Crimes Against Humanity In Yemen

The daily Trumpanzee circus has certainly kept the spotlight off issues that would otherwise be top news stories-- like the brutal and tragic war in Yemen, for example. Ted Lieu (D-CA), the first member of Congress to come forward and demand President Obama stop aiding the Saudis, told me this morning that "It is clear that the conflict in Yemen is a humanitarian disaster. The Saudi-led coalition-- either willfully or due to incompetence-- continues to kill innocent civilians. U.S. support for their efforts weakens our moral authority in the global community and makes us less safe. I am also deeply concerned that continued U.S. support to the Saudi-coalition in Yemen could qualify as aiding and abetting potential war crimes, placing our own troops and officials in serious legal jeopardy."

A year ago Ro Khanna (D-CA), working with Mark Pocan (D-WI), Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Walter Jones (R-NC), introduced a resolution to require U.S. forces halt aerial refueling and targeting intelligence against Houthi rebels within 30 days of passage. It didn't go anywhere. Then last month Mike Pompeo certified the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are "undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians"-- utter bullshit to begin with, but right after the Saudis hit a school bus killing lots of children. The certification allows the U.S. military to continue its assistance to the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen was also backed by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Khanna called the certification "a farce... The Saudis deliberately bombed a bus full of children. There is only one moral answer, and that is to end our support for their intervention in Yemen. If this executive will not do it, then Congress must pass a war powers resolution." Suddenly the ideas behind his 2017 resolution has a new life and is being re-introduced-- this time with the backing of the Democratic leadership.

"They thought I was nuts. They thought, why am I taking this on as a freshman member, bucking leadership," Khanna said. "And now that opinion in our party has changed, and I estimate 20-25 percent of Republicans are increasingly asking these questions." Bernie and Elizabeth Warren-- a likely presidential ticket in 2020-- are taking up the battle in the Senate.

In the House there Khanna's new resolution-- introduced Wednesday-- was over 50 co-sponsors already. On Thursday morning, Khanna told me that "when I introduced the bill a year and a half ago, we had very little support. Yesterday we introduced it with the support of Steny Hoyer, Adam Smith and Elliot Engel. It’s extraordinary that the position of getting out of the civil war in Yemen is now the mainstream Democratic position. It shows that progressive advocacy and grassroots mobilization can truly have an impact."

And a third Republican has joined on as a co-sponsor, Raul Labrador (ID). Massie: "Congress never authorized military action in Yemen as our Constitution requires, yet we continue to fund and assist Saudi Arabia in this tragic conflict. It’s long past time Congress held a debate and vote as to whether U.S. soldiers and personnel should be involved in this war."

Yesterday Nick Kristof wrote a blistering column in the NY Times, Be Outraged by America’s Role in Yemen’s Misery making the point that it's the U.S. supplying the bombs "for the war that’s killed civilians and is creating famine." He calls the tragic episode "crimes against humanity."

Trump didn’t mention it at the United Nations, but America is helping to kill, maim and starve Yemeni children. At least eight million Yemenis are at risk of starvation from an approaching famine caused not by crop failures but by our actions and those of our allies. The United Nations has called it the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and we own it.

An American bomb made by Lockheed Martin struck a Yemen school bus last month, killing 51 people. Earlier, American bombs killed 155 mourners at a funeral and 97 people at a market.

Starving Yemeni children are reduced to eating a sour paste made of leaves. Even those who survive will often be stunted for the rest of their lives, physically and mentally.

Many global security issues involve complex trade-offs, but this is different: Our behavior is just unconscionable.

“Yemen’s current crisis is man-made,” said David Miliband, the former British foreign secretary and current president of the International Rescue Committee, who recently returned from Yemen. “This is not a case where humanitarian suffering is the price of winning a war. No one is winning, except the extremist groups who thrive on chaos.”

