Yemeni women hold pictures of victims of airstrikes during a protest against Saudi-led airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Sunday, Nov. 27, 2016.Hani Mohammed/Press Association. All rights reserved.What
is it about America and its twenty-first-century
wars? They spread continually – there are now seven
of them; they never end; and yet, if you happen to live in the United States,
most of the time it would be easy enough to believe that, except for the
struggle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were no conflicts
under way. Take the Afghan War, for an example. Now 15 years old and
heating up again as the Taliban takes more territory
and US operations there grow, it was missing in action in the 2016 election
campaign.
Neither
presidential candidate debated or discussed that war, despite the close to
10,000 US troops (and more private contractors) still based there, the fact that
US air power has again been unleashed
in that country, and the way those in the Pentagon are talking about it as a
conflict that will extend
well into the 2020s. It makes no difference. Here, it’s simply the war that
time forgot. Similar things might be said, even if on a lesser scale,
about expanding
American operations in Somalia and ongoing ones
in Libya. Nor is the intensity
of the air war in Syria or Iraq much emphasized or grasped by the American
public.
And
then, as Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg, makes clear today, there’s
the war that couldn’t be forgotten because, in essence, just about no one here
noticed it in the first place. I’m speaking of the US-backed Saudi war
aimed significantly at the civilian
population of desperately impoverished Yemen.
It’s
a conflict in which the actual American stake couldn’t be foggier and yet the
Obama administration has supported it in just about every way
imaginable, and it will soon be inherited by Trump and his national security
crew. It could hardly be grimmer, more devastating, or more gruesome, and yet
most of the time, from an American point of view, it might as well not be happening. Tom Engelhardt
The forgotten war in
Yemen and the unchecked war powers of the presidency in the age of Trump
By Rebecca Gordon
The long national nightmare that was the
2016 presidential election is finally over. Now, we’re facing a worse terror:
the reality of a Trump presidency. Donald Trump has already promised to
nominate a segregationist
attorney general, a national security adviser who is a raging Islamophobe, a secretary of education who doesn’t believe
in public schools, and a secretary of defense whose sobriquet is “Mad Dog.” How
worried should we be that General James "Mad Dog" Mattis may well be the soberest
among them?
Along with a deeply divided
country, the worst income
inequality since at least the 1920s, and a crumbling
infrastructure, Trump will inherit a 15-year-old, apparently
never-ending worldwide war. While the named enemy may be a mere emotion
(“terror”) or an incendiary strategy (“terrorism”), the victims couldn’t be
more real, and as in all modern wars, the majority of them are
civilians.
On how many countries is US ordnance
falling at the moment? Some put the total at six;
others, seven.
For the record, those seven would be Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan,
Somalia, Syria, and, oh yes, Yemen.
The United States has been directing
drone strikes against what it calls al-Qaeda targets in Yemen since 2002,
but our military involvement in that country increased dramatically in 2015
when US ally Saudi Arabia inserted itself into a civil war there. Since then,
the United States has been supplying intelligence and mid-air refueling for
Saudi bombers (many of them American-made F-15s sold to that country). The
State Department has also approved sales
to the Saudis of $1.29 billion worth of bombs – “smart” and otherwise –
together with $1.15 billion worth of tanks, and half a billion dollars of
ammunition. And that, in total, is only a small part of the $115 billion
total in military sales the United States has offered Saudi Arabia since
President Obama took power in 2009. That, in total, is only a small part of
the $115 billion
total in military sales the United States has offered Saudi Arabia since
President Obama took power in 2009.
Why are American bombs being dropped on
Yemen by American-trained
pilots from American-made planes? I’ll get to that in a moment. But
first, a glimpse of the results.
“On the brink of
abyss”
The photographs
are devastating:
tiny, large-eyed children with sticks for limbs stare
out at the viewer. In some, their mothers touch them gently, tentatively, as if
a stronger embrace would snap their bones. These are just a few victims of the
famine that war has brought to Yemen, which was already the poorest country in
the Arab world before the present civil war and Saudi bombing campaign even
began.
UNICEF spokesman Mohammed Al-Asaadi told al-Jazeera
that, by August 2016, the agency had counted 370,000 children “suffering from
severe acute malnutrition,” and the UN World Food Program (WFP) says 14.4 million people
in Yemen are “food insecure,” seven million of them – one fifth of the
country’s population – “in desperate need of food assistance.” Before the war
began, Yemen imported
90% of its food. Since April 2015, however, Saudi Arabia has blockaded the
country’s ports. Today, 80% of Yemenis depend on some kind of UN food aid for
survival, and the war has made the situation immeasurably worse.
