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All right, you guys, introducing our good friend Gareth Porter back on the show here.
Of course, he's the author of the book, Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare, which is the single best book.
It's the book about Iran's nuclear program.
I mean it.
But this time we're talking about Yemen.
He's got this incredibly important article at the American Conservative Magazine.
When did Congress vote to aid the Saudi's Yemen war?
But more importantly, the subhead.
Lawmakers use War Powers Act to finally question legality of US involvement.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Good, good.
Happy to have you here.
Hey, listen, so in March of 2015, Barack Obama, along with Saudi Arabia, got America involved in this war in Yemen.
And even according to the New York Times, and it was no scoop, it was the Obama administration's official position, as they put it in the New York Times themselves, really, that this was done to, quote, placate the Saudis after accomplishing the Iran nuclear deal, which on the face of it, secured Saudi security interest, protecting them from Iran's nuclear program, preventing it from becoming a nuclear weapons program.
And yet, for some reason, the Saudis were so upset by this deal, America got involved in this war.
So maybe could you address that just for a second real quick before we get into the actual war itself, about what is America's motive for doing this war in Yemen at all, and how does it make sense to placate the Saudis?
That's a good enough reason for Barack Obama to launch such an aggressive war as this.
Well, I wish there was a way that I could somehow rationalize the U.S. agreement to not just go along with this Saudi war, but to actually participate in it.
But I'm afraid it's just not possible.
I mean, there's no rational explanation for it in the sense of an explanation that coincides with, or has to do with real U.S. national interest, the interest of the American people.
No, there isn't any.
I mean, this is a classic example of the problem that we see throughout the history of the Cold War and since of U.S. policy, national security policy constantly reflecting interests that really have nothing to do with the interest of the American people.
I think that you can see here the desire of the Pentagon, the CIA, particularly those two bureaucracies to maintain their extremely cozy relationships with the Saudis because they're big payoffs in both cases.
Obviously for the Pentagon, it has to do with the fact that the Saudis control Bahrain, which is where the Navy has its fleet in the Middle East.
And beyond that, of course, it's the huge wave of arms sales that have come from the Saudis, sales to the Saudis, meaning hundreds of millions of dollars that go to flow through the Pentagon and their arms contractor allies and means assurances of more jobs for retired officers, especially generals and admirals and so forth.
And so that accounts, I think to a great extent, for the pressure that comes from below on any president and that particularly applies to Barack Obama to go along with the Saudis on a war which clearly had no real rational basis, had no basis in terms of the international politics of the region, except insofar as you correctly put it, it had to do with the U.S. maintaining its cozy relationship with the Saudis.
All right, now let me try to say this as fast as I can because I know I'm right and I can say it pretty quick.
Obama, inheriting a policy from George W. Bush, he backed the president there, Saleh, in Yemen and gave him money and weapons to allow the CIA to attack Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or pardon me, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, also known as AQAP there.
And in doing so, he took then the money and the weapons and he launched multiple wars, four or maybe six different wars against the Houthis, a sect of Yazidi Shia, really a political group of Yazidi Shia from up in the north of the country.
And each time he attacked them, they got more and more powerful.
And then, you know, he always lost, they always won and got more and more powerful.
Then in 2011, the Arab Spring came and all factions basically in the country agreed, Saleh had to go, but Hillary Clinton intervened, held a one-man election and put his vice president in charge as the new president.
The problem with that was he had no other constituency other than the U.S. and the Saudis and the people of Yemen didn't want him.
And so he didn't have much strength and the Houthis eventually, by the end of 2014 and beginning of 2015, they began to come down from the north and then in the beginning of 2015, they seized the capital city.
And in fact, in alliance with Saleh, the former president who had attacked them over and over again, turns out he's a Zaydi Shia too, even though he'd never been a member of the Houthis, he brought some army divisions with him, joined up with his old enemies, the Houthis, they took over the capital city.
Iran warned them not to, even Barack Obama himself, you know, on TV recorded, admitted that the Iranians told them not to do it, but anyway, they marched down on the capital city and that was the start of the war, was for the Americans, the Saudis, the UAE, and I think the Saudis hoped the Pakistanis and Egyptians and everyone were going to join them.
And they were gonna go in there and reinstall Hadi on the throne.