The United States is not directly bombing civilians in Yemen, but it is providing arms, intelligence and aerial refueling to assist Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they hammer Yemen with airstrikes, destroy its economy and starve its people. The Saudi aim is to crush Houthi rebels who have seized Yemen’s capital and are allied with Iran.

That’s sophisticated realpolitik for you: Because we dislike Iran’s ayatollahs, we are willing to starve Yemeni schoolchildren.

“The Trump administration has made itself complicit in systematic war crimes,” said Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch.

Let’s be clear, too: This is a bipartisan moral catastrophe. The policy started under President Barack Obama, with safeguards, and then Trump doubled down and removed the safeguards.

“The war in Yemen has prompted today’s worst humanitarian catastrophe worldwide,” said Robert Malley, a former Obama aide who acknowledges missteps by the administration in Yemen-- which Trump has aggravated. Now president of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit working to prevent conflict, Malley added, “By our actions and inaction, we inevitably are complicit in it.”

I know, I know. All eyes are focused on the reality television show that is the Trump White House. But we can’t let Trump suck all the oxygen away from life-or-death issues. Trump drama cannot be allowed to nullify global tragedy.

The carnage in Yemen hasn’t stirred more outrage because the Saudis use their blockade to keep out journalists. I’ve been trying for two years to go, but the Saudis bar aid groups from taking me on relief flights.

Both sides in this civil war have at times behaved brutally, and the only way out is diplomacy. But Saudi Arabia’s crown prince seems to prefer famine and a failed state in Yemen to compromise, and the more we provide him weapons the longer we extend the suffering. We should be using our influence to rein the Saudis in, not cheer them on.

To their credit, some members of Congress are trying to stop these atrocities. A bipartisan effort this year, led by Senators Mike Lee, Chris Murphy and Bernie Sanders, tried to limit U.S. support for the Yemen war, and it did surprisingly well, winning 44 votes. New efforts are underway as well.

World leaders are gathered for the United Nations General Assembly, making pious statements about global goals for a better world, but the Assembly is infused with hypocrisy. Russia is up to its elbows in crimes against humanity in Syria, China is detaining perhaps one million Uighurs while also shielding Myanmar from accountability for probable genocide, and the United States and Britain are helping Saudi Arabia commit war crimes in Yemen.

That’s pathetic: Four of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are complicit in crimes against humanity.

Many Americans erupt in fury every time Trump lies, or tweets some inexcusable comment. Please do, but also save outrage for something even more monstrous-- the way we are contributing to starvation of children and exacerbating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Is The U.S. Responsible For Erik Prince's Savage Mercenaries Murdering Civilians In Yemen?

Not many Americans are especially aware of Yemen, an ancient country at the foot of the Arabian peninsula. it isn't on many tourist itineraries and there hasn't been a lot of U.S. business involvement. The country is not oil rich. But there is a horrifying war going on that has brutally devastated the country being carried out by U.S. allies, primarily Saudi Arabia, but also Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain, all authoritarian anti-democratic, feudal countries. Oh and I forgot another participant: Trump's neo-Nazi amigo Erik Prince-- who Bannon is trying to persuade to run for a Wyoming U.S. Senate seat-- has his savage mercenaries committing mayhem in the country as well. The war is being fought with U.S.-supplied weapons and U.S. technological and strategic assistance. A million Yemenis have fled the country and another two and a half million are internal refugees. The situation can only be described as a humanitarian catastrophe. War crimes are being committed with alacrity-- and without accountability. Over 10,000 civilians have been killed and more than 40,000 injured, primarily by indiscriminate bombing.

Three very serious minded Members of Congress, Walter Jones (R-NC), Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) penned a joint editorial for the New York Times that ran yesterday, Stop The Unconstitutional War In Yemen. They start by asking us to "imagine that the entire population of Washington State-- 7.3 million people-- were on the brink of starvation, with the port city of Seattle under a naval and aerial blockade, leaving it unable to receive and distribute countless tons of food and aid that sit waiting offshore. This nightmare scenario is akin to the obscene reality occurring in the Middle East’s poorest country, Yemen, at the hands of the region’s richest, Saudi Arabia, with unyielding United States military support that Congress has not authorized and that therefore violates the Constitution."

