What’s happening in Yemen today would shock the so-called world community’s conscience were that “community” of North American and Western European nations actually paying attention—and were its leaders in possession of the ability to care for people dying on land that is not on top of an ocean of oil.
At least 5,700 people have been killed, half of them children, since a coalition led by Saudi Arabia began bombing the country in March 2015 in support of embattled leader Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi. Fighting between coalition-backed forces and Houthi rebels aligned with the country’s former dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has left one of the world’s poorest countries without much-needed aid: According to the United Nations, more than 500,000 children under the age of 5 are now severely malnourished and over half the country’s 23 million people are not sure where they will find their next meal.
Strongly worded form letters, petitions and sparsely attended candlelight vigils won’t cut it: The world, beginning and possibly ending with the United States, needs to act now to stop the bombs that are being dropped from the sky and slaughtering men, women and children with impunity. Though often wrong, in this case the policy preferred by many a liberal interventionist is more than justified and ought to be pursued without controversy: The U.S. government must ground the airforce responsible for so much destruction in Yemen by imposing a no-fly zone—and it can and should do so unilaterally.
Previous tactics have failed. Cease-fires are called for but come and go with precious little effect on the ground, both sides unwilling to accept a compromise that does not amount to a victory. After 10 months of war, there is no end in sight, the peace process as much a joke there as it is in Israel, with 2.3 million people, already displaced by war crimes perpetrated, forced to seek refuge in dilapidated schools.
Not that those are safe, either—and, as in Gaza before and Syria today, not that there can ever truly be parity between irregular forces firing mortars and a modern military with an air force armed by one of the world’s leading powers. Indeed, it is that modern military, with an air force, that “has carried out a series of airstrikes targeting schools that were still in use,” according to Amnesty International, “a flagrant violation of the laws of war.”
2.3 million people are displaced by the conflict, many of whom live in 264 schools across #Yemen. #TaizChildren pic.twitter.com/tf8pdL2czt
— UNICEF Yemen (@UNICEF_Yemen) November 27, 2015
In addition to schools, the Saudi-led coalition has also bombed fishmen as well as brides and grooms; when high up in the sky with a limitless supply of munitions, militants and newlyweds all tend to look the same. The world community that prides itself on its commitment to humanitarian rhetoric has said barely a word, however, so now it is time we, the powerless humanitarians, make a demand of those in power: An immediate grounding of the aircraft responsible for the majority of deaths over the last 10 months.
“When high up in the sky with a limitless supply of munitions, militants and newlyweds all tend to look the same.”
“Ah, indeed,” says the ever alert hate-reader. “You Yankee imperialist pig-dog. I knew to what end all this performative ‘caring’ would ultimately lead: ‘Humanitarian’ war crimes on behalf of your Anglo-Zionist paymasters at the World Bank and Major League Soccer, which has been trying to infiltrate the Yemeni market for years.”
A+ rhetoric, I dare say, but the intervention for which I and others of conscience call for does not involve any U.S. aircraft in Yemen’s skies dropping bombs, but instead: the opposite of that.
In September, The New York Times reported that “the Pentagon is finalizing a US$1 billion arms agreement with Saudi Arabia that will provide weapons for the Saudi war effort against the Islamic State and Yemen.” A pedant might note that the Islamic State group is a defined, specific entity, while Yemen is a country—in this case, a reporter’s ambiguous grammar hints at a greater truth. And in this case, a humanitarian intervention can be achieved simply by not rearming a belligerent party. “Administration officials,” the Times reported, “said the sale to the Saudis primarily comprised missiles that would fit the F-15 fighter jets Saudi Arabia previously bought from the United States.”
Stop it. Stop doing that—and achieve a cease-fire, perhaps, by depriving an arson of more firepower.
It’s not just the arming that needs to stop. Those U.S. missiles, fitted to U.S. planes, are also being launched with the political cover and on-the-ground help of U.S. officials. The administration of Barack Obama “has supported the Saudi war effort by providing intelligence and logistical support,” the New York Times reported. Though that report came right after an airstrike that killed upwards of 70 civilians—another wedding—the paper noted that the U.S. “has avoided any direct public rebuke of the Saudis.”
.@BarackObama MUST cancel $1billion US arms sale to Saudi Arabia before more die in #Yemen: https://t.co/VGptKZk2iD pic.twitter.com/WjSt9v7iOi
— AmnestyInternational (@amnesty) December 11, 2015
Liberal Democrats in Congress haven’t been so silent. They have even sent a letter.
