Derek Davison sums up the folly of U.S. support for the war on Yemen:

America is thus providing critical logistical support to an operation that has only added to Yemen’s instability and that has worked largely to the benefit of America’s biggest security concern on the Arabian Peninsula.

Yet so far, America’s decision to enable the intervention has backfired in every imaginable way. Yemen is even less stable, Yemenis are suffering more, and AQAP’s position is stronger now than before the intervention began.

Continued U.S. support for the Saudi-led war is indefensible, as I’ve said several times before, but the striking thing about the administration’s decision to back the war beginning in March is that all of the pitfalls of the intervention were obvious at the start and were pointed out at the time. All of those warnings were ignored, and the U.S. kept increasing its involvement in the conflict despite the fact that it could have easily refused to offer any backing to the Saudi campaign. The U.S. government didn’t know what the Saudis hoped to accomplish, some American officers clearly saw the danger of supporting an attack on a group that was hostile to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), no one with any understanding of local conditions in Yemen thought the intervention would succeed, the goals of the intervention always seemed unrealistic, and it was always most likely that the intervention would exacerbate Yemen’s internal conflict while making things worse for the entire population.

Almost everything that critics of the intervention feared could happen has already happened, and the Saudis are as far from their stated goals today as they were when they started bombing Yemen over two months ago. To make matters worse, there was never any good reason for the intervention, nor was there any good reason for U.S. involvement. The war on Yemen stands out as just the latest in a series of ill-conceived, unnecessary wars in which the U.S. has involved itself, and once again the arguments for military action have been nonsense. The U.S. had absolutely no business contributing to the disastrous war that has inflicted such extraordinary damage on Yemen, and by backing the war the U.S. has done real harm to its own security interests. The administration has done this all so that our government can “reassure” a clutch of vicious authoritarian regimes that the U.S. will enable them in their most reckless and costly policies.