WHERE IS YEMEN ANYWAY?

Our first step is to search on Google maps. For a better chance of actually locating Yemen, we focus on one place; Saada. We take care to find Saada in Yemen, because a number of places in different countries in the region share that name, just like in Ireland, where you’ll find any number of Ballys.

When we find Saada, we search for the Zaydi Cemetery. It’s between Mufrah at Talh Street and the N1, quite close to the central market, the city’s main mosques and the archaeological site of Bab Narjan. We search for the graves of the children killed in the recent airstrike on a bus. Forty children were among the fifty one dead.

"My son went to the market to run house errands and then the enemy air strike happened and he was hit by shrapnel and died," said Fares al-Razhi, mourning his 14-year-old son.

We are in north Yemen, close to the border with Saudi Arabia. If Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world, Saudi Arabia is one of the richest. We pore over the Google map images of the border between the two states and wonder how that can be. 

There is a war underway in this part of Yemen. A complex war with militant actors frominside Yemen and also external to the country. The biggest external actor is the Kingdom and army of Saudi Arabia, one of Yemen’s close neighbours. What does that Kingdom and army want?

With logistical support from the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have carried out attacks in Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to reinstate the internationally recognised government of President Abu-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

In 2014, Hadi and his forces were overrun by the Houthis who took over much of the country, including the capital Sanaa.

Since then, the military alliance has carried out more than 16, 000 air raids on Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, with more than 3, 000 raids pulverising the Houthis stronghold of Saada.

We search the images on Google maps to see signs of ‘success’ for these air raids and bombings. The resolution on the maps breaks down as we zoom in. The maps cannot handle the devastation. They become coy and opaque. Can we hear the Yemeni people themselves?

Hakim Almasmari, the editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post, called it one of the worst days in Yemen in recent memory.

"Today is a tragic, sad day... that has gathered all Yemenis together. There are many people who oppose the Houthis, including residents of [the capital] Sanaa, but a crime like this has given the Houthis more support. You can't have sides when it comes to children." 

The war is three years old now. Young, in world conflict terms. Young, like the children blown to pieces.

"I didn't find any of his remains, not his finger, not his bone, not his skull, nothing. I looked through all the remains in the hospital and I didn't see anything."

We look on. From afar, knowing that great amounts of money are involved in the international trade in the weaponry that produces these tragedies. Jobs too. Do we cringe or quake? Do we feel remorse? Guilt? Who are ‘we’? 

Despite repeated petitions from human rights groups to Western powers over the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, the US, UK, Canada, France and Spain have all sold weapons to the kingdom in recent years, some of which have been used in the conflict.

The US has been the biggest supplier of military equipment to Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), with more than $90bn of sales recorded between 2010 and 2015.

Are ‘we’ supplying weaponry to the Houthis as well? Probably. If not directly, then covertly, via brokers and dealers. There’s money in it. And probably alongside weaponry, with logistical and political support, from Iran. Wars are complex and multi-agency, often acting in overlaps and parallels. The war in Yemen is one of numerous proxy world conflicts between the Great Powers and their allies. We are well beyond the capacity of thetwo dimensional imagery offered by Google maps.

With grand profits to be made, it is not in the interest of arms’ manufacturers like Raytheon, who dispute the evidence of the use of their products in this war, to see efforts at a cease-fire make progress.

Images sent to Al Jazeera by the Houthis on Monday suggested a Raytheon Mark-82 bomb was used in the raid.

While the photo had yet to be independently verified, fragments of Mark-82 bombs have surfaced repeatedly amid the ongoing war.

Do we say “It’s not personal. It’s just business. If we don’t sell the arms, someone else will”?

Days after the attack, body parts remain unidentified and some families were still searching for the remains of their children. 

Are ‘we’ as two dimensional as Google maps?

The UN special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, recently announced plans for negotiations between the warring parties.

The peace talks will begin in Geneva on September 6 and focus on building a transitional government and laying down arms.

Can we go beyond the flat maps in the search for a further dimension? More than simply ‘laying down arms’, can we work to end the international arms trade?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/funerals-held-children-killed-school-bus-attack-180812074219112.html

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WATCHING MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-FALL OUT

There is no need for a ‘spoiler alert’. This is a film in which a Goodie chases a Baddie and eventually catches him. Here is the chase in London.

The Baddie (August Walker, played by Henry Cavill) walks purposefully through thebusy streets of the City of London. The Goodie (Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise) races across the roofs and through the office buildings of that financial district. The chase continues across theriver Thames to the South Bank,where both make for the converted power station that houses the art gallery, Tate Modern.

Walker enters via a side-door he leaves open for Ethan Hunt now so hot on Walker’s heels that Hunt arrives at the lift right behind him. In classic Mission: Impossible fashion, Ethan Hunt grabs the underside of the metal cage in which Walkeris ascending. They converse, almost amiably, until Walker puts a photo on the metal grid of the lift floor, face down to Ethan Hunt.This shows the thorn, the prize and the treasure, the British MI6 assassin Ilsa Faust.She is Hunt’s desire and she is in mortal danger, as you’d expect. Forget the missing plutonium, the mad anarcho-terrorist on the loose, the threat to millions from a contagion of small-pox. When the shake-down comes, it’s a simple love and death triangle between two men and one woman. The Goodie must save the treasure, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). We’re not sure if she’s a goodie or a baddie, though she most certainly is a killer. As with many a relationship in the modern age, it’s complicated.

(Aside: that line is used elsewhere in the dialogue, stolen directly from a facebook status that became common usage. The film's dialogue is well-filled with contemporary commonplaces, many of which warrant the label ‘cliché’.) 

