While the Yemeni people will bear most of the suffering from Trump’s escalation, the needless war will further bleed the American treasury and deplete our arms depots.
If there is one thing that Americans should have learned about Yemen over the past decade is that there are no easy solutions. In 2015, Saudi Arabia announced it was going to conduct a swift regime change in Sanaa to remove the Houthis – Ansar Allah – from power.
As Scott Horton explains in the following excerpt from his book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, the war in Yemen was an utter disaster that was completely avoidable. Once again, Washington is dragging the American empire into another entirely avoidable war in the Middle East.
~ Kyle Anzalone
Picking a Fight with Ansarullah
While the CIA was targeting AQAP, [Yemeni dictator Abdullah] Saleh took the money and weapons [President Barack] Obama had given him to launch his own attacks against a group called Ansarullah (a.k.a. Ansar Allah or often “the Houthis” after the family and tribe which leads them). The Houthis are a political faction of Zaidi Shi’ites based out of the Sa’ada province in the far north of Yemen, near the Saudi border. The Houthis had formed decades before as a reaction against Saudi Arabia’s attempt to export radical Wahhabist Islam to their region.
Their more recent fight with the central state began as a consequence of Iraq War II. The Houthis had humiliated Saleh by chanting anti-American slogans to his face at a mosque in 2003, mocking him for his alliance with the U.S., when it invaded Iraq. This enraged Saleh, who vowed to punish them for their obstinance. Also, under pressure from the Bush administration to attack AQAP, Saleh used his ginned-up crisis with the Houthis to avoid doing so, which would have alienated him from important political allies.
But as with America’s drone war against AQAP, every time Saleh attacked the Houthis — six different times — it backfired. They only grew stronger in response.
Not only was Saleh empowering the Houthi movement every time he failed to destroy them, but he was also helping to build up al-Islah, Yemen’s branch of the Sunni-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and by some reports, even some AQAP factions to use against them. According to Yemeni political analyst Abdul-Ghani Al Iryani, Saleh was also sending arms to his enemies the Houthis to wear out his own military forces along with al-Islah, who were growing too powerful while fighting for him. And we think the curved daggers of American politics are sharp.
A Bogus Election
When the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions began, there quickly emerged an Egypt-like consensus of virtually all different factions that Saleh must step down from power. There were two assassination attempts against him, the second of which wounded him. This gave the Americans, Saudis and United Nations an opportunity to push Saleh out in favor of his vice president, Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, thus preventing the people of Yemen from coming to their own consensus about how to proceed. Instead, they held an “election” with only Hadi’s name on the ballot. Secretary Clinton declared his victory the advent of Yemeni democracy.
But Saleh refused to retire to a life of farming or quiet study. Instead, once he recovered from his injuries, he went away mad and took much of his army with him. Saleh then allied with the Houthis in the north. Ignorant U.S. policymakers belatedly discovered he was a Zaidi Shi’ite like them, just not a Houthi.
Meanwhile, Hadi was terrible at being a democratic president. After two years, he refused to hold new elections as promised and unilaterally prolonged his term in power. He replicated Saleh’s previous failed attempts to use al-Islah fighters to attack the Houthis, which only provoked them. He then announced a strong federalism plan which would have hardened provincial borders, cutting the Houthis off from the Red Sea. Finally, he abolished gasoline subsidies, severely disrupting the economy and causing riots. With that, what little support he had was gone.
The Houthis Take Over
At the end of 2014, the Houthi-Saleh alliance marched into the capital of Sana’a. Hadi fled south to Aden, then soon after to Saudi Arabia. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. military had no problem with the Houthis and was instead happy to have motivated enemies of al Qaeda to work with in Yemen. The Houthis’ hate for al Qaeda was defensive since AQAP considered the Shi’ite Houthis to be heretics worthy only of death. At that time, the man who later became President Biden’s first secretary of defense, General Lloyd Austin, was commander of Central Command. Austin started sharing intelligence with the Houthis, which they began to use to target al Qaeda forces there. The Journal reported:
The U.S. has formed ties with Houthi rebels who seized control of Yemen’s capital, White House officials and rebel commanders said, in the clearest indication of a shift in the U.S. approach there as it seeks to maintain its fight against a key branch of al Qaeda.
American officials are communicating with Houthi fighters, largely through intermediaries, the officials and commanders have disclosed, to promote a stable political transition as the Houthis gain more power and to ensure Washington can continue its campaign of drone strikes against leaders of the group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, officials said…
U.S. officials said they also are seeking to harness the Houthis’ concurrent war on AQAP to weaken the terrorist organization’s grip on havens in Yemen’s west and south…
Houthi commanders, in recent interviews conducted in Yemen, asserted that the U.S. began sharing intelligence on AQAP positions in November, using intermediaries, as the conflict in the country intensified. They specifically cited a Houthi campaign against AQAP positions in western Al Baitha province as one such operation.
One Houthi commander said the U.S. provided logistical aid to the militants and exchanged intelligence on AQAP to support the Houthis’ operations against the group and pinpoint drone strikes. The Americans passed on all this information, the officer said, through Yemeni counter-terrorism officials.
Journalist Barbara Slavin wrote of an appearance by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers at the Atlantic Council explaining the same:
Senior U.S. intelligence official Michael Vickers said Jan. 21 that the United States is continuing attacks on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) despite ongoing violence in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, and has an intelligence relationship with the Houthi insurgent group that has seized much of the capital since September…
Vickers, a special forces veteran and current undersecretary of defense for intelligence, presented a more nuanced view of the Houthis’ recent advances and aims than has been reported in much of the Western and Sunni Gulf media. …
Vickers, in response to a question from Al-Monitor, stated, “The Houthis are anti al-Qaeda, and we’ve been able to continue some of our counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaeda in the past months.” Asked after the public event whether that included lines of intelligence to the Houthis, Vickers said, “That’s a safe assumption.”
