War is the improvement of investment climates by other means, Clausewitz, for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today I authorize the Armed Forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys, introducing Scott Paul from Oxfam America.
He is the senior humanitarian policy advisor there.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you, sir?
Thanks, Scott.
It's good to be back.
I wish under better circumstances.
Yeah, well, they're pretty bad ones.
Well, so go ahead.
The news obviously is that the Saudis have announced a blockade on Yemen, which they've been blockading with American help for two and a half years.
So how much worse can it get?
To tell you the truth, I had hoped we had hit bottom.
And, you know, two weeks ago, we were, you know, even two weeks ago, we were looking at the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
You know, 17 million people who needed aid to survive, 7 million on the verge of famine, the largest and fastest growing cholera outbreak in recorded history, not even close.
And then over the past week and a half, things have really taken a turn for the gruesome.
The manifestation of the blockade over the past two and a half years has been, you know, basically delaying ships to enter into these ports so much that costs would go up astronomically and Yemenis couldn't afford it.
Now it's just nobody can go in or out.
So the key seaports and Sana'a Airport isn't able to receive, none of them are receiving any aid shipments, any food or fuel, and aid workers can't go in and out.
And it's becoming maybe the biggest disaster of our generation.
Man.
All right.
So when you say the, well, first of all, on the blockade itself, we're talking about, I mean, really they were down to the port of Hodeidah and the airport in Sana'a to get any aid in anyway already, right?
It was really difficult because, you know, the ships could come in, but what would happen is they'd go through a UN inspection mechanism, which would clear them, you know, within somewhere between 24 and 72 hours.
So they were cleared, no weapons, everything that was supposed to be there was there.
And then they'd proceed to port and the Saudis would say, no, hold on a minute.
You've got to go and wait for us to inspect you and clear you further.
And then they'd sit there from, you know, anywhere from another couple of days to five months.
And by that time, the demurrage costs had gone way up.
Food would spoil, medicines would spoil.
And in the end, by the time they got to market, nobody could afford them.
So that was the situation before.
Now, I mean, it was as bad as a World Food Program ship was in port and the coalition, Saudi Arabia in particular, told the ship to stop discharging its food and to leave port.
So that's the situation we're in now.
Man.
All right.
So and then I'm afraid I only read the headline and I didn't even follow up.
But did I hear right that they had bombed the runways of the airport in Sana'a to prevent planes from landing?
It wasn't the runway.
It was the it was a navigation system.
And fortunately, the navigation system, it turns out, was an old piece of equipment and people are still going to be able to fly in and out when they get clearance.
Right.
When they won't be shot down by Saudi jets for trying.
Exactly.
And, you know, likewise, you know, even before the past two weeks, even subject to the de facto blockade of the past two and a half years, the Saudi led coalition conducted airstrikes against the cranes in Hodeidah port.
So even once you get cleared, you either have to have your own crane or some other way to offload from the ships that were coming in, which, again, made things a lot slower and prohibitively expensive for people who are trying to buy food, fuel, medicine, other other daily survival items.
All right.
Now, I mean, I know this isn't exactly your expertise, but I know that you have a better idea than most.
What is the level?
Can you describe what is the level of the American Navy, the U.S. Navy's participation in enforcing this blockade?
They always say the Saudi this and the Saudi that.
And yet America is the empire, not Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, I'm not actually clear on whether the U.S. Navy has a role in enforcing the blockade.
I haven't seen anything to suggest that it would.
The bigger issue is, you know, from a Saudi perspective, this started when the Houthi rebels fired a missile towards the airport in Riyadh.
And thankfully it was intercepted.
It's one of many really shocking attacks on civilians over the past two and a half years.
It's different only in the sense that it's deep inside Saudi Arabia as opposed to near the border or, you know, or inside Yemen where journalists aren't really getting much access.
And so you don't see this much.
But there have been tons of attacks against civilians and civilian objects.
It's been really terrible.
But for Saudi Arabia, this this was an escalation that they couldn't abide by.
And so then they announced this blockade.
And what's happened since then, the reason I say all that is because you need to understand that background to understand the U.S. response.
And following the imposition of this blockade and this missile strike, the U.S. public position has been really, you know, it's almost, it's difficult to read their statements and not view their approach as seeing an opportunity to highlight the malign influence of Iran in the region, which, you know, hasn't been publicly proven or linked to the missile strike.