As the WFP reports:
“The nutrition situation continues to
deteriorate. According to WFP market analysis, prices of food items spiked in
September as a result of the escalation of the conflict. The national average
price of wheat flour last month was 55 percent higher compared to the
pre-crisis period.”
The rising price of wheat matters,
because in many famines, the problem isn’t that there’s no food, it’s that what
food there is people can’t afford
to buy.
And that was before the cholera
outbreak. In October, medical workers began to see cases of that water-borne
diarrheal disease, which is easily transmitted and kills quickly, especially
when people are malnourished. By the end of the month, according
to the World Health Organization, there were 1,410 confirmed cases of cholera,
and 45 known deaths from it in the country. (Other estimates
put the number of cases at more than 2,200.)
Both these health emergencies have been
exacerbated by the ongoing Saudi air war, which has destroyed or otherwise
forced the closure of more than 600 healthcare centers, including four
hospitals operated by Doctors Without Borders, along with 1,400 schools. More
than half of all health facilities in the country have either closed
or are only partially functional.
The day before the US election, Ismail
Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN’s envoy on Yemen, described
the situation this way: “People are dying… the infrastructure is falling
apart… and the economy is on the brink of abyss.”
The abyss
Every time it seems the crisis can’t get
any worse, it does. A recent Washington Post story describes
such “wrenching” choices now commonly faced by Yemeni families as whether to
spend the little money they have to take one dying child to a hospital or to
buy food for the rest of the family.
The Saudi-led coalition includes Egypt,
Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain.
Between March 2015 and the end of August 2016, according to
the Yemen Data Project, an independent, nonpartisan group of academics and
human rights organizations, the coalition launched more than 8,600 air strikes.
At least a third of them struck civilian targets, including, the Guardian reports,
“school buildings, hospitals, markets, mosques and economic infrastructure.”
Gatherings like weddings
and funerals
have come under attack, too. To get a sense of the scale and focus of the air
war, consider that one market in the town of Sirwah about 50 miles east of the
capital, Sana’a, has already been hit 24 separate times.
Casualty estimates vary, but the World
Health Organization says
that, as of October 25, “more than 7,070 people have been killed and over
36,818 injured.” As early as last January, the UN High Commission for Refugees reported that 2.4 million
people (nearly one-tenth of the population) were already internally displaced
— that is, uprooted from their homes by the war. Another 170,000 have fled the
country, including Somali and Ethiopian refugees, who had sought asylum from
their own countries in Yemen, mistakenly believing that the war there had died
down. Leaving Yemen has, however, gotten harder for the desperate and uprooted
since the Saudis and Egypt began blockading the country’s ports. Yemen shares
land borders with Saudi Arabia to the north and Oman – the only Arab monarchy
that is not part of the Saudi-led coalition – to the east.
“Tragic conflict” in 2016
In early October, Saudi planes attacked
a funeral hall in Sana’a where the father of the country’s interior minister
was being memorialized, killing at least 135 people and wounding more than 500.
Gathered at the funeral, according
to Human Rights Watch (HRW), were a wide range of Yemenis, including
journalists, government officials, and some military men. HRW’s on-the-ground
report on the incident claims that the attack, which intentionally targeted
civilians and involved an initial air strike followed by a second one after
rescuers had begun to arrive 30 minutes later, constitutes a war crime. The
Saudi-led coalition acknowledged
responsibility for the bombing, blaming the attack on “wrong information.”
UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon was
horrified and called for a full investigation. “Aerial attacks by the Saudi-led
coalition,” he said,
“have already caused immense carnage, and destroyed much of the country’s
medical facilities and other vital civilian infrastructure.”
For once in this forgotten war, the
international outcry was sufficient to force the Obama administration to say
something vaguely negative about its ally. “U.S. security cooperation with
Saudi Arabia,” commented
National Security Council Spokesman Ned Price, “is not a blank check.” He
added:
“In light of this and other recent
incidents, we have initiated an immediate review of our already significantly
reduced support to the Saudi-led coalition and are prepared to adjust our
support so as to better align with U.S. principles, values, and interests,
including achieving an immediate and durable end to Yemen's tragic
conflict."