Of course, Austin and Vickers’s drone war was also brutal and counterproductive. Yet this shows that the Houthis were no enemies of the United States. Instead, they were our allies — for a little while. Two months later, President Barack Obama stabbed America’s new partners in the back and took al Qaeda’s side against them.
Long, Bloody and Indecisive
In late 2017, nearly three years into the war, the Brookings Institution, a Democratic Party-aligned think tank, raised a vital question with their article, “Who Are the Houthis, and Why Are We at War with Them?” It was a decent piece by the former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who is fairly interventionist. But the article and its title must amount to some sort of existential remark on the state of our society.
President Trump stepped up the war against al Qaeda in Yemen too. As Airwars.org showed, especially in 2017, his administration increased JSOC night raids and CIA drone strikes against them, although they mostly succeeded in killing civilians as the journalist Iona Craig has documented. And where Obama drone-bombed Anwar Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman, both U.S.-born American citizens, Trump’s forces killed his eight-year-old daughter Nawar in a JSOC raid. She reportedly bled out over four hours after being shot in the neck. Despite this escalation of the drone and night raid war and some successes against al Qaeda leaders, the bulk of AQAP and ISIS fighters have simply joined the UAE’s mercenary army where they are protected from American strikes.
Though all of Western media continue to refer to the Ansarullah regime in Sana’a as Houthi “rebels,” as of this writing they have ruled the capital city and the north of the country with no real challengers for over six years. There is no indication they are leaving any time soon. It seems the Saudis’ plan is to keep fighting until Hadi is back on the throne, which will never happen. It has been the war that has solidified Houthi power in Sana’a, and it may be the primary factor in continuing popular support for their minority faction in power. Under Donald Trump, there was no serious pressure by America or its allies to end this war any time soon. Perennial attempts to start real peace talks have gone nowhere.
In 2018 and 2019, the Houthis showed that with a combination of missile and drone attacks, they have little trouble destroying targets in Saudi Arabia, including inside Riyadh, and with precise targeting, such as with the drone assassination of a top Saudi general and attacks against oil refineries.
Remarkably, in 2019, after the scandal of bin Salman’s brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, both houses of Congress passed resolutions invoking the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to force President Trump to end U.S. participation in the war. However, it was a “continuing” rather than a “concurrent” resolution, providing him the opportunity to veto, which he did. They could have refused to finance any U.S. participation in the war, but those amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act were killed in conference committee. When they did pass a measure to restrict new bomb sales, Trump’s State Department under Mike Pompeo declared that the sales were an “emergency” so they could continue.
“People make miscalculations all the time,” Steve Pomper, a former Obama NSC official, told the Times. Of course this is true. Who among us has not accidentally started a war against a government that they were working with against their actual al Qaeda enemies from time to time, right? This was Obama’s third. “But it was striking to me as I reflected on my time in the Obama administration that it wasn’t just that we embarked on this escapade — it’s that we didn’t pull ourselves out of it.” For two years, they helped to murder tens of thousands of innocent people in a war they had just accidentally stumbled into, and yet, somehow, they could not bring themselves to stop. That is rather striking.
At the very end of his term, Obama symbolically suspended new arms sales to Saudi Arabia. It meant nothing. The Trump administration went right on ahead at full steam. Trump justified the continuation of this tragedy for one reason only: money. He ludicrously claimed that the Saudis are pledged to spend $450 billion on American weapons in the near future. This is little more than a hoax. It would take decades for the Saudis to spend that much money on U.S. weapons at the current rate. Trump claimed a “million” American jobs depend on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but defense expert William Hartung found that “actual, paid-for deliveries of U.S.-produced arms for Saudi Arabia have averaged about $2.5 billion per year over the past decade, enough to support at most 20,000 to 40,000 jobs, some of which are located overseas.” From a narrower view, Raytheon alone has made more than $3 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia between 2015 and 2020. According to the New York Times, their lobbyists went to “great lengths” to influence officials in the Trump administration, particularly trade adviser Peter Navarro, to pressure Trump to veto Congress’s various invocations of the War Powers Resolution to stop the war.
American arms manufacturers are in the perfectly deniable position of fulfilling U.S. government demand. Therefore, they may hold themselves not responsible for any innocent people who are killed with their weapons. For example, missile maker Raytheon does not comment “on the military actions of our allies or customers.” Arms sales to Saudi Arabia only “reflect the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States government and are in compliance with U.S. law.” That is all they need to know. Of course, when it is time to pay up to the think tanks who write the studies justifying the policy or cozy up to the president’s trade adviser, they are the first ones in line.
There is no question that it means a lot to Raytheon. Trump made their top lobbyist, Mark Esper, the secretary of defense. Biden’s first defense secretary is former general Lloyd Austin, who has been sitting on the board of Raytheon ever since he helped Obama and bin Salman start this phase of the war back in 2015.
But even a few hundred billion dollars amounts to chump change compared to the overall American economy. The nation does not need Saudi investment to sustain us one bit. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, United Technologies, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, BAE Systems, and the politicians they support might need the princes, but they are not us. And even if somehow the U.S.A. was genuinely dependent on that revenue, then we, of course, would still have to do without because killing people for money is wrong.
You could even ask Donald Trump. He would tell you the same thing.
Source: AntiWar.
