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Our Complicity in the Starvation of Yemen

Yemen is not only the world's worst humanitarian crisis, but it is also the one for which our government is most responsible.
Yemen

Seth Harp interviewed Sen. Chris Murphy on the war on Yemen and his opposition to it. This answer from Murphy is worth highlighting:

Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East. An addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn’t. I ran in 2006 as an opponent of the Iraq War, and I came to Congress to change overreliance on U.S. military power. Yemen struck me as a place where we were beginning to make the same kind of mistakes as in Iraq. There are a lot of humanitarian nightmares in the world, but there’s only one country that’s in the middle of a famine caused by the United States [bold mine-DL]. I couldn’t stand by and allow that to happen.

It is rare to see someone describe our government’s responsibility for helping to create the humanitarian disaster in Yemen as bluntly and accurately as Sen. Murphy does here. One of the important things that Murphy has done in speaking out against U.S. involvement has been to call attention to that responsibility and to force the public and his colleagues in Congress to acknowledge the harm that this policy has caused to tens of millions of people. Because our government has had such a large role in creating the crisis, Americans have a greater obligation than most to help put an end to the war and the horrific conditions it has created. It is not only the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, but it is also the one for which our government is most responsible.

It is an entirely man-made crisis, and it was both foreseeable and preventable. I wrote an article for the September/October 2015 print edition of TAC on U.S. support for the war on Yemen. In the article, I said this:

Since then a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led military intervention has intensified the country’s civil strife and brought about a humanitarian catastrophe affecting more than 20 million civilians. Though most Americans may not realize it, the U.S. is helping to wage war on yet another country in the Middle East and supporting a policy that is inflicting enormous suffering on an entire people. The effects of this reckless intervention will likely include the further empowerment of jihadist groups in Yemen, amplified resentment of U.S. interference in the region’s affairs, chronic political instability, and a massive loss of life from famine and disease.

Unfortunately, the likely effects I identified more than three years ago have all come to pass, and some of them have been even worse than I could have imagined. The disaster now engulfing Yemen was not difficult to foresee for anyone interested in looking ahead, but our government chose to ignore the warning signs and indulge the Saudi coalition instead. The U.S. has been complicit in the destruction of Yemen ever since, and that policy continues to this day.

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