Yemenis Are Being Starved to Death

From The American Conservative:

The U.N. Secretary-General warned last week that Yemen faces the worst famine in decades:

Like most modern famines, the famine in Yemen is entirely man-made. It is the result of the Saudi coalition’s military intervention and economic war against the country. The U.S. has been supporting the Saudi coalition in these policies for more than five and a half years. Yemen suffers from the world’s worst humanitarian crisis because of the predictable and predicted consequences of waging a senseless war in this country, and the US shares culpability for the enormous harm done to innocent civilians from the Saudi coalition’s bombing and blockade. The humanitarian crisis has worsened this year as international donations have dried up and the Trump administration has suspended aid funding to the part of Yemen where most of the people live in a destructive bid to pressure the Houthis.

As I noted last week, the administration is considering a terrorist designation for the Houthis that will cause even more harm to a population that is already struggling with widespread starvation and disease. A bipartisan group of senators has warned against issuing the designation because of the devastating effects that it would have on the people of Yemen. Sens. Murphy, Young, and Coons released this statement yesterday:

We are concerned about the adverse consequences of designating the entire Houthi movement in Yemen as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. We have reason to believe that this designation would further destabilize the country, which is already the home of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, make it harder to negotiate a peace agreement, and stop the important work of the many NGOs providing lifesaving assistance in the country. This designation would almost certainly prevent the critical delivery of food, medical supplies, and other items necessary to combat both COVID-19 and famine. Yemen remains the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, one that on occasion has been exacerbated by ill-advised policies in recent years. Creating new, additional obstacles to the delivery of food and medical aid – during a global pandemic – is not in the best interest of the United States, our regional allies and partners, or the people of Yemen.

Read the rest of the article

Designating the Houthis Is Another Senseless Attack on Yemeni Civilians

From The American Conservative:

The Trump administration is preparing to go through with the terrible idea of designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization:

The Trump administration is preparing to designate Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi insurgents a terrorist organization before leaving office in January, fueling fears the move will disrupt international aid efforts and upend United Nations-brokered peace efforts between the Shiite movement and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, according to several diplomatic sources.

Designating the Houthis is a mistake on the merits. But it will make it more difficult to reach a negotiated settlement to end the war. It will make an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis even worse. All of this was true when it was being floated earlier this year, and it is still true today. On top of all that, there is good reason to believe that this decision is being made as a last-minute gift to the Saudis. It is also another attempt to tie the hands of the next administration:

“They have been contemplating this for a while, but Pompeo wants this fast-tracked,” said one diplomatic source. “It’s part of the scorched-earth policy the sour grapes in the White House are taking.”

The Trump administration’s Yemen policy has been a disgrace for the last four years, so it isn’t really surprising that they would do the wrong thing on their way out the door. This is just about the worst thing they could do after having already suspended U.S. aid to Houthi-controlled territory, which is where roughly 80% of the population resides. The U.N. special envoy has urged the U.S. not to do this, as have several of our allies and the Secretary-General of the UN Even the Pentagon and experts at the State Department are against doing this:

The US Department of Defense and career experts in the State Department are said to be against the move. A coalition of international charities, meanwhile, are preparing a joint statement anticipating the designation, comparing the potential impacts to the famine in Somalia after the US designated al-Shabab as a terrorist group in 2008.

The expected designation has already prompted evacuations of American UN staff and Americans working for other organizations from northern Yemen:

American staffers for the United Nations and some workers at nongovernmental organizations have been relocated out of northern Yemen in anticipation of the Trump administration’s possible terrorist designation for the Iran-backed Houthi rebels that is likely to complicate aid deliveries and further exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn country.

Read the rest of the article

Why the US Must Not Support Azerbaijan’s War

From The American Conservative:

Eldar Mamedov warns against the push to get the U.S. to side with Azerbaijan in their attack on Karabakh and Armenia:

As fierce fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan continues into a second month, neoconservatives in Washington are pushing the United States to side with Azerbaijan. Their rationale – involving Iran and Israel, as so many of Washington’s priorities in the Middle East do – is facile, naïve and dangerous to the region’s minorities.

The U.S. has no vital interests in this conflict, so it would be a serious mistake to take sides in it. If the U.S. were to tilt towards anyone in the conflict, it ought to be towards the Armenian side that came under attack, but neutrality is the wisest course. The best thing that the U.S. can do is to use whatever influence it still has with Turkey and Azerbaijan to halt the offensive, and to support Russian mediation efforts that have the best chance of succeeding in stopping the fighting. Armenian and Azerbaijani civilians will pay the heaviest price if the war is not stopped, and preventing further attacks on civilians should be the focus of U.S. diplomatic efforts. Azerbaijan is not an ally of the United States, and our government has no obligations to assist or defend them. While Turkey is formally an ally, they are acting as a regional arsonist and the U.S. should be reining them in rather than helping them.

The death toll from the conflict is already in the thousands, many of them civilians killed by indiscriminate use of missiles and shelling. Both governments have launched unacceptable, illegal attacks on civilian areas, and the U.S. should warn both governments against further such attacks. There are credible reports of war crimes being committed against Armenian prisoners of war by their Azerbaijani captors. Ethnic cleansing of Armenians in parts of Karabakh has already been carried out by Azerbaijani forces:

Siding with Azerbaijan makes no sense for American interests. It is being promoted by Iran hawks that hope to use this conflict as part of their fixation on destabilizing the Iranian government and potentially breaking up Iran’s territorial integrity. Michael Doran is one of the leading hawkish cheerleaders for Azerbaijan, and he has been making the case for siding with Baku explicitly for quite some time. In the quoted tweet, he is promoting Azerbaijan on account of its supposed diversity and tolerance:

Read the rest of the article

How Strategic Empathy Makes for Wiser Foreign Policy

From The American Conservative:

Anatol Lieven explains how strategic empathy is supposed to work:

This kind of empathy has very valuable consequences for foreign policy. It makes for an accurate assessment of another state establishment’s goals based on its own thoughts, rather than a picture of those goals generated by one’s own fears and hopes; above all, it permits one to identify the difference between the vital and secondary interests of a rival country as that country’s rulers see them.

