Press TV has conducted an interview with Mark Sleboda, an international relations and security analyst in Moscow, to discuss Saudi Arabia’s ongoing aggression against Yemen.
The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Mark Sleboda over 30 days now these Saudi airstrikes, US-backed in terms of at least what we are looking at in terms of their planes and now we noticed not even a Saudi coalition, at least our sources says this is a Saudi attack on Yemen. What is your reading into this?
Sleboda: First of all, this is Saudi-US axis and we have to make it perfectly clear the United States is a full partner. The US is at war in another Middle East country. They are providing C4ISR, reconnaissance, intelligence, re-fueling, ammunitions for the Saudi and their lackey [P]GCC allies’ attacks on Yemen.
First of all that the attacks are going very badly. The Saudis principally have two goals on this case. First is to stop the Houthi alliance advance and the other one is to restore their ousted puppet [Yemen’s former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour] Hadi to power.
It is impossible to see how they might achieve either one of them without a truly massive ground intervention of hundreds of thousands of troops from them and neighboring countries and we have seen before Saudi ground interference in Yemen has failed disastrously time and time again over the last half a century.
So they are very reluctant to do this. I think they do not know what to do. They have tried to rebrand their attacks on Yemen calling it “hope” instead of “storm” but I do not think any of that really matters on the ground.
On the ground we see two principle effects. The Houthi alliance is advancing despite the attacks, and also the opponents of both them and supposedly the ousted president, al-Qaeda is advancing as well.
We could have a very possible result of all of this, is that al-Qaeda makes some of the greatest gains because of the Saudi attacks.
Press TV: Do you think a ground invasion is eminent?
Sleboda: I think Saudi Arabia intended a ground invasion at some point but some cooler and more level heads seem to have at least put this process on pause. They are re-assessing and seeing how that alone is not a guarantee of any success.
The Saudi-US axis and their allies want to achieve a political result against the prevailing popular sentiments in the ground in Yemen by military force. The US itself when it put its full military force to bear has failed at this time and time again in the Middle East and Saudi supported only from behind the scenes by the US and only tacitly by other [Persian] Gulf state Arab allies ...
I do not think they know what they are doing at this point. They are floundering. They do not know what to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment