Senator Warren Calls for End of US Support of War Crimes in Yemen
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 February 19
Yemen is the world's largest humanitarian crisis. In 2018, an estimated 22.2
million people - 75 percent of the population were in need of humanitarian
assistance. A total of 17.8 million people were food insecure and 8.4
million people did not know how to obtain their next meal. Conflict,
protracted displacement, disease and deprivation continued to inflict
suffering on the country's population. Disruption to commercial imports,
inflation, lack of salary payments to civil servants and rising prices of
basic commodities exacerbated people's vulnerability. Despite a difficult
operating environment, throughout the year, 254 international and national
partners actively coordinated to assist people with the most acute needs in
priority districts across Yemen's 22 governorates. Together they assisted
over 7.9 million people monthly with some form of humanitarian assistance.
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, February 7, 2019
That sanitized United Nations assessment above, horrific as it is in its
abstract body-counting way, only begins to describe the terrible reality
that foreign countries have inflicted on the poorest country in the region.
A starker reality is that the US has aided and abetted a criminal, genocidal
war against Yemen, mostly carried out by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) and several allies. From the beginning, this war has been a
nexus of war crimes that included using cluster bombs on civilian targets,
such as weddings, funerals, hospitals, and schools. The US was involved from
the start in selecting those and other targets. The US provided
intelligence, maintenance, mid-air refueling, and support for a naval
blockade (an act of war) that helped starve a country that has always needed
to import food to survive.
There has never been any justification for the US to unleash this carnage on
Yemen. In 2014-2015, the native Houthis won a civil war and regained control
of that part of Yemen they had previously controlled for hundreds of years.
The internationally-imposed "legitimate" government fled to Saudi Arabia.
Further Houthi expansion was limited by a variety of forces that included
government loyalists, al Qaeda and ISIS enclaves, independent militias, and
tribal resistance. Yemen might have been left to sort itself out (the
Houthis did eliminate al Qaeda and ISIS from their area of control). In
2015, Yemen posed no serious threat to anyone other than itself.
But the Saudis were sulking, not only because they lost their puppet
government in Yemen, but more so because the US was actually treating Iran
as a sovereign nation capable of behaving responsibly under the proper
circumstances. The US was joining in the multilateral agreement that has so
far halted Iran's development of nuclear weapons.
So when Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) floated the idea of
low-risk bombing of helpless people, the Obama administration collectively
shrugged and said in effect: sure, why not, and we'll even help you commit
the international crime of waging aggressive war against a neighboring
country in the midst of a civil war. And that's what the US did. And that's
what the US is still doing. And the US thinks so little of its criminal
bloodletting that the president doesn't even mention it in his state of the
union address, and most of Congress and the media and the public have no
strong objection to a permanent state of war criminality. Well, 30 former
Obama officials last fall said Trump should end all US support for the Saudi
war on Yemen, without seriously taking responsibility for their own actions
that could put them in a war crimes dock (if such a thing is still
imaginable):
The statement by the former senior officials attempts to acknowledge that
America's participation in the war - providing intelligence, refueling, and
logistical assistance to the Saudi-led coalition - was now clearly a
mistake, given the coalition's failure to limit its myriad violations and
end the war. But they justify the Obama administration's initial decision to
support the war as based on "a legitimate threat posed by missiles on the
Saudi border and the Houthi overthrow of the Yemeni government, with support
from Iran."
Iran's involvement in Yemen has always been largely imaginary, and still is.
But the Trump administration sees Iranian ghosties and ghoulies everywhere,
without ever managing to demonstrate that they actually exist. Unfortunately
for the Houthis, they are Shiite Muslims of their own sect - Zaydi - who
have been targeted by Saudi Wahhabism for the past 40 years. Imagining Iran
was just an excuse for the Saudis to continue their religious war by other
means. In 2015, Iran "supported" the Houthis minimally, mostly
diplomatically and politically. There has been no evidence that Iranian
involvement has exceeded the scale described by Robert Worth, longtime
reporter on Yemen, in the current New York Review:
Houthis have also benefitted - militarily at least - from their alliance
with Iran and Hezbollah, which have provided training on infantry tactics,
anti-tank fighting, mine-laying, and anti-ship attacks in the Red Sea. Iran
has provided ballistic missiles that the Houthis have fired across the
border into Saudi Arabia
That's the whole load of Iranian "support" as iterated by Worth, who is no
Houthi apologist. He gives no timeframe nor any measure of the extent of
this support. Everything he lists is arguably defensive, including the
missiles if they followed the Saudi bombing. But the Iranian strawman is
rigidly fixed in the minds of US officials and media reporters, even Worth,
who ignores his own later evidence and reflexively writes: "Huge obstacles
to peace remain, above all the Houthis' military alliance with Iran, which
is what led the Saudis to launch the war in the first place." So at least he
acknowledges the Saudis waging aggressive war and even uses an apt Nazi
reference to describe the Saudi mindset: "They consider the Houthis an
Iranian dagger aimed at their heart."
Southern Yemen is subject to something much more like a real Nazi
occupation. Some uncertain amount of southern Yemen, including Aden, is
titularly under the control of the "official" Yemeni government. The same
area and beyond is more effectively under the control of the UAE military,
whose shock troops include thousands of child soldiers from Somalia. The UAE
works closely with US advisors on the ground. The UAE is reliably reported
to run black sites, a network of secret prisons where they torture and kill
prisoners at will. The US military officially testified to the Senate Armed
Services Committee on February 5 that the US has not observed such
activities. The official US see-no-evil written statement on Yemen and the
rest of the region is predictably optimistic and opaque.
Senator Elizabeth Warren questioned the US regional commander, Gen. Joseph
L. Votel about UAE prisoner abuses reported by the United Nations, the
Associated Press, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. The
general's response was one of official ignorance or deniability: "I think
what I'm saying to you is that we have no observations of our own - our
people that have actually seen this.... I have not reached any kind of
conclusion that they are conducting these activities.." By omission, the
general made clear that the US has made no effort to determine the truth.
This is the first rule of any cover-up: "I don't want to know and you don't
want to know." (Votel was equally oblivious to reports that Saudi and UAE
military were illegally transferring US arms to militias and other third
parties in Yemen.)
"Turning a blind eye is not acceptable," was Warren's response. Earlier in
the hearing, following up on the US support for Saudi bombing missions,
Warren said:
I'm asking you questions about the details of the help we give the Saudis
because they continue to conduct bombing runs. They continue to perpetuate
one of the worst man-made humanitarian disasters of the modern era. During
this civil war, more than 85,000 children under the age of 5 have starved to
death, and tens of thousands of civilians have been killed.
This military engagement is not authorized. We need to end U.S. support for
this war now.
If this is the first time you're learning about a US senator and
presidential candidate publicly calling for the end of US involvement in the
illegal war on Yemen, what does that tell you about American media and
politics?
Meanwhile, the December ceasefire brokered by the UN continues to hold
shakily, without significant US support, and the civilian death toll from
hunger and disease mounts.
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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
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