But that's another story rather than the real possibility that millions of people could die from from the backlash.
And that's enabled that's enabled the Saudi led coalition to legitimize what they're doing.
Well, now, but you're I mean, I guess maybe I asked the question too narrowly.
I mean, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have reported for, you know, back to 2015 and repeatedly that the U.S. Navy obviously, you know, is involved in enforcing the blockade.
It's it's this extra level of blockade now where they're closing down even the port of Hodeidah completely.
That's what you're saying.
You don't know about the American role in that particular part.
Right.
Right.
But it's still under the umbrella of, you know, it's our ships that rule the Indian Ocean.
I mean, yeah, if if if this is a this is a level of intervention that frankly, we shouldn't have to talk about.
But yeah, if the U.S. Navy wanted to decide that freedom of navigation applies to Yemeni waters and commercial and aid ships should get in, they have the they have the pure military power to enforce that.
But that's that's about three three levels down the scale of confrontation that they're not willing to go right now.
We'd be pleased just to see someone in a position of authority in the U.S. government say this blockade is wrong and we have to stop killing people.
Yeah, well, we've got a few congressmen and women saying that, but that's all exactly.
And thank goodness for them.
Yeah.
Well, and it's a it's a problem, too, because Obama started it and Trump has now continued it long enough that it's hard for it would be hard for him politically to just blame it all on Obama now.
And then the liberals don't want to make Obama look bad if he's the greatest president ever.
How come this is his fault and that kind of thing?
So they don't want to deal with it.
So it really hurts, you know, in terms of partisan politics.
Exactly right.
And, you know, under the Trump administration, under the Obama administration, it probably took, you know, a year, a year and a half for people to really wake up to what was taking place.
And even then, it was a really sensitive issue among Democrats.
So there was a tank sale, as you as you remember, I think I may have come on the show to talk about it back in August and September of 2016.
And 27 senators, I think 23 of them Democrats, voted against the sale.
And so now, you know, fast forward nine months later, there was a sale of precision guidance kits that the Senate was voting on.
And, you know, much, much more closely linked to the air campaign than even the tanks.
And, you know, unfortunately, the Republican leadership in the Senate said, well, you're only caring about this now because Trump's in office.
And I thought that was pretty unfair because there were 23 Democrats who stepped up on a much harder vote and said, we won't abide by this.
It was half of them, right?
Exactly.
It was half the Democratic caucus.
But, you know, to be fair, everybody has been slow to come around to the right side on this.
And if someone had said that not in the context of enabling the Saudi led coalition to do whatever it wanted, I might have been much more sympathetic.
Well, unfortunately, I think Rand Paul is the only one up there who's actually done the reading to explain.
And I saw him in one of these interviews say like, man, you know what?
Just stop for a second.
Let's get real about this.
If we succeed in pushing the current Houthi Salah government out of power in Sana'a, it might be al-Qaeda that takes over.
OK?
Let's not pretend that that's not what we're talking about here.
You know, we've already failed to reinstall Hadi.
And we know that al-Qaeda is benefiting from this war, which is de facto on their behalf.
At the same time, we're still bombing them, mostly killing civilians, missing bombing them, but still.
But that's the real risk that we're running.
And yet, how many people on Capitol Hill understand that?
That this isn't part of the war on terror.
This is the war directly for terror.
Right now, AQAP are the ones who hate the Houthis even more than we do.
Yeah, most people who've stepped up on this have taken a more humanitarian angle.
I think, though, I think that people like Senator Murphy are very, very clear on the implications of U.S. participation in this war for the growth of al-Qaeda.
But I think you're right that Senator Paul is probably the one who's most concerned with the intersection of U.S. war powers authority and the actual implications on the broader effort against terrorism.
Well, I'm sure you saw that thing at The Intercept where Lee Fong went and asked some senators and congressmen about, hey, how come you're not doing this thing?
And then, I don't know the guy's name, but this one congressman gave the perfect answer, which is, hey, I'm busy working on tax reform right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this, I mean, from our point of view, I work for Oxfam.
In emergencies, our first priority is to provide assistance and save lives.
As an organization in the United States, our first priority is to help people identify both as Americans and as global citizens with common interests across borders.
And so we hear that and we hear, wow, something has really gone wrong if we don't have time to take stock of the U.S. role in furthering the world's worst humanitarian crisis and now, in the past week and a half, maybe the worst episode of mass death that we've seen in 20 years.
