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A Shameful Op-Ed on Yemen

Carrying water for the Saudis and Emiratis has nothing to do with demonstrating support for the people of Yemen.
yemen bombing

Republican Congressman Will Hurd offers up an embarrassing defense of Trump administration policy in Yemen:

With tensions escalating in the Middle East, Congress is emboldening Iran by sending the wrong message about Yemen. Last week the Senate voted to halt military sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Earlier this year, President Trump was forced to veto a congressional resolution aimed at ending U.S. assistance to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Congress evidently can’t separate its response to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi from the threats posed by the Houthis, Iranians and terrorists in Yemen. This is no time to be sending mixed messages to Tehran.

Rep. Hurd makes a number of questionable and misleading claims in his op-ed, and some of the things he says are outright false. He wants to create the impression that Congressional opposition to U.S. arms sales to the Saudi coalition and to the war on Yemen are driven solely by outrage over the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi on the Saudi crown prince’s orders. That is false, as many of his colleagues have made clear during their efforts to bring U.S. involvement to an end over several years. There was considerable Congressional opposition to U.S. support for the war long before last October’s gruesome slaying of a regime critic by Saudi agents, and there was similarly strong opposition to continued arms sales that provide weapons to the governments committing countless war crimes against innocent Yemenis. Opposition to these arms sales was also motivated in part by a rejection of the president’s abuse of power in declaring an “emergency” that didn’t exist.

Hurd’s decision to frame the debate over Yemen as a matter of sending messages to Iran tells us that he doesn’t know the conflict or the country very well. “I know Yemen,” he asserts, but all that he seems to know are the pro-Saudi talking points that he recites. For instance, he says, “Tehran is turning Yemen into a proxy state and haven for terrorist groups.” The first part of this statement is false, and the second is an attempt to cover for the role that the Saudis and Emiratis have had in strengthening jihadist groups in Yemen since 2015.

The Saudi coalition war has allowed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to get stronger, and the coalition and its proxies have fought alongside jihadists, recruited them, armed them, and paid them off. If a “haven for terrorist groups” is what “the Saudi-led coalition is fighting to prevent,” they have done a horrible job and should halt their campaign at once so that no more U.S. and U.K.-made weapons end up in the hands of criminals and terrorists. It will not come as a shock that Rep. Hurd has nothing to say about any of that.

Like many other hawks, Rep. Hurd chooses to portray the war as a fight against Iranian influence. That is not just overly simplistic, but actually gets the real nature of the conflict wrong. The conflict has its origins in internal Yemeni rivalries and grievances, and it was the Saudis and Emiratis that exploited that conflict in an attempt to carve out their own spheres of influence. While the war is ostensibly meant to restore the deposed Hadi government to power, the UAE has been pursuing its own agenda and propping up southern separatist forces hostile to Hadi. The Saudi and Emirati governments are out for their own interests and couldn’t care less about the damage that they do to Yemen in the process. The war supposedly being fought on behalf of the “legitimate” government and for the sake of Yemen’s stability will never restore the deposed government and has fractured Yemen even more. Helping the Saudis and Emiratis to destroy Yemen doesn’t hurt Iran in the slightest, and it doesn’t serve any U.S. interests, but it does make the U.S. party to terrible crimes and makes our government one of the authors of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Hurd tries to create the impression that the humanitarian crisis is the result of the overthrow of the Hadi government:

Since 2014, when the Iranian-backed Houthi government attacked Yemen’s internationally recognized government and seized the capital, Sana’a, the country has descended into a humanitarian crisis that is among the world’s worst.

The beginning of Yemen’s descent into deepening famine and the rapid spread of preventable disease was not the takeover in 2014, but the Saudi-led intervention in March 2015. The suffering is most acute in Houthi-controlled areas because that is where most of the population lives and those are the areas that the Saudi coalition has been trying to starve. It has primarily been the coalition that has blockaded Yemen’s ports, impeded delivery of commercial goods and aid, and waged economic war on the country by relocating the central bank and withholding public employees’ salaries. The Saudi coalition has also deliberately targeted the country’s farms and fisheries in an effort to destroy the country’s local food production and distribution. The Houthis have also interfered with aid deliveries and committed their own share of war crimes and abuses, but it was the coalition’s intervention that escalated and intensified the conflict and drove Yemen into the abyss. The fact that Hurd has nothing to say about the Saudi coalition’s role in devastating Yemen’s infrastructure, including attacks on sewage treatment plants and water systems that the population needs for clean drinking water, speaks volumes about his supposed concern for the people of Yemen. The best way to “alleviate the needless suffering of millions of innocent Yemenis” is to understand who is responsible for causing it, bringing sufficient pressure to bear on the governments responsible, and doing everything possible to get those governments to halt their senseless military campaign and economic war. Rep. Hurd’s proposal does none of that.

If Hurd wants to pass a resolution condemning Houthi abuses and crimes along with the abuses and crimes of the Saudi coalition, he will find plenty of support from opponents of the war, but his resolution and his op-ed are pretty clearly efforts to change the subject from Saudi coalition war crimes and continued U.S. support for the coalition. Trying to make the vote about Yemen into a litmus test about Iran is a disservice to people in Yemen and to his own constituents. The war on Yemen is not about Iran despite the best efforts of pro-Saudi lobbyists to pretend otherwise. Carrying water for the Saudis and Emiratis has nothing to do with demonstrating support for the people of Yemen. On the contrary, continuing to support and enable Saudi coalition crimes is an insult and an affront to the people of Yemen, and that is what Hurd wants Congress to do.

Our government’s Yemen policy is as despicable and indefensible as it is because both the Obama and Trump administrations believed that indulging Saudi Arabia and the UAE was more important than pursuing a policy that served U.S. interests and values. Part of that indulgence is regurgitating the propaganda that destroying Yemen has something to do with opposing Iran. It is wrong, and it blinds Americans to the real causes of Yemen’s misery and our government’s role in helping to cause that misery. If Congress passes a resolution condemning crimes and abuses in Yemen, it should apply to all parties in the conflict, and that should include condemnation of our government’s ongoing assistance to governments that commit war crimes using the weapons and support provided to them by the U.S.

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