By Finian Cunningham

July 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   The surprise pullout of troops and warplanes from Yemen by the United Arab Emirates has been interpreted as a “peace move”, or at least a tacit admission of defeat. But, more plausibly, the timing of the withdrawal seems more to do with the UAE redeploying forces at the behest of the United States in order to ramp up military pressure on Iran.

The UAE has been a major actor in the US-backed Arab military coalition, along with Saudi Arabia, which has been waging a war in Yemen for the past four years to oust the Houthi rebel government in Sanaa. The Emiratis and Saudi Arabia want to reinstall an exiled clique which the Houthis kicked out of Yemen at the end of 2014. The US, Britain and France have backed the anti-Houthi coalition with massive arms supplies and logistics for a relentless air war campaign.

Despite the relative lack of Western media coverage of the conflict, Yemen has become widely seen as a horrendous humanitarian disaster. Nearly half its population of 24 million are suffering from critical food and water shortages. The Western-backed coalition has also been blamed for war crimes from indiscriminate air strikes on civilian centers. The war has been described as an “un-winnable quagmire” for the Saudis and Emiratis, not unlike Vietnam was for the Americans.

So, when an Emirati official was quoted last week as saying the withdrawal from Yemen was motivated by bolstering a United Nations-sponsored peace plan, a more skeptical reading would be that the UAE simply wants to get out of a futile and costly war. Thus the move is less about peace and more about saving face for the Emiratis. But there also seems to be a bigger geopolitical picture concerning US designs to confront Iran.