Man, all right.
So let's talk more about that here for a little while.
At the top of the show, you said 17 million need aid.
Seven million are on the verge of famine.
And I think, I don't know if you said the number, but the Red Cross reported just a couple of weeks ago that we're now up to 900,000 people with cholera.
And so, I guess...
It's actually 21 million people that need aid, and 17 of them need aid for food.
Even more need aid for clean and safe water.
A whole bunch of others need help preventing...
Yeah, sorry, go on.
No, that's okay.
No, that's an important clarification.
So, now here's the thing, though.
Ever since the start of this war, two and a half years ago, I don't know Oxfam specifically, but many different aid groups were saying right away, hey, wait a minute.
This poorest nation in the Middle East also now imports 80 to 90% of their food.
And we're going to be at the risk of starving millions of people to death.
And they've been saying that all this time.
And it seems like, well, geez, they must have had a secret crop system that we don't know about or something, because all these people are always on the verge of famine.
And I know from talking with Nasser Arabi, who's a reporter there in Sana'a, and I've spoken with Clara Minera at Doctors Without Borders and other people.
And, you know, obviously the death toll is far higher than the UN's couple of 10,000.
And yet, I don't know, no one really knows.
I wonder what is the real situation.
It sounds possibly like you guys have been crying wolf about just how desperately hungry these people are if we're two and a half years into this thing and they're still starving but haven't dropped dead yet.
Scott?
Yeah, well, we were one of those organizations.
We came out and we said exactly that two and a half years ago and we stand by it.
And when we say that seven million people are on the verge of famine, what that actually means is that many of them are dying from preventable disease.
And the ones that aren't, basically, are eating one meal a day that they usually can't rely on, that doesn't provide anywhere near the amount of nutrition that you need to even stave off the common cold or influenza or pneumonia from killing you.
The problem is we don't track, we don't track deaths from preventable disease in a way that we can link to food consumption.
So UNICEF, for example, said in December last year, nearly a year ago, that one child under five years old dies every 10 minutes.from preventable disease.
Now, you don't hear that statistic and say, well, that's because they're not eating enough.
But that's actually why it is.
It's a combination of not eating enough and not having access to clean and safe water that isn't going to essentially give them an infection that will overcome their weakened immune system.
So I'm very, very happy that we came out with those warnings two and a half years ago because people have been quietly dying in Yemen all the time.
What we're seeing now is an escalation that'll be really difficult to ignore even in a country where journalists aren't being allowed in.
If I can, I apologize if you had another question and you wanted to take this somewhere else.
No, please.
The floor is yours.
I'm going to detail what's going to happen now because food is already very expensive for people who don't have any income.
But what's going to happen now is fuel's going to run out.
Even though the governor, it's where Oxfam is working, we're already seeing fuel run out.
We can't find it in the market.
It's not for sale.
And what happens in a place like Yemen when fuel runs out is the generators shut down.
And that means we won't be able to pump water.
And it means the lights will go off in the hospital.
We won't be able to refrigerate medicines and vaccines that require a cold chain.
And so those vaccines are going to expire and go bad.
The hospital lights are going to go off.
We won't be able to perform life-saving surgeries.
People will be drinking, essentially, water contaminated with raw sewage.
And if you think that the world's worst cholera outbreak is gruesome already, if you combine that with more cholera and diphtheria and other diseases you can contract from drinking raw sewage with weakened immune systems, that's what's ultimately going to produce this astronomical death toll that we're not going to be able to ignore unless we do something quickly.
Yeah, and we're not going to really know until someday when it all finally ends.
And then we have attempts to do surveys of the excess death rates comparing the pre-war and during the war numbers and that kind of thing.
And then we're going to find out how truly bad it was.
Because as you say, a lot of this being deprived to death, it's the same, really, as a battlefield wound.
You know what I mean?
It's the same thing.
It's the war that's killing them.
Exactly.
And a great example to demonstrate what you just said, this year there was a famine in South Sudan.
The last famine before this was in 2011 and 2012 in Somalia.
And that was a situation where, again, the international humanitarian community had been warning for a year, a year and a half, that people were going to die.
And it was only about three years after the famine ended that someone did a study and figured out what had happened.
And there were news stories about famine.
