Hey guys, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party in Rhode Island on October the 27th and then November the 3rd with Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and a bunch of others down there in Lake Jackson.
Jeff Deist and all them, Mises Institute, are having me out to give a talk about media stuff.
And that's November the 3rd down there in Lake Jackson.
If you like Ron Paul events and you're nearby, I'll see you there.
Sorry I'm late!
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR!
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw us.
He died.
We ain't killing their army.
We killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying.
Say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Eric Eikenberry.
He is the advocacy officer at Yemenpeaceproject.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Doing very well today.
How are you?
I'm doing very well.
You have the most important job in the world, trying to stop this war.
And a coalition of a lot of other people with the very same important job.
I can't claim that alone at all.
Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to say you're the only one with that job.
But I just mean it is the most important job.
So, listen here.
I guess, tell us, first of all, I just can't keep track.
It's just too much.
Who is sponsoring which bills in which committees of which houses of Congress?
And what in the hell can anyone in my audience do about it?
Please, sir.
Okay.
So, first of all, the most pressing legislation we have is a resolution in the House called House Concurrent Resolution 138.
138 being the important number there.
It was introduced by representatives Adam Smith out of Washington, Ro Khanna, who's been working on this for a while, Mark Pocan out of Wisconsin, who's been working on this for a while.
Also, Thomas Massey and Walter Jones from the Republican side has rapidly gotten a cohort of very strong co-sponsors, including, and frankly, to my pleasant surprise, a lot of Democratic leaders.
So, representatives Engel, Hoyer, Lowy, and Deutsch have all signed on as co-sponsors as well.
Right now, there's about 41 co-sponsors.
Yeah.
A little surprising.
Very, very welcome, though.
That will likely come to a head sometime.
It could come to a head as early as mid-November, potentially be voted on in December.
What's likely to happen is that because the bill has a somewhat united Democratic front for now, Republicans might try to advance a maneuver in the Rules Committee where they strip the bill of its privilege.
As a war powers resolution, it should be privileged.
We had the same problem last year when Khanna tried to do this with H. Connors 81, if you remember that one.
Republicans stripped it of its privilege.
It never got a floor vote.
Republicans might try the same thing this time, but because it's more high-profile, because war is getting a lot more attention in the U.S., and because the Democratic caucus seems to be falling in line on the House side behind this, it could set up an interesting vote.
And if people can pressure their more conservative Dems, if they live in a more conservative Dem district, or if they live in a Republican district and can pressure there, you could potentially see this beat.
It'd have to be bipartisan, but you could see it beat a Rules Committee attempt to strip it of its privilege and get a full floor vote sometime in November or December.
And now, is this the same kind of resolution you're saying, or is it a different resolution than what they did before, because trying to invoke the War Powers Act?
Well, that was the Senate one, right?
I'm lost.
Yeah, no, totally fine.
It's been a whirlwind of a time.
They initially tried to do this in the House last year with H. Concurrent Resolution 81, which was the first war powers resolution attempt in a long, long time.
I had forgotten that that was centered around the War Powers Act question as well.
I was only thinking of the Senate one.
I remember the resolution.
I just forgot that was the framing of it.
Yeah, and it couldn't get a vote because both Democratic and Republican leadership united to strip it of its privilege.
Then in March in the Senate, we had Senate Joint Resolution 54, another War Powers resolution.
That got to the floor, was tabled 55-44, but got a good number of votes.
I mean, you want to see it pass, but it got a good number of votes.
And that was also invoking the War Powers Act, which would or could have been an unprecedented, awesome, incredible thing to see the U.S. Senate do there, but they didn't.
They didn't, yeah.
And so they're taking another crack at it in the House.
Leading offices on this have sort of surmised that, and I think correctly so far, that the conversation in the U.S. has changed, the media pressure and attention has changed, and at least one side of the chamber and the Democrats have come around.
It's become an issue that Democrats don't want to be seen as being split on.