That "check" from Washington
did at least include the bombs used in the funeral attack. According to HRW’s
on-the-ground reporters, US-manufactured, air-dropped GBU-12 Paveway II
500-pound laser-guided bombs were used.
What’s it all about?
Why is Saudi Arabia, along with its
allies, aided by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom,
fighting in Yemen? That country has little oil,
although petroleum products are its largest export, followed by among other
things “non-fillet fresh fish.” It does lie along one of the world’s main oil
trading routes on the Bab el-Mandeb strait between the Suez Canal at the north
end of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the south. But neither Saudi nor US
access to the canal is threatened by the forces Saudi Arabia is fighting in
Yemen.
The Saudis have specifically targeted
the Houthis, a political
movement named for its founder Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a Zaidi Shi’a
Muslim religious and political leader who died in 2004. The Zaidis are an
ancient branch of Shi’a Islam, most of whose adherents live in Yemen.
Officially known as Ansar Allah
(Partisans of God), the Houthi movement began
in the 1990s as a religious revival among young people, who described it as a
vehicle for their commitment to peace and justice. Ansar Allah soon adopted a
series of slogans opposing the United States and Israel, along with any Arab
countries collaborating with them, presumably including Saudi Arabia and the
other Gulf states. Ansar Allah soon
adopted a series of slogans opposing the United States and Israel, along with
any Arab countries collaborating with them. As Zaidi Muslims, the movement also opposed any significant role for
Salafists (fundamentalist Sunnis) in Yemeni life and held demonstrations at
mosques, including in the capital, Sana’a.
In 2004, this led to armed
confrontations when Yemeni security forces, commanded by then-President Ali
Abdullah Saleh, attacked the demonstrators. Badreddin al-Houthi, the movement’s
founder, was killed in the intermittent civil war that followed and officially ended
in 2010. Al-Jazeera, the Qatar government’s news agency, has suggested
that President Saleh may have used his war with the Houthis unsuccessfully to
get at his real rival, a cousin and general in the Yemeni army named Ali
Mohsen.
During the Arab Spring in 2011, the
Houthis supported a successful effort to oust President Saleh, and as a reward,
according to
al-Jazeera, that same General Mohsen gave them control of the
state of Saadra, an area where many Houthi tribespeople live. Having helped
unseat Saleh, the Houthis – and much of the rest of Yemen – soon fell out
with his Saudi-supported replacement, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. In January 2015,
the Houthis took over Sana’a and placed Hadi under effective house arrest. He
later fled to Saudi Arabia and is believed to be living in the Saudi capital
Riyadh. The Houthis for their part have now allied with their old enemy Saleh.
So, once again, why do the Saudis (and
their Sunni Gulf State allies) care so much about the roiling internal politics
and conflicts of their desperately poor neighbor to the south? It’s true that
the Houthis have managed to lob some rockets into Saudi Arabia and conduct a
few cross-border raids, but they hardly represent an existential threat to that
country.
The Saudis firmly believe, however, that
Iran represents such a threat. As Saudi diplomatic documents described
in the New York Times suggest, that country has “a near obsession with
Iran.” They see the hand of that Shi’a nation everywhere, and certainly
everywhere that Shi’a minorities have challenged Sunni or secular rulers,
including Iraq.
There seems to be little evidence that
Iran supported the Houthis (who represent a minority variant of Shi’a Islam) in
any serious way – at least until the Saudis got into the act. Even now, according to
a report in the Washington Post, the Houthis “are not Iranian puppets.”
Their fight is local and the support they get from Iran remains “limited and
far from sufficient to make more than a marginal difference to the balance of
forces in Yemen, a country awash with weapons. There is therefore no supporting
evidence to the claim that Iran has bought itself any significant measure of
influence over Houthi decision-making.”
So to return to where we began: why
exactly has Washington supported the Saudi war in Yemen so fully and with such
clout? The best guess is that it’s a make-up present to Saudi Arabia, a gesture
to help heal the rift that opened when the Obama administration concluded its
July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. The best guess is that it’s a gesture
to help heal the rift that opened when the Obama administration concluded its
July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Under
that agreement’s terms, Iran vowed “that it will under no circumstances ever
seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons” in return for the United States
lifting years of economic sanctions.