“We write to express our dismay over recent reports that airstrikes conducted by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition struck yet another wedding reception,” wrote some of the most progressive members of Congress. But the lawmakers’ dismay had less to do with the reality on the ground, it seemed, as it had to do with the risk that others might perceive that reality: given the U.S.’s “active involvement in the campaign,” they wrote, “we are concerned some overseas may hold the United States responsible for any civilian casualties resulting from the bombing.”
What was lacking from the correspondence was a reason why “some overseas” should not do just that. The only meat in their argument was a suggestion that Saudi airstrikes “correspond to the standards that would apply to any U.S.-military operation.”
The response to that from the Saudis was illustrative: the Saudis listened. Less than two weeks after that letter, the U.S.-backed kingdom destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Northern Yemen, despite having been given the hospital’s GPS coordinates—following the U.S. lead in Afghanistan, where the Saudis’ weapons dealers killed at least 42 people at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz.
A true protege, the Saudis weren’t finished, though: six weeks later they did it again, but in the south of Yemen, attacking a Doctors Without Borders medical clinic in the city of Taiz.
The response to that on the part of concerned U.S. lawmakers has also been illustrative. “Flexing New Powers, Congress to Review Arms Shipments to Saudi Arabia,” was the headline on the website of Foreign Policy. Not “block” or even “delay” — “review.”
“By invoking this new authority, the Senate committee is now saying that we want to monitor each shipment of the ordnance—and it’s a lot of ordnance,” a congressional aide told the news outlet.
Yemenis shrugged. Or perhaps they wept.
REPORT: Western Arms Deals Corrupt Arab Nations, Feed Conflict
In the United States and Europe, “humanitarian intervention” typically entails the dropping of more ordinance, often exacerbating whatever humanitarian crisis U.S. policymakers ostensibly aim to address. Opponents are also accused, often unfairly, of proposing that nothing at all be done, the only options presented being military action or acquiescence to an ongoing horror—which, truth be told, is not all that bad a proposal when the alternative suggested is making the truly horrible absolutely horrific.
In a world dominated by amoral nation-states, it’s at least understandable, if not necessarily right, that even those on the left who purport to be better humanitarians than the bomb-dropping sort perceive calls for solidarity—or, even more dastardly, “doing something”—to be akin to a call for war crimes to be compounded by war crimes. So long as states as we know them exist, and until there’s a world where internationalist brigades of bleeding-heart socialists are willing to risk having their blood shed to beat back the forces of reaction and counter-revolution, it may at some point be the lesser evil for one of those nation-states to employ force, however cynical and self-interested the stated “humanitarian” motivation may be.
“The U.S. can ‘intervene’ and do something good for the world by doing less, and ideally none, of what it is doing now and ceasing to do what it has before.”
The good and awful thing about the conflict in Yemen is that this is a conflict that requires no such debate, nor a Marxist-Leninist peacekeeping force that does not exist. There’s no cause for debate nor ideological confusion among the skeptics of intervention: The U.S. can “intervene” and do something good for the world by doing less, and ideally none, of what it is doing now and ceasing to do what it has before. Before the current conflict, for instance, the U.S. and its ally Saudi Arabia backed Yemen’s dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh; when the Arab Spring broke out in 2011, Saleh’s outside backers responded to the unrest by naming his vice president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, the country’s new leader—an internationally imposed solution that pleased no one, including the Houthi rebels who decided to ally with their former enemy, and the country’s former dictator, to kick out his successor.
Unable to correct past imperial errors, the Obama administration can today act to ground the Saudi air force by refusing to restock it with weapons and spare parts. It can impose a “no-fly zone” unilaterally without even offending the world’s multilateral organizations, saving lives and its own duplicitous face by ceasing to continue what it’s done so far.
That it hasn’t already, enabling instead the Saudis to fight their disastrous little war as a way of showing the Kingdom it hasn’t been replaced in America’s heart by its de facto ally in Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is arguably more damning than support for bombing that is the product of conviction or material interest. “The United States wants Saudi … support for the Iran nuclear deal, and the price is to back them in their war against Yemen,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official now at the Brookings Institution, recently told The Daily Beast.
A jury may look with some pity on the criminal who burned down the barn because they were convinced it was full of demons, perhaps, but to claim you did it to impress a friend—and the barn was full of men, women and children who were already near starvation? Should the developing world after attain its rightful place in the “world community,” U.S. officials would do well to come up with something else before their appearance at The Hague.
Charles Davis is an editor at teleSUR.