And we're hoping to make the same gains on the Republican side, because this is not obviously a partisan issue.
So, yeah, this is a third War Powers resolution.
It's different from H.C.O.N. Res. 81, but it's similar in what it invokes.
It's similar in its legal arguments and its moral arguments as well.
Well, it sure is good to hear that there's a lot more momentum behind it, and there sure ought to be.
But so I guess, so what do you think are its chances?
It sounds like you think it will be able to get a floor vote, or there's a significant chance of that.
But I guess there are only, what, two or three House Republicans who are good on it, or how many?
There's two House Republicans signed on right now.
We're hoping to get more.
In order for it to beat a rules committee attempt to deprivilege, you're looking at trying to swing about 25 or 30 Republicans to vote against the rule when it comes up, which is a hill to climb.
It's a boulder to push up, so to speak, but I think it's doable.
I think there's some important things that this resolution does.
One, it's sort of announcing that there's more attention on the U.S. side, there's more attention in Congress, and that leading congressional offices that are no doves by any stretch of the imagination really feel like they have to get behind a vehicle like this, and I think that's positive.
I think the second thing it sets up is, because if it came for a vote, it would be voted on in the lame duck, and even if it passed the House, it would be hard to circle the wagon to get it through the Senate and then overcome a presidential veto because you have a new Congress starting.
So what it does is, if it gets a lot of momentum, or even if it secures a floor vote in the lame duck session, you're setting yourself up, on this issue at least, potentially nicely for the new Congress come January, where you could see a lot of seats flip and even see a different party get in the majority, and if that party's well-positioned to be much tougher on this issue, you could see further legislation.
Maybe not a war powers resolution, but you could see legislation to sort of pull out planks of U.S. logistical ammunition support to the coalition's bombing campaign in Yemen.
So in the short term, we'd love to see you get a floor vote and pushing very hard for a floor vote, but in the long term, hoping, and I'm optimistic, that this signals that the next Congress will force this issue on the administration in a way that this Congress has only recently gotten around to doing.
You know, it's funny, because think if the media was on our side or something like that.
I mean, all of this is over the establishment and including the media, the entire center consensus.
This is over their dead body.
They refuse to cover this.
They refuse to talk about it or controversialize it, and yet, you know, really activists like yourself have pushed this thing to the point where you really have, and I guess there's certain Congress people who've taken an interest for whatever reason in bucking the Saudi lobby on this and pushing this hard, but, you know, there's certainly no top-down effort to try to, you know, mobilize Democratic voters out there to make this their issue or any kind of officially sanctioned effort, and yet it really has pushed.
It really goes to show the ability of activists, not that we've won yet, but it goes to show the ability of people outside the establishment to actually make some kind of difference here and force this issue in a way that, you know, where we won't let them sweep it under the rug.
And then, of course, you take one look at it, and there's no question you have to be against it.
Yeah, and the really interesting thing we've seen, at least in terms of advocacy to Congress and advocacy to the U.S. government, the really interesting development we've seen has actually, it has not been Yemen-related specifically, but it is reverberating on U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition's intervention in Yemen, and that is the apparent disappearance and likely murder of the Saudi journalist and U.S. resident, Jamal Khashoggi.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that.
Talk about the reaction to that.
That has been—I'm sort of struggling for words on how to interpret it, just because from what I work on, that has reverberated into the Yemen debate in very surprising ways, and for a variety of reasons.
On the one hand, I'm sort of—I kind of want to be reflexively critical, not of, obviously, Jamal.
It was terrible for him.
It's a tragedy.
He's disappeared.
It appears that he's dead and likely killed by Saudi government officials in a decision that potentially goes right up to Mohammed bin Salman.
Did you know this guy?
I did not know him.
I've seen him speak at D.C. events.
I see.
I'm somewhat frustrated, because people—this singular death or potential death has resonated with people in a way that thousands and thousands of Yemeni deaths hasn't.