As the film enters the third act, Walker escapes via a helicopter waiting on the roof of Tate Modern. The lettering on the side of the helicopter shows GDE-UP, which the viewer reads as GIDDY UP.

Did the film makers intend this or was the viewer silently articulating a desire for the film to get on with it? Certainly a quickening is required at that point, because, although we’ve seen pacy chases through the streets of Paris in cars, vans, trucks and on motorbikes, action seems to be lagging, despite Ethan Hunt jamming a truck into a narrow street, neatly foreshadowing the jamming of two helicopters into a crevasse on a cliff-face, the location of the very final showdown between the Baddie and the Goodie.This turns out to be a curiously muted affair, in spite of all the crash-bang-whalloping pyrotechnics that immediately precede it.

As you’d expect, the film has a surfeit of technical devices; phones, transponders, drones, image manipulators and ear devices for communications, all of which work miraculously well, despite being bashed, thrown, pummelled, shot and jammed throughout the one hundred and twenty minutes of the film’s duration, too long by about half an hour. 

Would the old Hollywood feature length staple of ninety minutes better serve the 'and then.... and then.....' structure of the story?

There is a count-down, of course, given a slightly novel twist by lasting fifteen minutes, which is what the Super Baddie (Solomon Lane, played by Sean Harris) allots to give Walker enough time to get away with the detonator for their fiendishly clever double-plutonium bomb. This is linked by a trigger Walker carries as he gets away.Again.Solomon Lane goes hara-kiri at this point.

Ethan Hunt’s side-kicks are Benji Dunn and Luther Stickler, played by Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames. The latter neatly self-deprecates throughout the film by referring to his ageing. The side-kicks pore over a bomb each and are separately assisted by paramours of Ethan Hunt; the MI6 killer Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and his former wife Julia, who is now engaged in humanitarian work, played by Michelle Monaghan. 

It is one of the great achievements of the Baddies in the films of the Mission: Impossible franchise that they contrive to gather all outlying threads of plot and relationships into one place for the final blast. In FALL OUT, we are among the snow-covered peaks and verdant valleys of Kashmir.

Though the agencies underpinning the activities of Ethan Hunt and his small team are from the USA, their challenges and endeavours are never domestic. They always happen far away from the territory of the USA. However, the current imperium and the role of those agencies in policing the globe from the threats wrought by rogues, individuals and states, means that everywhere is American territory.

Some domestic politicking does take place in the hissy-fit spats between the Mission: Impossible Secretary, Alan Hunley, played by Alec Baldwin and the CIA lead, Erika Stone, played by Angela Bassett, as they cross, double and multi-cross each other, right up to the film’s end. They are, however, on the same side, the side of 'the good’, as are Ethan Hunt and his furiously adept side-kicks, the ageing and wise Luther and the clownishly wimpy Dunn. These aides are hi-tech savvy and Conor McGregor-level handy with fists and feet. They also fire automatic weapons in a night-time and undergroundfire-fight and come out well ahead and unscathed.

No irony is offered by the quest to keep nuclear material away from rogues by agencies working for the superpower in possession of most of the weaponised nuclear material on the planet and, so far, the only human organisation to use such material, for bombing the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seventy three years ago almost to the day. 

There are women in the film, as well as Erika Stone (Angela Bassett). The blond double-agent, The White Widow, conflating espionage, arms-dealing and charity work, is the Lana Turner-channeling Vanessa Kirby. She kisses Ethan Hunt, but only in a loveless, dry manner. The MI6 assassin, Isla Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), is an ace motor-cyclist and markswoman. She, like everyone in the film, wants, one way or another, to “come home” but again, “it’s complicated”. The viewer is left with the sense that her relationship with Ethan Hunt will continue and develop. After all, she makes him laugh, despite his shattered ribs and busted gob.

Woman as “self-sacrificing Angel” is present in Julia (Michelle Monaghan). She is Ethan Hunt’s great, early love, who says she owes her maturation and self-worth, her very place in the world, to her relationship with him. Seeing her in the film, together with the stabbing to death of the Secretary, Alan Hunley, (Alec Baldwin) leaves the viewer with a sense that we might be coming to the end of something, especially when we consider we’ve seen much of all of this before, not only in the Mission: Impossible franchise, but also in the Bond and the Bourne versions, in the comprehensive Harry Potters and the upsurging Marvel franchise. 

The Baddies feature brutish East-Europeans, some dodgy French Fellas and, unusually, cockney wide-boys. There are no scheming Arabs and the Indian Army comes to the rescue at the end, led by the CIA, just as the US Cavalry did so often in the past.

Best scene? The street-side shootout when a Paris traffic cop, played by Alix Bénézech, stumbles upon Hunt and his team rendering their captive into the back seat of a car. A bunch of baddies surprises them and shoots the cop, wounding her. Hunt riddles the baddies, then, in the film’s keenest manifestation of human emotion, he leans over her and whispers Je suis desolé.

Apart from being too long, Mission: Impossible-Fall Out is just what you would expect. Drama-less and suspense-free, it is tamely predictable and un-troubling. It presents threat, fear and resolutions as neatly packaged experiences, well-managed by resources, endeavours and material readily at hand in the USA. We are cowered, but can still feel secure, if indeed we feel anything. That fine American-English word ‘hokum’ applies. As does the name of the Roman Catholic Church committee of 1622, the Propaganda.

Mission: Impossible-Fallout

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4912910/?ref_=nv_sr_1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiHiW4N7-bo&frags=pl%2Cwn

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