Daniel Larison, a senior editor at The American Conservative, discusses his article “Whose War in Yemen? Saudi Arabia wreaks havoc on its poorest neighbor—with U.S. help.”
Update: Your host said “Yemen” when he meant to say “Somalia.”
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Alright you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is Daniel Larison.
He's holding down the foreign policy over there at the American Conservative magazine, theamericanconservative.com, and just a few days ago this one was the spotlight at antiwar.com.
You can find it in our viewpoint section there if you need to.
Who's War in Yemen?
And that's a play on a famous American Conservative magazine article from the past, but anyway we'll skip that.
Or maybe we'll come back to it.
Who's War in Yemen?
Saudi Arabia wreaks havoc on its poorest neighbor with U.S. help.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me back.
Good, good.
Yeah, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I just got to tell you, I really appreciate you paying attention to this story.
As you know, so few are.
It's just, there's so many other news stories.
A war on Yemen, a country most Americans couldn't find on a map kind of thing.
It's just, since America's not in the lead on the war, it's just barely even making the headlines at all.
And so, I'm kind of sorry to do this to you, but I think you'll understand.
Could you please help make up for that by giving us the bare bones, explaining what is this war, before we get into the real nitty-gritty?
Sure.
So, the basic facts are, five months ago, a little over five months ago, Saudi Arabia and the coalition of mostly Gulf states, but also Egypt, Sudan, and a few other Arab states from around the world have joined forces to attack Yemen with the goal of driving back this militia from North Yemen, the Zaidi Shiite militia, known popularly as the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, which has been in opposition to successive Yemeni governments over the last 10, 15 years.
Well, really, 20 years, to be more precise.
And so, this group had effectively deposed and driven out the president that succeeded the old dictator who stepped down in 2012.
The current exile president, Hadi, with the backing of the Saudis, has tried to drive the Houthis back out of the south of Yemen.
The Saudis and Emiratis have managed to do that with their own ground forces, after pummeling and battering the country and bombing for five months.
The Saudis have committed numerous war crimes that have been documented by Human Rights Watch and other organizations.
They have been maintaining a blockade that is depriving the country of necessary foodstuffs, medicine, fuel, and has brought an already poor and poverty-stricken country to the brink of famine.
And in all of this, the U.S. has been providing logistics and intelligence support, and of course has sold the Saudis the weapons that they're using to batter Yemen as we speak.
All of this has been driven by the Saudis' paranoid fear of anything to do with Iran, and they have imagined or exaggerated the Iranian role in Yemen, and now think that they're striking a blow against Iranian interests by doing that.
And that's basically propaganda and nonsense.
Right.
Okay.
Now, very many points to go over there, and thank you for that.
I think that's a pretty damn good thumbnail there for people just catching up on this.
So the most important thing to me, while they're competing, I guess, the humanitarian crisis, but I guess more newsworthy in a way to Americans, the U.S. role in this.
You say helping with logistics, and there's a famous Wall Street Journal article from a few months ago now describing a little bit of that.
But I wonder if you can help us, especially with sourcing, on just exactly what role the Americans are playing here.
It's difficult to imagine the Saudis running their own air traffic control for this war.
I just assume it must be American AWACS in the air and ships at sea are basically running the entire war for them.
But am I assuming too much?
Do you know?
Well, our ships are certainly involved in the blockade.
We're certainly helping them with refueling, and we have people at bases in Saudi Arabia that are helping them to select targets.
So the U.S. is very much directly involved in the prosecution of the war, even though we don't have people dropping bombs or necessarily operating inside Yemen.
But there's certainly close cooperation between the U.S. military and the Saudis.
And now, as far as day-to-day, hour-to-hour air traffic control, do you know about that?
Or does anyone?
I'm not sure about that.
I'll have to look into that.
I mean, honestly, I've looked around, and I can't find any real good reporting about this.
Even where the L.A. Times said, we're sending more guys over there, there's still a real lack of detail about what exactly they're doing, if they're just picking targets on a map or whether they're really running the war, which is – I just assume that they must be, because I just don't – I've never read anything about the Saudis that would make me believe that they have the ability to run air traffic control for a war like this.
But then again, would the Americans be picking this many civilian targets to destroy?
Maybe.
I don't know.
Well, it's clear that they're not ruling them out or they're not keeping the Saudis from selecting them, because there is pretty clear evidence that the Saudis are deliberately targeting civilian areas, especially in the north of Yemen, where the Houthis have their stronghold.
The Saudis have been targeting areas that are strictly civilian in nature, and declared the entire city of Saada a military target in violation of international law.
So the Saudis certainly have no compunction about that, and whatever the U.S. role is in that, well, we're not restraining them from doing that.
That's clear.
Yeah, you know, Matthew Akins was on the show a few weeks back, and he talked about – he saw it with his own eyes, where they were just bombing, I think he said hotels, certainly a car dealership, and all different civilian infrastructure where there were no enemies anywhere around, but just families being destroyed hither and yon.
