Horrific conditions in Yemen continue to grow worse:

Cholera deaths in war-torn Yemen have surged into the hundreds, more than a quarter of Yemenis face famine, and parents are selling girls into marriage to buy food, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

It bears repeating again that the humanitarian catastrophe now consuming the people of Yemen is entirely man-made. This catastrophe could still be prevented from getting worse if there were sufficient pressure on the warring parties to halt the fighting along with adequate funding for relief efforts and a lifting of the blockade that has been starving the country for over two years. Unlike some other conflicts where the U.S. and other Western powers have little or no influence, the war on Yemen is one waged by U.S. clients and fueled by U.S. and British support for the intervening governments. Washington has considerable leverage that it could use to rein in the Saudi-led coalition and possibly halt their campaign all together, but only if it is willing to use it. To date, neither the Obama nor the Trump administration has been willing to do that.

The U.S. and the coalition governments also have ample resources that they could use to alleviate the hardship of millions of starving and diseased Yemenis. These people suffer in large part because of the coalition intervention that our government has supported to the hilt, and so there is a special obligation on the governments responsible for this to redress the wrongs that have been done to them. Millions of Yemeni lives are threatened and thousands are being lost because of a foolish decision to try to reimpose a discredited leadership on Yemen, and the U.S. has helped enable the creation of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in a misguided desire to “reassure” the client states responsible for wrecking the country. Yemenis have done nothing to us or their neighbors that could possibly justify the treatment that has been meted out to them, and they are the victims of an indefensible and atrocious war that most of the world chooses to ignore. Meanwhile, some of the world’s most powerful governments–including ours–seek to profit from the death and destruction.