The Costs of the War on the People of Yemen

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

The Guardian published three accounts from Yemeni aid workers working with the Norwegian Refugee Council about their experience of the war and the humanitarian crisis. This comes from Marwan Al-Sabri, a 32-year old water and sanitation officer from Taiz:

We already know that the shelling kills people, but I am seeing what a broken economy does too. People have been left so desperately poor that they kill themselves before the hunger does.

The economic war being waged against the civilian population is often overlooked in coverage of Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, but it is one of the major reasons why almost 16 million people are food insecure even with humanitarian food aid and more than 20 million are food insecure without it. Of those, there are 1.7 million people in the Taiz region that are at crisis, emergency, or catastrophe levels of food insecurity, and that’s with humanitarian food aid. Approximately the same number of people in the Hodeidah governorate are enduring the same deprivation. More than two-thirds of the population of Hajjah governorate in the northwest are suffering the same hardship. More than half of the country’s entire population is in the same position, and conditions are going to keep deteriorating unless the war is brought to a halt and the economy is stabilized.

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Send Trump and the Saudis a Message: End Support for the War on Yemen

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

A State Department official restated that the administration very much wants to continue backing the Saudi coalition war on Yemen:

“There are pressures in our system … to either withdraw from the conflict or discontinue our support of the coalition, which we are strongly opposed to on the administration side,” said Timothy Lenderking, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Arabian Gulf Affairs.

“We do believe that the support for the coalition is necessary. It sends a wrong message if we discontinue our support,” he told a security forum in the United Arab Emirates.

While Pentagon officials tell members of the Senate one thing, other administration officials tell members of the Saudi coalition something else. According to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ testimony last week, the U.S. isn’t a participant in the war and doesn’t support any side, but the administration is quick to reassure an audience in the UAE that the US won’t “withdraw from the conflict” (acknowledging that we are a party to the conflict) and won’t “discontinue our support” (admitting that we are very much on one side). Administration officials tell a dishonest story to Congress to discourage opposition to the war, but when they need to reassure regional clients that US support isn’t going anywhere they drop the pretense of being uninvolved. It is no wonder that members of Congress have grown tired of the administration’s two-faced Yemen policy.

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Why Lies About the War on Yemen Matter

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Tony Badran takes another crack at justifyingTrump’s subservience to Saudi Arabia. Inevitably, this means telling lots of lies about Iran and Yemen:

The lead paragraph of Trump’s statement identifies Iran’s destructive regional role, and correctly assigns to it, in the first line, responsibility for the extended war in Yemen. “The country of Iran,” the first paragraph begins, “is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen.”

Right at the outset, the president sets a tone of strategic clarity.

Strategic clarity appears to have the same relationship to sound strategy that “moral clarity” has to morality. “Moral clarity” usually means whitewashing and excusing the crimes of the governments and people on one’s own “side” while criticizing only adversaries in the harshest terms. Strategic clarity involves letting hostility to one state overwhelm all other considerations and justify supporting any actor or policy, no matter how senseless and bad for U.S. interests it may be, simply because it expresses hostility towards the hated regime. Trump “sets a tone of strategic clarity” because he leads off with a false accusation against Iran to defend a relationship with a reckless client that has involved the US in an indefensible war. The war doesn’t even have much to do with Iran, but the small connection that does exist is blown out of all proportion to distract from the fact that the Saudi relationship is now a huge liability. Take it as a given that these “clarity” phrases have the opposite meaning from what the words usually mean.

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Report: Saudi Coalition Diverting Weapons to Yemeni Militias

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

A forthcoming documentary accuses the Saudi and Emirati governments of passing weapons purchased from the U.S., Britain, and other Western governments to militias in Yemen in violation of the agreements governing those sales:

An investigation into weapons being used in the war in Yemen has shown numerous examples of arms supplied by the UK and the US, among others, ending up in the hands of militias including those linked to al-Qaida and Isis.

In an apparent abuse of trade agreements by the Saudi- and UAE-led coalition, sophisticated armoured vehicles, rocket launchers, grenades and rifles are among the weapons being purchased from European and US companies and reaching local factions and groups.

As international concerns continue to rise over the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the report by journalist Mohamed Abo-Elgheit and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalists (Arij) alleges that not only are weapons being openly passed to militias aligned to the Saudi coalition but also to marginalised and feuding groups fighting their own territorial battles.

Here is one more reason why the US and other Western governments should get out of the business of selling arms to the Saudis and Emiratis. Not only are coalition forces using the weapons that our government sells to them to commit war crimes, but they are passing them along to their proxies and even to groups aligned with terrorists. Since the Saudi coalition and its proxies have also been buying off and recruiting members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), it isn’t surprising that they’re also providing jihadists with weapons sold by the US and others, but it is more proof that these governments are not the counter-terrorist security partners that war supporters always claim them to be.

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Pompeo’s Perverse Yemen Rhetoric

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

The Senate didn’t go for Pompeo and Mattis’ sales pitch for the war on Yemen on Wednesday. That’s because it was filled with dishonest nonsense like this:

The truth is that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have used their donations as another weapon of war while doing everything in their power to worsen the humanitarian crisis that their policies created. Saudi “aid” efforts have been denounced by humanitarian organizations as a “war tactic,” and the Saudi government has used its donations to buy good publicity from aid agencies and silence criticism. The “investments” that the Saudi coalition governments have made are little more than poorly-concealed bribes to relieve international pressure, and these same governments have used their donations as leverage to blackmail the U.N. in the past.

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Trump’s Saudi First Foreign Policy Strikes Again

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

The Trump administration bows before the Saudis once more over the war on Yemen:

The US has “slammed the brakes on” a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a limited ceasefire and increased humanitarian aid in Yemen over concerns about angering Saudi Arabia, two sources tell CNN.

One source familiar with the negotiations over the resolution tells CNN the US “has slammed the brakes on,” saying that “we can’t support a resolution at the moment.”

U.S. policy in Yemen has been dictated by Saudi and Emirati preferences for years, but Trump and his administration have taken this disgraceful subservience to new lows since he came to office. Trump’s outrageous Saudi propaganda statement from last week confirmed that he would happily lie to defend Saudi Arabia from any and all criticism, and now he is shielding them from international scrutiny and pressure at the U.N. He is not just serving as a Saudi mouthpiece, but acts as their lackey as well.

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