And yet, so now we are a full two and a half years into this thing, and Lord knows how many people have really died in it.
I mean, Nasser Arabi says it's well over 50,000 and that was months ago he told me that.
So nobody really knows, the cholera epidemic is, it's not just a, you know, a spreading thing, it's an epidemic at this point.
So that's basically how we got here.
I'm glad you've raised that point.
I'm glad you've raised that point because I've noticed the same thing.
They continue to talk about 10,000, which has been the same for well over a year, I think maybe a year and a half, if I'm not mistaken, but something like that.
And clearly the whole UN system is on the take on this.
They've gone in the tank.
Well, Nasser Arabi told me that the UN, I'm sorry, the head of whichever UN agency, I forget exactly, had admitted to him, you know, and was perfectly happy to admit that, listen, we're very limited in our ability to know.
If you say it's 50,000, pal, I'm not arguing with you.
That's what the UN guy had said to Nasser Arabi was that, hey, if you say so, I wouldn't dispute that, that sounds right to me, kind of thing.
Just they couldn't, they're not able to do the work to verify it.
Yeah, but I mean, they could at least take some, you know, they could use some data and extrapolate and so forth.
They're not making any effort whatsoever, which I think is a political decision on their part.
I just wanted to make that point.
Yeah.
Well, and so, yeah, and we can talk about the casualties more too, because that's obviously at the heart of this.
That's why it's, you know, that's the subject at hand, so to speak, is the innocent civilians dying in this thing.
And so, you know, the reason that I tell all that backstory is just sort of to show how, you know, we're basically, we're stuck in a quagmire again.
We have a policy to reinstall a government that has no constituency in that country.
It's just not going to work.
It hasn't worked.
This was supposed to be one of those quick little easy wars, and here we are two and a half years into it, and the stated goal, which has not been revised, is impossible.
And yet the American side and the Saudi side here are not doing anything to try to negotiate an end to the war, to try to figure out some kind of compromise.
They'd rather just keep bombing and just keep fighting.
Is that really correct?
Well, yeah, in fact, it's actually even worse than that, because we know that, in fact, the Obama administration knew ahead of time that there was no way that the Saudis were going to be able to actually conquer militarily the Houthis.
And so they were counting on the Saudis fighting for a while and then, you know, being ready to negotiate.
And of course, that never happened.
The Saudis had no intention of doing it.
But the Obama administration then made no adjustment in its policy.
It simply continued to justify, defend and justify the Saudi-led war.
And that's really the problem.
Well, and through the Obama years, or I don't know the entire time, but at least here and there, during, you know, post-March 2015, during the war against the Houthis, the CIA was still doing drone strikes against AQAP.
And we've seen under Trump, they've sent special operations forces on the ground after them as well.
So we're fighting for and against both sides in that war right now.
Well, out of many sides.
So in the sense that, of course, the Saudis and UAE, the forces that they are supporting in Yemen are fighting alongside AQAP people.
There's no doubt about that.
That's well-documented by now.
And it's notoriously the fact that we are not just giving AQAP a huge opening to expand control resources and both military and economic resources at their disposal, but to gain a lot of military experience as well as legitimacy in Yemen.
This is going to definitely position AQAP as a competitor for power in the future.
And that's well-known, has been well-known really from early on in the war by the U.S. intelligence community and the counter-terrorism specialists in the U.S. government.
Well, and it seems like all the bombings notwithstanding, or perhaps you could say because of them, the Houthis' position is that much more solidified.
I mean, they don't seem to be 1% less powerful than they were at the start of this war, huh?
Well, there's no possibility that they could be dislodged from their position.
I mean, they represent the Houthi community and that's not even remotely a possibility.
No, it's difficult to imagine how that could happen under any circumstances really.
All right, hang on just one second.
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All right now, so here's the thing about this though, is nobody can really pretend that the Houthis are in on it with ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
They got to admit, even if you can take the authorization to use military force and stretch it to strikes against ISIS in Libya and stretch it to even cover all of Iraq War III against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, there's no way you're gonna be able to pretend that that applies to the Houthis.
Now, I guess when they started the war against Qaddafi, they said, well, you know, this is just a kinetic activity or something.
As long as they can't shoot back at us, then it doesn't count as hostilities since we have all the power and they have none and we have our Al-Qaeda shock troops on the ground.