Right.
He's a reporter for Rolling Stone.
He's done really great work on this story.
And as he said, he smuggled himself into Yemen, which is what journalists have to do in order to get access to the on-the-ground conditions, because the Saudis are very closely restricting the flow of information in and out of Yemen, and of course they're restricting movement of people.
That's one of the side effects of the blockade, or maybe one of the goals of the blockade, is to keep information from getting out.
And that's one of the reasons why the coverage of the war is so scanty and so sporadic, because there's simply very few ways to get in safely.
So the journalists are discouraged from even trying.
All right.
Now, another thing that – it seems to be reported kind of often, but still without much detail, is the humanitarian crisis there.
I mean, it's been said for months and months that under this blockade, these people are destined to starve.
They import 90 percent of their food, plus the war has completely destroyed their infrastructure for distribution of whatever crops are being harvested and things like that.
There's no fuel for trucks.
But then how many have already starved to death?
A human being can only go for so long without food and fresh water to drink, Daniel.
Does anybody know?
No, I don't think there are good sources or exact numbers of how many people are perishing.
In addition to the food shortages, you have the outbreaks of malaria and dengue fever that have become much worse because of poor sanitary conditions, because of the lack of access to clean water.
So the fatalities from those diseases and, honestly, from malnutrition are much higher than they would otherwise be.
But, unfortunately, we don't know exactly how many.
The warnings coming from aid organizations, though, are that millions of people are at risk, at extreme risk of starvation.
I believe one of the most recent estimates put it at six million are at the most critical stage of lacking food, and another seven million beyond that are also severely deprived.
Almost the entire country is lacking in basic necessities, again, because of the blockade.
Well, and all you have to do is just look to America's war across the strait there in Yemen and during the famine there where more than half a million people starved to death in 2011, and, of course, more than half of those were children under the ages of five years old.
That's who can afford least to go without food and water.
That's who we're at war against here are innocent babies who couldn't possibly have done anything to anybody at this point in their life to deserve any kind of assault like this.
Anyway, sorry.
Hold it right there, y'all.
We'll be right back with the great Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative in one second.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Wallstreetwindow.com All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative magazine about this article, Who's War in Yemen?
You know, to go slightly off topic for a minute, I think it's important, y'all.
I hope you understand why it's so important to have journalism like this, opinion writing like this, from the right.
We don't have to be some big, fat, millionaire, communist, hypocrite like Michael Moore to be for peace.
And whoever told you that was a liar.
And it's very important that you can show people conservative arguments against this empire.
He's got his facts straight on just what's going on, obviously.
And he's got the conservative reasons why it does not have to be this way, why it should not be this way.
And so, you know, that's the best way to get through to your right-wing family, friends, whoever it is you're trying to influence, is attack them from the right and show them what utopian world revolutionaries they are and embarrass them into being a peacenik, basically.
That's my plan.
Anyway, so, Daniel, where we left off here, I forget, we were talking about the people all starving to death.
Is anybody doing anything about this?
I know that there have been some half-hearted attempts at peace talks in the past.
But is anybody really trying to force America, to force the Saudis to come to terms, to end this thing short of some kind of total victory, which could be, you know, months or years and, you know, maybe millions of lives from now?
Well, unfortunately, I don't think there has been much progress along those lines.
There have been informal talks by the U.S. with various parties, including Oman, which has tried to act as a mediator in this conflict prior to now.
There have been some efforts by the U.N. to try to get the competing Yemeni factions to sit down with one another, but after the last talks in Europe broke down, there really hasn't been anything significant along those lines since then.
There have been a couple of so-called humanitarian pauses, but those pauses, to the extent they were even honored, were just short respites that didn't really address the main humanitarian problems.
So, unfortunately, no, there hasn't been much progress made in that.
And because the Saudis and Emiratis have started to make up ground in South Yemen, they are now talking about a full-out assault on the capital in the fall, in the hopes of finally displacing the Houthis from the capital.
Even if that were to happen, the civilian toll in the capital would be incredibly horrific, and so we have to hope that there is more pressure placed on them between now and then so that they don't actually launch that offensive.
Unfortunately, with the Saudi king coming to Washington this week, there doesn't seem to be much indication that Obama is going to try to press him on that.
There was some very weak rhetoric coming from the White House ahead of the visit this week, saying that there will be a need to end the fighting and the importance of enduring that assistance can reach Yemenis on all sides of the conflict, which, of course, sounds good, but if the U.S. were in earnest about that, it wouldn't be facilitating the war, it wouldn't be helping with the blockade.
So it's a little hard to take seriously that the U.S. is even interested in imposing that pressure.
And the Saudis seem really hell-bent on this.