They're just a statistic.
He's a tragedy.
Because he knew—I mean, he was moving through these circles.
It's a quote Joe Stalin, the ultimate realist.
Yeah.
Although, to be fair, it does—and I say I want to be reflexively critical, although if you kind of abstract from this case and you abstract the tragedy of this likely murder, in international relations, you can't have a country using its consulate to murder citizens in another country's building.
By the way, when I said Stalin was the ultimate realist, I meant in his analysis, not in his policies, just for the record.
Sorry.
Of course.
No, of course not.
But yeah, I mean, hey, this guy wrote for the Washington Post.
Precisely.
That was a big mistake.
Remember that whole saying about you're not supposed to pick a fight with an enemy that buys ink by the barrel full?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They just made insulting the New York Times, something like that.
But this is killing a guy that wrote for Fred Hyatt's op-ed page.
Jeff Bezos.
There's some friends that you could not afford to throw overboard.
Yeah, and Jeff Bezos, upsetting the richest guy in the world, potentially.
Right.
Not to minimize from that, but that singular death has reverberated.
And so now we have senators, prominent conservative senators, saying that the security partnership with Saudi Arabia is in question.
In the last 24 hours, we've had a series of media appearances and statements from Senator Bob Corker, Senator Lindsey Graham.
Senator Graham said that if a munition sale or a weapon sale to Saudi Arabia came up, we couldn't vote for it.
It couldn't pass the Senate.
You're telling me that Lindsey Graham said that?
Lindsey Graham said something to that effect.
Corker has been the most.
I mean, I don't take him at his word on that, but I take him on his word for what it's worth.
Not his word, but the value that he felt he had to say that.
That's at least worth noting.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
Graham and Corker said very explicitly that if a munition sale came up, that it would not pass the Senate right now.
And that's huge, obviously, from the chair of the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But Gardner and Graham came out with sort of similar, not quite as strong, but similar statements saying that they would have to look very hard at a weapon sale right now.
And they were very, very deeply concerned.
And statements going on the typical, a lot of the BS of politicians will say that, oh, I am deeply concerned about X, Y, Z.
I mean, these were sharp statements and should be concerning if you're part of the Saudi lobby in D.C.
But so this this death, this murder has could have more of an effect on advocacy related to U.S. support for the coalition's intervention in Yemen than any singular event before it.
Now, part of that is because activists have been pushing so hard and so hard and so hard and it's become much more of an issue.
And it has continued to make national offices and members of Congress themselves more uncomfortable.
But it will be interesting to me to see if this sort of tangentially related matter does become the tipping point.
So on the Senate side, and I say this because he spoke publicly, but, you know, Bernie Sanders is saying that he's going to bring up the war powers resolution again in the Senate in after the election.
And so that could be coming up in the next month.
We're definitely expecting not only the usual suspects, but broad based support.
If the administration tries to go ahead with a munition sale, it's had in the docket for a while, worth over two billion dollars, giving over 60,000 precision guided munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
And that's the new Rand Paul resolution, right, is to stop that one.
OK, go ahead.
No, go.
No.
Yeah.
Rand Paul, both Rand Paul and Chris Murphy have come out and said that they would introduce a resolution to block that stuff that came up.
And this is a sale that Senator Bob Menendez has already put on an informal hold.
And Paul's piece of the Atlantic, he says, you know, all weapons sales to them should be suspended until they bring this guy back safely alive, which I think he knows is a bit of a poison pill there since the consensus seems to be that they murdered him all right.
Yeah, I guess we don't know that for a fact, but that's what all the governments are saying.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I can't I don't I don't work on this issue directly and I can't comment on it, but I've been following the press reports with everyone else.
And the Saudis have been given I mean, the international community has been giving the Saudi government chance after chance after chance to do damage control on this.
I mean, they could they could admit to kidnapping him.
