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Ignoring the Costs of the War on Yemen

Hadi predictably fails to mention the humanitarian disaster that this war is causing for the entire country.
DESERT SHIELD
F-15E Eagle fighter aircraft of the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing, Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C., are parked on an air field during Operation Desert Shield.

Yemeni President Hadi’s op-ed in The New York Times yesterday is a remarkable piece of propaganda:

The Houthi attacks are unjust acts of aggression against the Yemeni people and the constitutional legitimacy of my government, as well as an assault on Yemen’s sovereignty and security [bold mine-DL].

Much of what Hadi says in the op-ed is false or misleading, but most of his claims probably sound just reasonable enough that they might seem persuasive to readers that don’t know what has been happening for the last two weeks. Despite the fact that the Saudis and their allies are the ones that have been attacking Yemen and violating its sovereignty by bombing and shelling the country, Hadi presents his Yemeni enemies as if they were foreign aggressors that need to be repelled. While he lives in exile in Riyadh and serves as little more than a Saudi prop at this point, he accuses his opponents of being the agents of a foreign government. The Yemenis that are being bombed are portrayed as “agents of chaos,” while the governments that are bombing them are “coming to the aid of Yemen.” The dishonesty of Hadi’s argument is fairly obvious to anyone paying close attention to the story, but for many people in the West these misrepresentations will sound plausible.

The trouble is that the false portrayal of the Houthis as “puppets of the Iranian government” is already a widespread one, and Hadi is counting on Western audiences to know just enough about the region to be alarmed by his warnings of “the next Hezbollah” without understanding how far-fetched the claim really is. It might be worth noting that if one wanted to create a new Hizbullah, the fastest way to do that would be to have foreign governments attack this group’s country, thus providing it with the perfect opportunity to present itself as defending the country against the invader. The campaign that Hadi and the U.S. support is making this outcome more likely rather than less.

What Hadi predictably fails to mention is the humanitarian disaster that this war is causing for the entire country. This is what “coming to the aid of Yemen” looks like in reality:

The strengthening Saudi Arabian-led air campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthis now in control is systematically destroying much of the country’s infrastructure. Anything that had been left of basic services, including health care, is all but gone, the U.N. said.

Hadi has to ignore the fact that all of Yemen is suffering from lack of food, water, medicine, and fuel because of the cruel and unnecessary war that his allies are waging in his name. Whatever support he may have had before he fled the country has all but vanished, so it’s absurd to think that he will be able to return to the capital as president. He says that Yemen has been pulled back “from the edge” of an abyss by the Saudi-led war, but the reality is that this war threatens to push the entire country into the abyss. If it falls in, there should be no confusion about who was responsible.

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