US boots on the ground
The munitions the United States has
supplied to the Saudis for their war in Yemen include cluster bombs,
which sprinkle hundreds of miniature bomblets around an area as big as several
football fields. Unexploded bomblets can go off years later, one reason why
their use is now generally considered to violate the laws of war. In fact, 119
countries have signed a treaty
to outlaw cluster bombs, although not the United States. (As it happens, Saudi
Arabia isn't the only US ally to favor cluster bombs. Israel has also used
them, for instance deploying
“more than a million” bomblets in its 2006 war against Lebanon, according to an
Israel Defense Forces commander.)
We know that US-made cluster bombs have
already killed
civilians in Yemen, and in June 2016, many Democratic members of Congress tried
to outlaw their sale to Saudi Arabia. They lost in a close 216-204 vote. Only
16 Democrats backed President Obama’s request to continue supplying cluster
bombs to the Saudis. Congressional Republicans and the Defense Department,
however, fought back fiercely, as the Intercept has reported:
“‘The Department of Defense strongly
opposes this amendment,’ said Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., chairman of
the House Committee on Defense Appropriations, during floor debate. ‘They
advise us that it would stigmatize cluster munitions, which are legitimate
weapons with clear military utility.’”
Perhaps some weapons deserve to be
stigmatized.
These days it’s not just American bombs
that are landing in Yemen. US Special Operations forces have landed
there, too, ostensibly to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, the
local terror outfit that has been expanding its operations amid the chaos of
the war in that country. If anything, the air war has actually strengthened
AQAP’s position, allowing it to seize more territory in the chaos of the ongoing
conflict. Those US special ops troops find themselves allied with
the United Arab Emirates against AQAP and the local branch of the Islamic
State, or ISIS. In the ever-shifting
set of alliances that is Yemeni reality, those US special ops troops find
themselves allied with the United Arab Emirates against AQAP and the local
branch of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and also, at least temporarily, with a
thriving movement of southern Yemeni separatists, who would like to see a
return to the pre-1990 moment when there were two Yemens, north and south.
In the beginning, the White House
claimed that the special ops deployment was temporary. But by June 2016, the Washington
Post was reporting
that “the U.S. military now plans to keep a small force of Special Operations
advisers in Yemen… for the foreseeable future.”
And that has yet to change, so consider
us now directly involved in an undeclared land war in that country. Compared to
the horrors of Iraq and Syria, the slaughter, displacement, and starvation in
Yemen may seem like small potatoes – except, of course, to the people living
and dying there. But precisely because there are no US economic or military
interests in Yemen, perhaps it could be the first arena in Washington’s endless
war on terror to be abandoned.
Missing Congressional
backbone
I vividly recall a political cartoon of
the 1980s that appeared at a moment when Congress was once again voting to send
US aid to the Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in
Nicaragua. Having witnessed firsthand the effects of the Contra war there, with
its intentional military strategy of attacking civilians and public services as
well as its use of torture, kidnapping, and mutilation, I found those
Congressional debates on sending money, weapons, and CIA trainers to the
Contras frustrating. The cartoon’s single panel caught my mood exactly. It
was set in the cloakroom of the House of Representatives. Suspended from each
hanger was a backbone. A blob-like creature in a suit could just be seen
slithering out of the frame. The point was clear: Congress had checked its
spine at the door.
In fact, in every war the United States
has fought since World War II, Congress has effectively abdicated its
constitutional right to declare war, repeatedly rolling over and playing dead for
the executive branch. During the last 50 years, from the Reagan
administration’s illegal Contra war to the “war on terror,” this version of a
presidential power grab has only accelerated. By now, we’ve become so used to
all of this that the term “commander-in-chief” has become synonymous
with “president”– even in domestic contexts. With a Trump administration on the
horizon, it should be easier to see just what an irresponsible folly it’s been
to allow the power of the presidency and the national security state to balloon
in such an uncontrolled, unchecked way.
I wish I had the slightest hope that our
newly elected Republican Congress would find its long-lost spine in the age of
Donald Trump and reassert its right and duty to decide whether to commit the
country to war, starting in Yemen. Today, more than ever, the world needs our
system of checks and balances to work again. The alternative, unthinkable as it
might be, is looming.
It’s 2016. We know where our bombs are.
Isn’t it time for the US to bring them home?
This piece, including Tom Engelhardt's
introduction, is reposted from Tom.Dispatch.com
on
December 11,
2016 with that site's
permission.