But at this point, if they produced on a live Jamal Khashoggi, you would probably see some of this fear get dialed back a bit.
But the fact that they haven't and they've been unwilling to do.
I mean, we're looking at an admission of guilt by just their total silence on this.
Sure looks like it anyway.
But, yeah, it's unknown, but it looks.
And that was what Bob Corker was telling Politico yesterday.
Senator Bob Corker was saying because he has access for a relations committee chair.
He has access to high level intelligence that pacifists like myself don't have access to.
And he came out of a viewing that intelligence saying all but saying that the Saudis had done this and putting the onus and the responsibility directly on the Saudi government at very high levels.
And you've seen also consequences for the Saudi government in terms of there is a big conference are going to be that big conference in Riyadh that a bunch of people, media centers in the United States from The New York Times to CNBC to Fox News had co-sponsored.
We're going to send people to speak out.
And I think everybody, all those American media co-sponsors, but for Fox News have pulled out so far.
This is going to.
Yeah, this has had short term consequences.
It will be interesting to see if this has medium and longer term consequences.
And is if this is if this, you know, is something that wakes senators up to, you know, this Saudi foreign policy is so reckless at this point that there is really no line of division between killing a political dissident and U.S. resident in a foreign consulate and bombing another country and just destroying its infrastructure and killing thousands and thousands and thousands of people directly and directly that there is no line of division.
It's all part of the same, just unbelievable foreign policy and that the U.S. has leveraging an exercise to bring this in and to end this violence.
You know, that's such an important thing.
I mean, I think it's such a simple and powerful and true narrative that this is MBS this war.
He got named deputy crown prince and within two months he launched this war.
It's the first thing he did because that was his big macho political thing to move up a step.
And it worked for him.
He moved up to crown prince from deputy crown prince.
But that was his whole thing.
So this very same spoiled brat that murdered everybody's friend from The Washington Post up there is the same one who launched this war.
And, you know, I've always found this really meaningful.
I quote it all the time.
I've probably spoken with you about it before.
I don't know whether you agree or anybody else is nearly impressed by this as I am, or whether this makes for a great talking point or not.
But in The New York Times version of the start of this war, explaining the thinking in the Obama administration of why they were going to do, you know, this chapter of the war starting in the spring of 2015, they knew in their words, according to The New York Times, that the war would be long, bloody and indeterminate.
Indeterminate.
Meaning they knew that the Saudis weren't going to be able to put Hadi back on the throne in Sana'a and undo the history of the years 2014 and 15 and whatever.
They knew that it couldn't happen.
But they said, well, we have to placate the Saudis anyway.
So here's the same spoiled brat, this MBS, who thinks that just whatever he says goes, who would murder their Washington Post journalist op-ed writer friend, is the same guy who launched this completely reckless war.
And, I mean, I don't want to get all partisan and get people rallying around Obama to protect him or whatever, but I'm just saying they knew at the time, it doesn't have to be accusatory to them, but just they knew at the time that this could not work.
None of them even had an imagination for how it might work.
They knew that, well, we're just going to start it and see what happens.
Let the Hillary Clinton administration figure it out, was their thinking apparently.
And that, to me, seems like an important part of the narrative here, that this isn't even Saudi foreign policy.
This is this same idiot, MBS, the guy who picked a fight with Qatar and who rounded up and jailed all the women who had protested for the right to drive and who beheads people for sorcery and whatever else.
He executes people for sorcery over there, his regime does.
Yeah, and I think you're right on in terms of what the previous administration allowed, what the Obama administration sort of permitted for expediency on other foreign policy fronts.
And if you talk to former officials, they'll sort of say that, oh, we couldn't have stopped them anyway, if we had wanted to, because doing this intervention or conducting this intervention was so important.
A lot of these people are out of power, and so you can point to their record potentially next time they're in power and demand that they don't make the same mistake again, at least from an activist perspective.
You do raise an interesting point about Mohammed bin Salman and this being his war.
