The war on Yemen continues to be a much higher priority for the Saudis and the other Gulf states than the war on ISIS:

“They’ve all been busy doing other things, Yemen being the primary draw,” Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who leads the air war from a $60 million command center at this sprawling base in Qatar, said of the Arab allies.

The truth is that non-U.S. contributions to the air campaign against ISIS have largely been token ones from the beginning. It has always been an overwhelmingly U.S.-dominated war, and the diversion of attention and resources to Yemen has just made that harder to ignore. The fact that the Saudis and their allies are putting so much more effort into bombing and blockading Yemen at the same time that they neglect the other campaign just underscores how little interest these governments have had in aiding the war on ISIS.

This reminds us that our regional clients are driven much more by sectarian and anti-Iranian concerns, and it reconfirms that our interests and theirs continue to diverge. As they have also shown in Syria, the Saudis and other Gulf states are much more interested in inflicting harm on Iran and its allies and proxies than they are in combating jihadists. While the U.S. assists the atrocious Saudi-led war, Washington’s useless regional clients do as little as they possibly can to assist in fighting ISIS because they expect that the U.S. will assume the burden of doing so. The U.S. shouldn’t be helping with the former, and it should seriously reconsider why it is taking most of the responsibility for a war it doesn’t need to be fighting against a regional threat.