Speaking of Seattle, the Member of Congress who represents Seattle in Pramila Jayapal, a stalwart progressive. She told us this morning that "My colleagues hit the nail on the head-- what’s happening in Yemen is horrifying. When a nation with a population the size of Washington state is suffering and the United States is involved, it is on us to ensure we’re doing all we can to promote peace and support human life. If these rates of famine, malnutrition and violence were occurring in our own country, there’s no way we could ignore it."

For nearly three years, the United States has been participating alongside a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in a brutal military campaign in Yemen. The United States is selling the Saudi monarchy missiles and warplanes, assisting in the coalition’s targeting selection for aerial bombings and actively providing midair refueling for Saudi and United Arab Emirates jets that conduct indiscriminate airstrikes-- the leading cause of civilian casualties. Meanwhile, the Saudi coalition is starving millions of Yemenis as a grotesque tactic of war.

This is horrifying. We have therefore introduced a bipartisan congressional resolution to withdraw American armed forces from these unauthorized hostilities in order to help put an end to the suffering of a country approaching “a famine of biblical proportions,” in the words of Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council. After all, as Foreign Policy has reported, the Saudi coalition’s “daily bombing campaign would not be possible without the constant presence of U.S. Air Force tanker planes refueling coalition jets.”

How did we get to this point?

In March 2015, the United States introduced its armed forces into the Saudi regime’s war against an uprising of Yemen’s Houthis, a rebel group that rapidly took control of Yemen’s capital, Sana, and eventually most of the country’s cities, by allying with forces loyal to an ousted former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. But the Shiite Houthi rebels are in no way connected to the Sunni extremists of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, which the United States has been going after across the globe under the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001. American participation in the war in Yemen is not covered by that authorization.

Al Qaeda has been referred to by The Associated Press as a “de facto ally” of Saudi Arabia and its coalition in their shared battle against the Houthis. This raises the question: Whom are we actually supporting in Yemen?

American involvement in this unauthorized conflict against the Houthis was pursued by the Obama administration for political purposes-- “a way of repairing strained ties with the Saudis, who strongly opposed the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran,” as Foreign Policy put it.

There’s a good reason that the Constitution reserves for Congress the right to declare war-- a clause taken in modern times as forbidding the president from pursuing an unauthorized war in the absence of an actual or imminent threat to the nation. Clearly, the founders’ intent was to prevent precisely the kind of dangerous course we’re charting.

The State Department found that the Saudi war against the Houthis has allowed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State’s Yemen branch “to deepen their inroads across much of the country.” In other words, the power vacuum left by the war has made Al Qaeda’s deadliest branch stronger than ever-- yet there’s never been a public debate over the American role in deepening that threat to our own national security.

Four decades ago, as a bloody United States military campaign across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos drew to a close, Congress overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto to enact the War Powers Resolution of 1973, reflecting the legislature’s determination to confront executive overreach as a coequal branch of government. Now we congressmen are invoking a provision of that 1973 law, which defines the introduction of armed forces to include coordinating, participating in the movement of, or accompanying foreign military forces.

That law affords our bill “privileged” status, guaranteeing a full floor vote to remove unauthorized United States forces from Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemeni Houthis. In doing so, we aim to reassert Congress’s sole constitutional authority to debate and declare war.

This resolution may create discomfort for some of our colleagues who have been content to cede Congress’s oversight responsibilities to the White House and Pentagon in recent decades. But now more than ever, the House of Representatives must serve as a counterweight to an executive branch that has long run roughshod over the Constitution-- especially at a time when our president has threatened, in front of the United Nations, to “totally destroy” an entire country, North Korea.

