Yemen: Placeholder

I’m still thinking about A Complete Unknown and I’m in the process of reading several books about the era. For now…

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I don’t have a Big Point to make here. This is just a placeholder for something I might write later. With Yemen in the news just remember that the only people who have ever dropped chemical weapons on Muslim Arabs were other Arabs, the worst of them being that big, fat nationalist, Nasser. He probably killed more Arabs than Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon combined.

Forgotten Gas Attacks in Yemen Haunt Syria Crisis¹

While the deployment of chemical weapons was no secret, President John F. Kennedy’s administration responded with restrained diplomacy. The U.S. ambassador to Egypt sat Nasser down for a private talk on the folly of using chemical weapons. Nasser’s initial denials were followed by excuses that his military commanders in the field were free to make their own strategic decisions, for which he wasn’t responsible. …

The U.S. government pushed international committees to investigate the attacks. The International Red Cross released a full report, as did a team of U.K. mercenaries working with the opposition. These investigations showed that the Egyptians began experimenting with poison and chemical bombs in 1963.

These initial amateurish munitions were augmented by a Soviet shipment of new gas bombs in January 1964. Victims died 10 to 50 minutes after an attack, blood emerging from their noses and mouths without any marks on their skin. Autopsies confirmed death by pulmonary edema caused by breathing a poisonous gas. Final studies concluded that mustard gas was the likely culprit, as it was relatively simple to manufacture and matched the symptoms of the victims.

Leaders then faced the dilemma of what to do with this intelligence. …

And so on. Read the whole thing.

And there’s this:

The plot thickens. (Israel was rightly quite concerned about these chemical weapons.)

Nasser’s decision to completely withdraw from Yemen was brought about by Egypt’s defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel. Egyptian military officials have often blamed their 1967 defeat on Yemen, citing spurious statistics on troop numbers abroad and Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer’s misdirected attention from the Sinai border with Israel. While most of these assertions lack credibility, there was in fact a direct connection between Yemen and June 1967. British mercenaries organized a clandestine group of Israel Air Force pilots and navigators to airlift weapons and supplies to royalist tribal armies behind enemy lines. Israeli decision makers were given front-row seats to Egypt’s expanding air power and weapons capabilities—the use of poison gas in particular—providing further encouragement to preemptively strike Egypt’s air force and avoid the same fate as the northern highlands of Yemen.

1. I can’t locate the date on this article; it was written sometime between 2011 and 2015 given the title.