And one of the things they're going to be analyzing for a long time after this war, because we look at it so much from the international perspective, how it fits in the global conflict or the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or this or that, the sectarian narrative and things that are advanced to justify the war.
But one aspect locally that's going to be studied and picked apart by scholars of the region for years is how the Saudi government in the years leading up to the war totally mismanaged its relations with tribes in northern Yemen, so much so that the tribes eventually, many of them threw in with the Houthi rebels.
These tribes were happy, and these tribesmen and their leaders were happy to be bought off by Saudi Arabia for decades.
It was Saudi policy to manage sort of fractious northern Yemeni politics via cash payments, via the bestowing of prestige and things like that, and access to preferential treatment and resources in Saudi Arabia.
And how that changed, and how the Saudi government in the years leading up to the Yemen war really abandoned these patronage networks.
And how Mohammed bin Salman not only launched this terrible war, but launched it without any sense of local Yemeni politics, and any sense of how he was going to intervene to fix it diplomatically or fix it at a local level, which is what he needed.
If the goal of this war, which the Saudi government will say, is to protect its border and to push back an Iranian threat, I think the border narrative is much more compelling for their argument than the Iranian threat narrative.
But if you're trying to secure your border, how can you let your resources and your attention to northern Yemen dry up for years beforehand?
And how can you put this young prince on the throne who wants to bomb everything without reconstructing anything?
So this is a total tangent, but I think not only is Mohammed bin Salman's war, but he and the advisors around him apparently are singularly unequipped to do the groundwork to establish peace that could be satisfactory for present and future Saudi government and for Yemenis themselves for years and years.
Yeah, now that's interesting.
What was the source that you're referring to that told that story about the ceasing of the payments there?
Oh, I mean, so that's conversations I've had with Yemenis, one particular, and this would be off the record conversation or a private conversation with someone.
So I won't give their name, but it was Yemeni tribesmen who said, who told me that.
So without getting too much into the weeds of Saudi history.
This is a pretty good sounding source, I mean, for the narrative that it is.
I learned importantly, too, that the Hadi government had instituted this regime of what they called federalism, where kind of, I guess they hardened all the unofficial boundaries of the different regions and powers and territories within the state of Yemen.
And kind of, you know, date and accord style drew with Black Magic Mark there.
And that had the effect of cutting the Houthis completely off from the Red Sea.
And that was a huge part of their motivation to march on Sanaa, that Hadi had just picked that fight absolutely unnecessarily there.
Yeah.
And also that at that time, we can sort of, we want to relitigate that history.
Yeah, why not?
That Hadi was very incompetently playing, trying to play off.
At that time, he didn't view the Houthis, he viewed them as an internal threat to the stability of his presidency, his quote unquote transitional presidency.
But at the same time, he was also trying to play the Houthis off against another internal threat to what he considered an internal threat, which was the Islah party, which is an internal party going back in Yemen.
It originated in the 90s, largely, not entirely, but mostly made up of elements related to the Muslim Brotherhood.
And so the Houthis and the Islah were enemies.
And so trying to, in the months leading up to the Houthi coup, trying to instigate fights between the Houthis and Islah, that just weakened everyone in the face of the Houthis sort of sweeping down from the north and taking Sanaa.
That's an older story.
Well, I mean, what's funny is because it's really a replaying of the same story of what had happened under Saleh, where he had used Islah to pick all these fights with the Houthis over and over again, and including also the national army.
And then, but the Houthis won time after time after time.
And then, so you're saying there was one more example of that exact effect was there under Hadi as well.
After Saleh was gone, he tried to get Islah to pick a fight with the Houthis and the Houthis came back and the backfire was too big that time.
Yeah, and it was Hadi tried to play the game that Saleh played, you know, with varying degrees of success for several decades, to try to balance internal factions against each other by violently setting them against each other.
And it just totally backfired because at that point, the Houthis, the rebels had become strong enough in and of themselves.