Exercising our constitutional duty is the key to alleviating the catastrophe that’s engulfing Yemen.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs declared last April that “Yemen is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world,” and in August the charity Save the Children warned that one million malnourished Yemeni children were at risk of contracting cholera. Nowhere else on earth today is there a catastrophe that is so profound and affects so many lives, yet could be so easy to resolve: halt the bombing, end the blockade, and let food and medicine into Yemen so that millions may live.

We believe that the American people, if presented with the facts of this conflict, will oppose the use of their tax dollars to bomb and starve civilians in order to further the Saudi monarchy’s regional goals. Our House resolution is a first step in expanding democracy into an arena long insulated from public accountability. Too many lives hang in the balance to allow this American war to continue without congressional consent. When our bill comes to the floor for a vote, our colleagues should consider first the solution proposed by the director of Unicef, Anthony Lake, for stopping the unimaginable suffering of millions of Yemenis: “Stop the war.”

When we reached Ro after publication of his OpEd, he told us that "You are seeing both progressives on the left and conservatives in the Freedom Caucus express concern about the neocon/neoliberal vision of foreign policy. There is an appetite for greater restraint and a recognition of the harms of interventionism. The hope is that the Congressional leadership will allow for a vote and recognize the bipartisan coalition that is growing for reasserting Congress' role in matters of war and peace." Congressional leadership... that means Paul Ryan, so, alas, probably very futile hopes.

The resolution already has 30 co-sponsors, including Ted Lieu (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Keith Ellison (D-MN), John Conyers (D-MI) and Tom Massie (R-KY)-- and that's just on day 1.

Can You Find Yemen On A Map?

I started traveling when I was still a teenager and I write about my travel adventures on another blog. I'm even a member of the (informal) century club-- meaning I've been to 100 countries. Yemen isn't one of them. In fact, aide Rep. Alan Grayson, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, I don't know anyone who's been to Yemen. Working at Sire Records, I got to know Ofra Haza, an Israeli-born Yemenite many of whose songs derived from that country's traditional music. Ofra and her music got me interested in visiting Yemen, although I never did and when I've written about Yemen in the past, it's mostly been about how unsafe the country is for tourists. Political developments over the last month or so make Yemen, already on anyone's top 10 least safe tourist destinations, even less safe.

I had never heard of the Houthis, a Shia group, before reading last week that they had staged a successful coup against the government the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have been propping up in Sana'a. Actually, they've been struggling against the government, which resigned under Houthi pressure January 22, for many years and have gradually made inroads, one province at a time. They are considered to be allies of Iran, which is driving the Saudis insane right now. The U.S., France and the U.K. closed their embassies and withdrew all their diplomats this week. The State Department and the Foreign Office have urged all Americans and Britons to leave the country immediately, although it's hard to imagine that there are many Americans or even Brits in Yemen to begin with. Germany has indicated they're closing down their embassy soon as well. Saudi Arabia closed theirs down today. President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi is under house arrest.

Yemen has been, along with western Pakistan, ground zero for the U.S. drone war against Al Qaeda and Yemen's last two governments have given tacit approval for American operations. The Houthis are adamantly opposed to the drone war-- although, they are also enemies of Al Qaeda.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East, slightly better off than African neighbors Sudan and Somalia. 54% of Yemen's 25 million people survive on less than 2 dollars/day and almost half the people in the country, which suffers from a dire water shortage, are malnourished. Yesterday, the AP reported that Jamal Benomar, the UN envoy to Yemen, warned the Security Council that the country is at a crossroads between "civil war and disintegration" and a successful political transition, while Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the state is "collapsing before our eyes." The Houthi coup has opened the door for al-Qaeda, which has been making significant gains. Its being reported in the Middle East that the U.S. has been bombing al-Qaeda targets in the country today. Yemen is almost definitely headed towards civil war, possibly partition... and lots more misery for it's already beleaguered people.