There were news stories about people seeking aid and leaving the country.
But you didn't see.
People were dying quiet deaths.
And in the end, it came out that 260,000 people died from that famine.
Oh, was that all?
Internet had said it was 500,000.
It was 260,000 people in the 2011-2012 famine in Somalia, most of whom died before the famine was declared.
And half of which were young kids.
So, yeah, at some point, when this war ends, someone else is going to do a study and the numbers are going to jump off the page and they're going to be really damning for everybody who stood on the sidelines.
And even more so with the people who enabled it.
You know what?
I don't know why.
I've done this twice now, you know, on the show, I think, where I remember it 500,000.
And then I pull up my own article here that I wrote about this in 2013.
And it says a quarter of a million people died and more than half of them children.
I don't know why.
If I'm going to screw up the numbers, it should be conservatively, not overestimating.
Still, it was only a quarter of a million people died.
125,000 children who starved to death.
And, of course, again, there was a drought in the Horn of Africa.
Nobody's denying that it was all the sun's fault.
It was all the sun's fault, except it was also George Bush's fault and Barack Obama's fault because they were waging war in Somalia really before George Bush since 2001, but especially since 2006.
They had turned that country upside down and then created the circumstances for the rise of Al-Shabaab, which did their own part in turning the country, making everything that much worse.
And that was why the market system, I mean, capitalist countries don't have famines because if there's capitalism, then you're always going to be able to buy food from somewhere.
But when all of the economic system is just completely broken from warfare, the markets are all closed and no one has any money.
No one can borrow any money.
No one can spend the time that it takes to sow the crops or harvest them or do any of these things because of the chaos.
Then all the markets break and everybody just lays down and dies.
So we could say functioning capitalist systems don't allow famines.
Right, yeah, well, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah, you carpet bomb one and then the capitalism doesn't work anymore.
All the capital is gone and the ability to invest in any long-term project is canceled.
That's the real point.
Yeah, and there's no regulation to actually assure investors and businesses that they can do things.
In the case of Somalia, there's more than enough blame to go around for everybody.
But the salient point there is it was another time when the humanitarian community sounded the alarm before there was a famine.
And basically everybody shrugged their shoulders until the famine was declared.
And at that point, it was too late to save most people because most people had already died before the famine was declared.
And once the famine is declared, it's really hard to put that genie back in the bottle.
We're in a position now in Yemen where people have been dying really quickly at a gruesome rate for the last two and a half years.
But we're entering a new phase of that horror.
And thankfully, there is one particular action that can help turn that around, at least back to what things were like two weeks ago, which is not a good situation.
And that's just for the love of everything wonderful in the world, please let aid get in.
Let food get delivered.
Let fuel and medicine get delivered.
There's no weapons on those ships.
They're screened.
That's what makes no sense about any of this.
Well, they're starving them out.
I mean, that's the thing.
It's a collective war, and until they give in, that's the policy.
It may well be.
I find it really difficult to figure out people's intentions from different things, but I won't argue the point with you in this situation.
Well, and a big part of this, too, and I know this is a little bit outside of what you write about and that kind of thing, but it's pretty obvious and it's important that the then Deputy Crown Prince and brand new Defense Minister went to war for his own personal reasons.
Speaking of economics, this wasn't about the national interest of Saudi Arabia.
This was about the national interest of Mohammed bin Salman, the new, very young Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister who had to make a name for himself by letting some blood, like a bushwood, something like that.
And so here he is.
And that's how this whole thing started.
And I don't want to get into the motives of the different people who have been waging war because this is another one where there's plenty of blame to go around on all sides.
There was a transition after the Arab Spring Resolution that a lot of people disregarded.
The Houthis used force in a way that they shouldn't have to circumvent the political process.
But then it's pretty clear that this went off the rails when international interests showed less interest in that because there have been more than enough opportunities for the U.S. to demonstrate to the Saudi-led coalition, and I include Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well, who's played its part in this war, as well as for the Iranians and for the Houthis to all pull back from the brink.
And nobody's been willing to do it because it's just not that important to anybody except the people who are losing their lives.
Yeah, I don't know.
I haven't seen weapons coming in and out of there, but I was in Yemen for a real short period of time, and that's not what my agency does.
Yeah, right.
Well, and we all know they got those guns from Barack Obama, not from Iran.
It was Obama that armed Saleh and his army.
