When Drones Come Home to Roost

It was fucking beautiful. There are no more accurate words in the English dictionary to describe the vision I saw. I awoke Sunday afternoon, turned the TV on to CNN and there it was in all its infernal glory like Christmas Morning in hell. Standing six-hundred stories high above the sea of sand in Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, a leaning wall of towering flames shimmering across the night sky like an aurora borealis made of fire. As all the usual yammering skulls off camera spun fantastic tall tales about an Iranian conspiracy to deny the House of Saud their Allah given right to rape and pillage with abandon, only one thing, one message, burned through my frontal lobes like Abqaiq crude, “They did it. The Houthis really did it!” The resounding feeling of karmic justice was downright euphoric. I wanted to cry. I wanted to dance. Fuck, I wanted to masturbate to the sight of those rabid dogs getting exactly what they deserved.

After spending nearly half a decade watching Saudi Arabia’s savage holocaust in Yemen and the dogged Houthi rebels courageous if at times downright suicidal resistance, after pouring over a veritable ocean of pictures and footage of starving and slaughtered Zaydi children, somehow this conflict on the other side of the planet had become very personal to me. In spite of being a decadent pagan faggot, the chaste Houthi rebels had come to symbolize a greater narrative beyond their own struggle for independence. They had come to symbolize a greater resistance to a dying empire of Atlantic supremacy represented by their twisted Arab cartels in the Persian Gulf, the Salafi Goliath to the Shia Davids. But now, the unthinkable. David struck back hard with his RC slingshot, landing a spectacular blow to the vital organ Goliath held most dear, his wallet.

There is a certain twisted irony in the fact that the Saudi Kingdom’s self-proclaimed 9/11, the original being an attack they were intimately involved in, didn’t cost a single human life. After all, a sociopathic absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia has little use for the frivolity of human life, only the monetary gain they can wring from it’s corpses. So the greatest tragedy ever visited upon such a venal nation should naturally cost them nothing but dollars. After decades of brutal Wahhabi bloodshed across the globe; throwing acid in the faces of unveiled coeds in Afghanistan, firing rockets into civilian apartment blocks in Chechnya, gang raping Gypsy Holocaust survivors in Kosovo, stoning queer children to a bloody pulp in Iraq, decapitating whole villages of “infidels” in Syria, and pushing the entire nation of Yemen to the brink of genocide with all the latest and greatest gadgets their precious petro-dollars could buy from the American Military Industrial Complex, it took just ten toy planes to bring these bullies to their fucking knees. The illusion of traditional military supremacy has been shattered. The drones have finally come home to roost.

And this is why fingering Iran for these attacks has become so necessary, not just because Iran is the current boogeyman of choice so desperately reviled by the psychopathic Saudi Kingdom and their cantankerous orange marionette in the Oval Office, but because of the message the real masterminds behind this splendid propaganda of the deed send. That message, written to every powerful army on the globe in fire across the desert sky, is you are not safe and we can destroy you. The drone was a toy of death designed by the American war machine to make crimes against humanity so simple that even a pock-marked fat-ass in a Las Vegas airbase could wipe out a village with the click of a mouse before knocking off early to indulge in jalapeno poppers and casual harassment at the Hooter’s down the strip. Now, much the way Anonymous and Wikileaks had done with the internet, rag-tag anti-imperialists like the Houthis have turned this tool of imperial conquest against the empire itself and used it to outfox trillions of dollars of cutting edge Washington technology. The war machine has been rendered irrelevant by its own infernal innovations. This is a good thing, a very good thing.

This isn’t just a win for the Houthis and the starving children they protect. This is a win for cash-strapped, working-class, revolutionaries everywhere. This is a win for the otaku crypto-anarchist looking to strike a blow against the Red Army from the comfort of his Hong Kong high-rise. This is a win for the Gazan fisherman looking to pierce the iron dome and vanquish the IDF sunken ship that had fed his family for generations. This is a win for the Kashmiri Muslim displaced by a Hindu Nationalist army that conceals her very existence beneath its shadow. This is a win for the migrant caravan looking to jam up the Border Patrol’s digital wall just long enough to escape their rapacious grasp. This is a win for the Cascadian primitivist seeking to even the score with the local dam drowning his hunting grounds in the murky deep.

This is a win for all of us, dearest motherfuckers, and we should appose the latest blackballing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, not just because wars of mass deception are more evil than most, but because credit must be given where credit is due. Those Saudi savages weren’t leveled by another state army. They were leveled by one of us, stateless partisans in a guerrilla war to crush empire in all its twisted manifestations. Let me be the first queer anarchist lumpenproletariat to congratulate my unlikely Houthi comrades for a job well done. Hey man nice shot.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.