Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly a fraud, a fabulist, a fantasist, a liar.

It was never about Iran.

"The United Arab Emirates, unlike Saudi Arabia, has backed the STC, so the move has the potential to pit two close Gulf allies against one another, complicate the task of securing a national agreement to end to the five-year civil war, and possibly restore the geographical division that existed in the former British colony before unification of Yemen in 1990."