Yeah, and lots of presidents going back before him.
Sure.
All of the members of the so-called quints, which is just an awful name for a group of countries that are supposedly getting together for peace, particularly when four of them are supporting one side.
But everybody needs to do its part to chip in, and unfortunately, people have just seen Yemen as their own national chessboard to play out their geopolitical interests, and that has to stop.
Yeah.
I mean, they put the Red Cross in, but anybody wants to sell food, too.
You know, like open up, end the blockade, full stop, and all of that.
I mean, what would it take to, I mean, for one, stop the cholera epidemic?
I mean, it would be, they need a whole new water system now, or what?
It's going to cost a lot of money, but that's about five steps down the road.
So the first thing that you identified is right.
First thing that needs to happen is that people need to come in, because it's not, aid alone isn't going to do it.
You know, we're providing aid to one and a half million people across the country, and not meeting, not able to meet all of their needs.
People need protection, people need education, people need water, sanitation, hygiene, food, you name it.
So the market has to take care of most of that.
It's the beginnings of a political process to reconcile the main parties.
And I say that with a pretty huge recognition that that's not going to bring peace to Yemen.
There's, you know, scores of small armed groups now, because this conflict has gone so far out of control, who are going to continue fighting because they need to get theirs, and they're not aligned with international interests.
But I don't want to diminish what that big peace deal could get is, it could potentially put back together the government of Yemen and its ministries and institutions.
And if you suddenly had a functioning central bank with money in it, and health ministries where salaries were being paid, then maybe you could start to get at the fundamental problems underpinning the economy and the problems with preventing and treating cholera.
All right, so now what percentage of people are dying of it?
Yeah, it's tough to say.
And part of the issue with cholera is you only confirm cholera with a really expensive test.
So we, in the humanitarian world, we talk about suspected cases because what they present with is acute watery diarrhea.
I don't have the number offhand how many have died, although I can pull it up.
I know that statistic is available.
I just haven't checked it All right, and now, so I think if I heard her right, I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth, but I think Clara Minera from Doctors Without Borders, when I talked to her, I'm pretty sure that she said that, you know, honestly, you don't even really need antibiotics.
You just need fluids.
And if we can get you through the first couple of days of your cholera infection, you'll be all right.
And people who do, they have, back to the fuel problems and every other problem, the methods of distribution are all completely broken.
And so, is that really right?
You know, let me just hook you up to this bag of saline and you'll be fine in 48 hours and yet people can't get their bag of saline?
Well, for a lot of people, and yeah, because, you know, for bags of saline, you need a health infrastructure.
You need functioning hospitals and in a lot of cases, you need some form of electricity.
And that's, I mean, Yemen is, a lot of Yemen is going into the dark ages right now.
We don't have electricity in a lot of places.
The generators are, the hum of the generators are going silent.
And that's why in a lot of cases, you know, this incredibly preventable disease is spiraling out of control.
And then, now, I'm sorry, because we're running out of time here, but on Somalia again, real quick, is the famine over now?
Everything's fine?
I mean, I know it's not, but I don't know what to read right now.
Well, like I said, famine is a technical designation that basically happens when you meet three different criteria and it means that everything has gone wrong and everything has gone off the rails.
It's the worst possible situation.
In Somalia, a lot of people are living one step before that, which means not only do they not know how they're going to feed themselves on a daily basis, but they're eating so little that they're vulnerable to all of these preventable diseases that arise, you know, in a widely malnourished population.
So, it did get better for a time around 2013, 2014, when the rains were better.
But, you know, we're in a situation now where you've got weak governments, you've got climate change, which, you know, under which a drought that normally happens every 70 years is happening every 10 years.
And a drought that normally happens every 10 years is happening every three years.
So, people are more vulnerable and there's no social safety nets to protect them.
Yeah.
All right, man, well, I'll let you go, but I sure appreciate the work that you're doing.
Thank you for your work, but it's a pleasure speaking with you.
Yeah, very happy to have people like you doing the work to get the word out about something like this.
And you know what?
Actually, just one last thing here.
The word is finally getting out.
You know, this is getting a little bit more attention.
In fact, I even have people on my Twitter feed who are suspicious that now all of a sudden the media has decided to pay attention to this.
So, thank you for that, Scott, to really get out there.
Thank you.
We're going to be doing everything we can.
All right, good deal.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
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