And they weren't going to be satisfied.
Unfortunately, they were not going to be satisfied with just controlling their territory.
They wanted a much larger piece of the pie.
Anyway, though, so back to the PR then about the MBS's war and the murder of Khashoggi here, and really the, you know, the parallel, which is Saudi foreign policy in Yemen and the obvious irony, right?
You shouldn't have to be any kind of political ideologue at all to see that.
Isn't it strange that we have this ongoing war against the poorest country in the world?
At the same time, everybody's crying over just this one guy who was killed.
I mean, not that it was OK or whatever, you know, it's tragic for him and his family and everything like that.
But now let's multiply that by 50,000 going on here in Yemen right now.
It seems like the segue there is just so obvious.
And then when it's, you know, I think it's important to, yeah, that it was MBS who started this thing.
And why should we be doing this for him?
You know, the Kushner of Saudi Arabia.
You know, I don't want to do things for the Kushner of America, but I got to do things for the Kushner of Saudi Arabia.
Why?
You know, because Obama says so.
I don't respect that.
Why should anybody go continue to go along with that, including the current president?
He could just blame all this on Obama, even after, you know, a couple of years of this on his watch.
He gets still he's Donald Trump for Christ's sake.
He could blame it on George Bush if he wanted.
He could do whatever he wanted and just call it quits.
Yeah.
And what's been really remarkable.
Blame it on me.
I don't care.
We've seen this admit this administration's reaction because the messages are getting out of Congress on this are very strong.
And any other administration would have backpedaled by now.
And there would have been an effort.
There would have been some potentially minor or semi significant diplomatic slap on the wrist.
Promises of reform addressing down an effort to send people to the Hill to allay congressional concerns.
And this administration doesn't even care.
They're not even bothering to do that.
You know, President Trump is yesterday telling Oval Office full of reporters that, you know.
Yeah, this this this, you know, Jamal Khashoggi, not that he would know the guy's name, but this reporter died.
But he wasn't even a U.S. citizen.
And by the way, we have one hundred and ten billion dollars of arms sales with Saudi Arabia, which is not true.
But we have billions of dollars in arms sales and we need this for domestic jobs.
And just so blatant.
I mean, U.S. policy has always been at this transactional level with the Saudi government.
And it's always been obvious and people try to gussied up or dress it up in different ways.
And it's been unconvincing.
But for Trump to come out and so nakedly say that we don't I don't care about this guy's tragic, horrible death.
I don't care about the deaths of, as you point out, to better estimates than we've had for a while, have recently landed a number of potentially 50,000 casualties from this war.
That that's direct deaths doesn't get into indirect deaths from the humanitarian conflict.
So I don't care about potentially over one hundred thousand one hundred thousand Yemeni deaths.
I care about continuing the profit margins of Boeing and Lockheed and Raytheon.
That's my primary foreign policy goal, apparently.
The votes of those job holders, too, which is funny because, you know, any capitalist, anyone who's familiar with capitalist economics at all, they wouldn't have to be a pure libertarian or Austrian school guy.
But anyone who's really familiar with capitalist economics could see the major flaw in that.
You know, yeah, those jobs, sure.
But at what cost to everybody else when what they're really constructing are weapons of destruction that don't that don't really provide goods and services that add to GDP and or add to the standard of living of the people around.
So it's the seen and the unseen.
Any time any capitalist, any Republican ought to be able to see that no matter how necessary they think it all is, that all industrial militarism in America is a diversion from a capitalist economy, even if they think it has to be.
That's not part and parcel supposed to be the whole thing.
That's just the part that we have to suffer and put up with for the national defense at the cost of everything else.
That's what Eisenhower said.
Right.
Everybody knows that.
Oh, yeah.
I would encourage I can't speak so on this.
I don't have an economic background, but I would encourage everyone to read a colleague in D.C. in New York City.
Who's a great guy named William Hartung at the Center for International Policy.