So anyway, that was their excuse.
Then in this case, as you report here in the American Conservative Magazine, there are actually some members of Congress who are determined to try to do something about this.
And, well, and they're invoking the War Powers Act in order to do it.
So please tell us everything.
Right.
Yeah, this is an important initiative and it's important on different levels.
One, of course, it's important because it's the best opportunity, the only opportunity that we have at the moment and perhaps the best opportunity thus far for Congress to vote on the US military role, the active military role of particularly refueling the planes that the Saudis, the UAE and others are carrying out the bombing with in Syria.
But at another level, it is actually a test of whether the War Powers Act could actually make a difference.
And that's because, as you've pointed out, the US, what we can in fact call the US-Saudi war in Yemen is not legal, it's not been authorized by Congress under the AUMF, excuse me.
And so it is subject to the War Powers Act and it is time for Congress to really step up and either vote to say, yes, we're at war, we are going to stay at war or to say, no, this is not authorized and it should stop.
And of course, the arguments against continuing this war on the part of the United States are overwhelming and because of the humanitarian crisis, now half a million people with cholera, tens of thousands of whom are clearly going to die, if not hundreds of thousands, there's simply no excuse for the United States to refrain from now taking the step that it should have taken from the beginning to sever its relationship to this war, to get out of this war.
And that's what the bipartisan group of members of Congress are proposing in this measure, H. Conres 81.
So it's interesting, Gareth, here about the War Powers Act because of course this was passed by supermajority vote over Richard Nixon's dead body and veto in the 1970s because it says, as everyone always seems to misunderstand this, that it says that the president can start a war for at least 60 days.
But in fact, it says, no, he can never start a war.
It reaffirms that constitutional principle.
He may never start a war unless authorized by Congress, although they don't say it must be a declaration of war.
But then the 60 days thing is that he may defend America if attacked, but even then he has to get approval from Congress to continue fighting a defensive war even after 60 days, which is really the entire opposite of the way they spin that thing.
Everybody just says 60 days, 60 days, as though Congress, over Richard Nixon's veto, forced him to accept a brand new grant of extraordinary war power.
Doesn't really make any sense if you think about it for a second, or if you actually read the text.
But anyway, so here we have these congressmen are saying, hey, War Powers Act.
We've been at war for 60 days.
You haven't asked permission, and now it's time to rein you in, which is at least unique in one circumstance, right, in that it's written into the act that it goes straight to the floor and nobody has the ability to bottle this thing up in committee so they can have a real debate on this, right?
This is an important distinction here that people should know about that in the case of a resolution that has to do with the application of the War Powers Act, you know, if you're opposed to it in the leadership of the Republicans or Democratic Party in the House or Senate, you can't just bottle it up in committee.
It has to go to the committee within a short period of days, and then it has to, in three days after the committee reports it out, it has to go to a vote on the floor.
Very good.
So, is there a date set for that?
There's no date yet, no.
It has to, of course, it has to- Oh, it's still in the committee now.
Yes.
Well, it's not in the committee.
It still has to be voted on.
That is, the original H. Conres 81 has to be voted on, and it has to be brought to the floor somehow.
That's the, it's gonna have to be into the committee, and it hasn't been done yet, but that hasn't happened.
They're still trying to get co-sponsors, so, you know, it's still early in that process.
Okay, well, listen, you know, I think this is one that really ought to have a lot of traction.
I mean, there's just no question about the humanitarian crisis there.
Jason Ditz has this great piece that he's published in the Daily Caller, the hurricanes we can prevent and the ones we can't, something very close to that.
Poor Puerto Rico, but look at what we're doing to Yemen is just like inflicting hurricanes upon them over and over again, in effect, and, you know, sorry to make it gross or whatever, but it's gotta be pointed out, Gareth, that when people, when they say dying of cholera, what they really mean is that, and this includes the very young children and babies and the grandmothers and everyone who's dying of cholera, I don't know why middle-aged people are supposed to be exempt from caring about, but hey, especially little children.
I mean, what it means is that they are vomiting and diarrhea-ing themselves to death.
That's what they're doing.
They're dying of dehydration, but in a very immediate sense, as in just puking and puking and puking until they're dead.