It's part of their new, more aggressive foreign policy doctrine overall, and so I'm not sure how much the U.S. could actually rein them in now, now that they've got their forces in Yemen.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like Obama could tell them, look, I'm just turning this thing off, man, no more American help, no more American CIA or military helping you pick targets or run the war anymore.
But then, I don't know, maybe they would say, that's fine, we've got enough of your money and equipment and our guys trained by yours that we can make do without you.
It sounds like maybe that's what they're afraid is going to happen here, so they have to go ahead and keep helping them anyway.
Don't lose that influence that they apparently don't have.
Well, yeah, exactly.
And the Saudi king, of course, is coming here to ask for even more assistance.
So I think the best we can hope for from Obama is that he doesn't give them anything more than he's already done.
But I wouldn't have guessed that the U.S. would be as involved as it is.
And so it's entirely possible that the U.S. will get sucked even more deeply into this conflict before it's all over.
Yeah, but Daniel, Iran, they're taking over the planet, et cetera, et cetera.
What about that?
Well, the Iranian influence has been exaggerated from the start.
And really, all the Iranians have to do is sit back and watch as the Saudis and their allies waste their resources in this conflict.
Iran isn't being harmed in the least by this.
They don't provide the Houthis with much aid.
The Houthis don't do anything for them.
So really, if they're the nominal target of all of this, there's really nothing that they can lose as a result of this conflict.
So if you were worried about Iranian influence or if you were interested in actually checking Iranian influence, Yemen is the worst place to go.
And Yemenis shouldn't be punished in any case for whatever sin the Iranian government may or may not have committed.
But unfortunately, they're the ones that are getting it in the net.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like the thing that Iran has most to do with, even Obama himself admitted that they warned the Houthis not to take sauna, that that would be biting off more than they could chew and would lead to adverse consequences and all that.
It seems like, if anything, the Iranian role is they're the excuse for this, basically.
And they're why Obama has to let them do it is because, oh, you know, so you'll not bankroll too much effort to ruin the Iran deal in the U.S.
Right.
Which becomes less of an excuse every day.
I'm not sure the Saudis could have actually stopped the deal even if they had been fully publicly invested against it.
And now that the votes are there to prevent a veto override of the resolution, I don't see what Saudi opposition could do to it at this point.
So really, there's no there are no more even semi plausible excuses for why the U.S. is helping.
Now, I don't know, you know, what's your experience in, you know, military strategy and this, that and the other thing.
Is it predictable that at some point, if they keep this up, like, say, the Libya war 2011, we were all against it, but we could see the writing on the wall that at some point they're going to corner Gaddafi and kill him and replace him here.
At least get rid of him.
I don't know about replace him.
But I wonder if you think that it's just a matter of time before actually, yeah, that the Houthis are driven out of sauna and and Hadi is put back on the throne there.
Or I don't know.
It sort of seemed like the Houthis haven't been losing so far as much as they've been being attacked.
Well, they may eventually be driven out of the capital.
In order to do that, the capital will probably be reduced to ruins in the process.
So I'm not sure how.
Any government that succeeds them will be able to govern in any case.
But I think Hadi personally will not be able to retain power, you know, they try to win and so on because he is so widely hated in the capital and in the north because of his role in supporting this campaign.
And the people in South Yemen have no particular love for him either.
He simply became the convenient figurehead because he's technically the president.
Therefore, they can claim to be on his side.
But there really is no constituency for him.
And that's one of the reasons why he was booted out of power so easily in the first place.
He was the default consensus figure to take over from Saleh after the protests in 2011.
So even if the Houthis are removed from the capital, they still have their readout in the north.
And I don't think the Saudis would be, well, I don't know, but they would be crazy to try to go after them up there.
And Hadi is not going to be president again.
I would be pretty confident about that.
Oh, well, at least the silver lining is, though, the AQAP has been destroyed, right, Daniel?
Well, unfortunately, they're getting stronger by the day.
As the Saudis and Emiratis have advanced in the south, so has al-Qaeda in the Iranian Peninsula.
They have seized parts of Aden now, and of course they already controlled Mukalla farther east in South Yemen.
So they're getting many new footholds all over the country thanks to this.
And one of the less reported stories, it is a very under-reported story, is that a branch of the Islamic State, a so-called Islamic State, has started acting against Shiite targets in Yemen and just bombed a mosque in Sana'a just the other day, killing some 30 people, I think.
So jihadists are the main ones benefiting from all of this at the expense of Yemeni's lives and the security of the whole region.
Yeah, just what we need is IS and al-Qaeda in competition in Yemen.
Just great.
All right, well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your writing about this regularly as you do, and as well as you do in your time, again, shared with us on the show today, Daniel.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be back.
All right, Shell, that's Daniel Larrison.
Who's war in Yemen?
Saudi Arabia wreaks havoc on its poorest neighbor with U.S. help.
That's at TheAmericanConservative.com.
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