A vital interest is one on which a state will not compromise unless faced with irresistible military or economic pressure. Otherwise, it will resist to the very limit of its ability, including, if necessary, by war. A statesman who sets out to challenge another state’s vital interests must therefore be sure not only that his or her country possesses this overwhelming power, but that it is prepared actually to use it.

American policymakers are notoriously bad at understanding how other governments perceive things and the reasons why they act in the way that they do, and we have seen on many occasions how this failure to understand the other side’s thinking has led us into one crisis after another. Our leaders often fail to grasp that they are threatening another country’s perceived vital interests, because they frequently deny that the other government has any legitimate interests at all. Instead of trying to see an issue from the other side, our leaders will often insist that there is only one acceptable way of seeing it and it is invariably the same as ours. If the other government responds angrily to this approach, they are then deemed hostile and “revisionist” rather than a normal state reacting as any other state would. Practicing this kind of empathy does not mean agreeing that the other government is right, but it does mean acknowledging what their actual position is rather than projecting one onto them.

H.R. McMaster likes to talk a lot about practicing strategic empathy, but in fact he refuses to understand how other governments see the world. He prefers instead to imagine that they are all driven to achieve ideological, expansionist goals just as he is, and then he warns about the aggressive intentions that he has imputed to them. This is exactly the opposite of what Lieven is talking about, and it is nothing more than reading his own hawkish inclinations into everyone else’s worldview. If McMaster were willing to see things as the Russian government or Chinese government did, he would understand that they perceive aggressive U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War as a threat, and at least some of their conduct over this same period has been in reaction to American overreaching. But McMaster doesn’t understand this at all. Instead, he insists that the behavior of other states has nothing to do with US actions whatsoever, because to admit this would be to acknowledge that an interventionist foreign policy can create more problems than it solves.

Read the rest of the article

Yemen’s Worsening Humanitarian Crisis

From The American Conservative:

The U.N. issued a new warning this week about acute malnutrition among Yemen’s youngest children that threatens to kill nearly 100,000 children under the age of five:

“Yemen is on the brink of a catastrophic food security crisis. If the war doesn’t end now, we are nearing an irreversible situation and risk losing an entire generation of Yemen’s young children,” said Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the country.

“Acute malnutrition among children is hitting the highest levels we have seen since the war started.”

The people of Yemen have been starved for the last five and a half years by a combination of Saudi coalition blockade, economic war, and bombing. The crisis has worsened recently because of shortfalls in international funding, rising prices, and the suspension of U.S. aid to Houthi-controlled areas where the overwhelming majority of Yemenis live. Humanitarian relief organizations called for a resumption of US aid earlier this year to no avail. Restoring that aid is imperative if our government is to help stave off a worse disaster that has resulted from an indefensible policy of backing this war.

The worsening conditions in Yemen are preventable, but it will require sufficient funding to keep the aid projects going:

Funding shortfalls have disrupted the implementation of many aid projects, including emergency food assistance. Malnutrition treatment programs also could be curtailed if funds are not received soon. As of mid-October, only $1.43 billion of the $3.2 billion needed in 2020 had been received, the UNICEF press release said.

U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen Lisa Grande said the inability to increase humanitarian efforts in Yemen because of insufficient funding is “heartbreaking.”

The misguided use of humanitarian relief funding to punish the Houthis is only harming innocent and powerless people. The civilian population always bears the brunt of these heavy-handed pressure tactics, and so it is again in Yemen.

Read the rest of the article

Just Say No to a Karabakh ‘No-Fly Zone’

From The American Conservative:

The renewed fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Karabakh has not drawn that much attention in the West, but many of the initial, knee-jerk responses to the conflict have been remarkably bad. Whether it is members of Congress urging U.S. recognition of an independent Artsakh, pro-Azerbaijan advocates calling for US support for the aggressor, or Iran hawks cheering on aggression against Armenians because they have the “wrong” geopolitical alignment, many Americans are eager to co-opt and meddle in a conflict that has nothing to do with us. David Ignatius takes the cake with his new proposal to impose a “no-fly zone” in the South Caucasus (a region whose name he doesn’t know how to spell):

Here’s a simple suggestion for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is scheduled to meet Friday with the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan: The path to real negotiations and stability in Karabakh could begin with a no-fly zone over the enclave, enforced by the United States, Russia and France, the three co-chairs of the “Minsk Group” that had been fruitlessly attempting to settle the Karabakh issue since 1992.

This is a terrible proposal for reasons that I hope are so obvious that they don’t need to be spelled out, but let’s review some of the chief problems. Ignatius has been banging the drum to “do something” about the new war over Karabakh for weeks, but this is the first time that he has explicitly called for military action. It is a mindless, reflexive demand for intervention that makes absolutely no sense. “No-fly zones” by themselves do not halt conflicts, and at best this would just expand the conflict to include more belligerents. It is difficult to see where US planes would be enforcing this “no-fly zone” from, since it is doubtful Turkey would permit basing or overflight for such a mission, and there is a decent chance that the US might have to enforce this “no-fly zone” against Turkish jets at some point. Ignatius’ proposal is hopelessly naive and extremely dangerous.

Read the rest of the article