I mean, this is the most horrible sort of brutality that America is inflicting on these helpless, most, the poorest country in the Middle East, and we got the most powerful country ever is inflicting this merciless punishment on them for the sake of what?
Because they overthrew Hillary Clinton's sock puppet?
Why should any of us care about that to inflict this revenge on them for that?
The other side of the issue, the other argument that is made here is that that is by the people who oppose any tinkering with the U.S. role in the Yemen War is that, well, we have to do this because the Saudis are opposing Iran, and Iran is the real culprit around the entire Middle East.
And of course, they claim that this is a proxy war that Iran is fighting through the Houthis as their proxies.
And the record on that is very clear.
That is a complete myth.
There's even U.S. intelligence knows that that's not true.
They know, as you pointed out early in this interview, that the Iranians actually suggested to the Houthis it would not be wise for them to seize power alone because that would cause more problems, it would be worse.
And of course, the Houthis paid no attention to them.
What they were doing was listening to what Saleh was telling them, which is that he would give them arms and provide troops to support them if they seized power.
And of course, that puts the lie to the whole idea that the Houthis are somehow under the control of, or even follow the dictates or the suggestions of the Iranians.
It's such an obvious non-reality that it should be outed, and we need to get that information to people in Congress who are still somehow under the spell of this notion that they think justifies the U.S. supporting the war and participating in the war in Yemen.
Well, and for the record, you've got these great articles going back for the last couple of years here documenting about how the worst accusations are based on shipments of weapons that you debunk, that you show, in fact, were not shipments of weapons from the Iranians to the Houthis at all, but these were the kernels of so-called truth behind the narrative.
The Houthis were getting the overwhelming bulk of their arms from Saleh and from the Yemeni army.
In other words, from what Obama had previously given the former government.
Exactly, exactly, yes.
All right, and now...
Oh, I'm sorry, I know you gotta go, Gareth, but can you talk to me real quick about the blockade too, because it's the U.S. Navy is enforcing this blockade.
I guess I didn't really give you a chance to talk about the refueling.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
The role exactly that we're playing here.
This is a big part of the problem of the horrible human cost of this Saudi-led war is a naval blockade that has nothing to do directly with the bombing that everybody associates with the war and exacts a huge human toll, because what they're doing, what the Saudis and their allies are doing is preventing any humanitarian aid, I can't say any humanitarian aid, but blocking the bulk of international humanitarian aid and supplies from reaching the areas that are controlled by the Houthis.
And as you said a moment ago, the U.S. Navy is sort of side-by-side with them in this blockade.
I mean, the Navy says they're not participating in that blockade, but in effect, they are.
They're part of it.
Oh, and I'm sorry, I spaced out, but I meant to also say real quickly, just the reference there, the very important article, and I interviewed the guy too, it's Joost Hilterman.
It's spelled like juiced with two O's.
Joost Hilterman wrote this piece for foreignpolicy.com called, The Houthis Are Not Hezbollah.
And of course, Hezbollah itself is sort of a state in the Iranian Union, but they're somewhat autonomous themselves and the Houthis ain't even- Yeah, Hezbollah's not even Hezbollah.
Yeah, Hezbollah isn't even Hezbollah, but the Houthis sure as hell are not Hezbollah.
Yeah.
All right, listen, you're the best.
You're absolutely the greatest reporter in the world, and I'm so glad that you're my friend and that you always make time to come on this show, Gareth.
Thanks so much, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Bye-bye now.
All right, you guys, House Resolution 81.
It's Walter Jones and Thomas Massey, and they got some Democrats too, and this is, you know, it's something that we can do for a change.
How about that?
You know, they're actually going to force this thing to a floor vote, and they'll have to debate it on C-SPAN.
So, let's get behind that, huh, if we can.
Check out Gareth's great article.
It's at the American Conservative Magazine.
When did Congress vote to aid the Saudis' Yemen war?
And also that one by Jason Ditz.
It's the spotlight on antiwar.com today, and let me get the title right for you guys here real quick.
It's The Hurricanes You Control Versus The Hurricanes You Don't.
All right, I'm Scott Horton.scotthorton.org for the interviews, foolserend.us for the book.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Check out my institute at libertarianinstitute.org, and I reveal those viewpoints for you at antiwar.com.
Thanks.