Sure.
Long time.
Yeah, precisely.
Bill's great.
Bill has recently written he's written multiple articles, but I think he just wrote another one on how the weapons industry and teaming up with these autocrats abroad to kill civilians does not enhance the U.S. economy.
It actually, you know, every dollar spent on the weapons industry yields much less in terms of GDP, in terms of jobs in particular, which is, you know, Trump's constant mantra that these arms sales produce jobs.
We use less than jobs and comparable spending and education on health care on sectors like that.
And so we're just letting people keep that money and invest it privately in the first place.
Yeah, which is also another option that that that is much superior to continuing to invest in a couple of large weapons behemoths that are essentially just getting government subsidies to fund themselves.
It's military Keynesianism.
And it's, you know, roundly ridiculed by people who know about economics because it's completely ridiculous, of course.
You know, it is it's stimulating some profits, but at the expense of everything else in the way things could be instead that goes, you know, unassessed.
Oh, yeah.
No, and it's it's.
Yeah.
And so that that was it was remarkable for Trump to articulate that.
So and maybe honest, I mean, maybe you got to appreciate the honesty.
But when you look at what's happened to this one journalist and to, you know, thousands and thousands of Yemenis and what this is all what all this all these deaths are supposed to add up to and what the benefit to the United States is supposed to be, it's it's asinine.
It makes it's not only morally abhorrent, but the logic is just outside of the benefit of a very few people.
It makes no sense.
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OK, so in the Senate, I'm sorry to put you on the spot.
Do you have the resolution number for Rand Paul's thing?
I should have it here somewhere.
No, so he has not.
My understanding was that was a threat to introduce.
Oh, it has not been introduced yet?
A resolution might come out.
Daniel, just go ahead.
Let me double check.
I could.
There's a lot of news to follow.
I could have missed that particular one.
But I think that was more of he was saying it was something he was going to be introducing.
This week, I intend to introduce.
So maybe I took it for granted that he actually followed through with that.
I'm pretty sure I heard he was going to, though.
Anyway, well, maybe while you're looking at your notes, I will cover for you by talking about House Res 138.
That's the one that's already been introduced by Smith and Kohana, you said there.
And with Massey and Jones, I really like that Massey.
He just seems like such a great anti-war, you know, reliable guy.
And of course, Walter Jones as well.
He's a virtual Ron Paul nowadays.
Certainly where it counts, he is great.
And then, as you said, and this is really important news, Steny Hoyer and these important Democrats signing up for this thing.
You know, maybe, I don't know.
See, even the losses on these things, at least, you know, force a news story out of it, force more attention to something that's unjustifiable.
So in the end, it's got to help somewhat.
But I don't know.
Did you see there?
Did he introduce it yet?
It looks like he hasn't.
It looks like he is just there is a threat to introduce, which we I mean, we will full throatedly support this if and when he does.
And then but there is, as you said, Sanders, too, is saying that after the election, he's going to have one.
Well, so Esther is 54 was tabled in March.
Was it tabled after that debate?
And the vote table is 55 to 54.
And so he actually doesn't have to reintroduce anything.
He can just attempt to bring that to the floor at any time.
I see.
And so he told the media.
I'm sorry.
What was the number of that one again?
S.J. was 54.
So, yeah.
So Senate joint resolution 54.
I mean, we won't know if he does it for over a month now.
My understanding was that he had a conversation with media and that he was thinking of reintroducing that.
So that's another possibility of congressional action.
And also we should see I mean, we're trying to build towards and work towards it from our end, but we should see a new Congress come at this issue of U.S. complicity in these war crimes and in this tremendous loss of civilian life and destruction of infrastructure.
Come at it with new zeal come January with a new Congress.
I mean, that's what we're hoping for.
And a lot more legislative action then.
Right.
By the way, I'm Paul here.
You know, I found a Fox News article about it, too, where it doesn't sound like he's saying if so and so doesn't give in to my demands this week, I will introduce.
It sounds like he's just saying sometime this week it's going to happen one way or the other.
He's going to do it.
OK, sure.
I sure hope he falls through on that.
In the last year, he really or I guess the beginning of this year, he really could have rallied with Sanders and others.
He did, of course, vote correctly on the question of tabling it, but he had not championed the the whole thing when everyone had expected that he would back then.
So anyway, even even Rand needs pressure on this.
And, you know, I'm not much of a believer in the system, but I am saying we have to try, of course.
And there's nothing else to do.
You can't just complain.
We got to try to do something whenever we can to push this thing.
Yeah.
I mean, even even if you have, you know, doubts or about the system, which I mean, I, I confess to the same myself.
You don't have to look at it as a sort of enshrined process or this this very worthy process to view it as leverage.
This legislation in a very cold, instrumental way, even if you have no affection for Congress or for the Constitution or whatever your political position is, is leverage amongst U.S. elites in how they formulate policy and is a way is one avenue to push back.
And there are others as well.
I would recommend if there are protests in your area to sign up for them.
If there's more grassroots area and to sign up for them, you don't you don't just have to call your senator representative, although I recommend you do.
You can get active locally in your community as well.
Yeah, right.
OK, so and now tell me who are all your best allies on this issue that, you know, listeners can get involved with, contribute to, talk with, connect with, work with on this.
Oh, wow.
I'm in Washington, D.C. because that's where sort of the locus of my work is.
There is.
I'm sorry.
By all means, talk about your organization as well.
First here on the list.
Of course.
So we're the Yemen Peace Project.
You can find us at Yemenpeaceproject.org.
If you go online and you sign up to be part of our mailing list, we send out we try not to overwhelm people's inboxes, but we send out emails once or twice a month with congressional updates.
If you want to get a little more news on what's happening at Yemen on a more daily or weekly basis, you can also sign up for sort of weekly news briefings we put out just to kind of keep track of all the different factions and what's going on inside the country and also how U.S. involvement is impacting that as well.
If you and you can also donate when I recommend you can also go into our site and donate if you want to as well.
Other organizations in D.C. that I recommend you plug in with in addition to ours, the Friends Committee on National Legislation is excellent.
The Quakers have been doing tremendous work on D.C. for a while now, and they've been excellent on this issue and they know how to mobilize.
They know how to mobilize popular grassroots energy and make that a viable threat in congressional offices.
I've seen their representatives do that in meetings.
There's a woman named Kate Gould who runs our advocacy on this issue who's fantastic.
You can follow her on Twitter at K8Gould.
So that's Kate Gould.
Also Win Without War is another excellent, excellent organization.
I know you've spoken with Kate Kaiser in the past.
And Kate Gould as well.
They're both great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so they do excellent advocacy around this.
They know how to mobilize grassroots.
They are leading the policy fight, I would say, not just on Yemen, but for a less interventionist, less militarist foreign policy in general in D.C.
One last organization.
I mean, I could keep naming organizations that are great on this.
How about I'll name Code Pink?
I think it's just heroic, those ladies.
I really like Medea Benjamin and I forget the other leaders.
There's a few of them.
And I think it was Medea who went and confronted these guys, these warmongers on Iran at this thing the other day.
The sort of quintessential civil disobedience there.
And she knows what she's talking about, man.
She gets up there.
She said exactly the right thing about what they're doing, trying to pick a fight with Iran and sticking up for the Yemenis and kind of going limp and making them drag her out.
Or, you know, sort of passively resisting, hanging onto the podium.
And just absolutely shaming the think tank goon who's there to promote picking a worse fight, trying to destabilize Iran and all these things.
And I forget the exact words, but a big part of what she said was just think of how absurd this is.
You would sit here and entertain this as this guy sitting here talking about what we're going to do to some other country that never did anything to us.
This is crazy.
Snap out of it.
I think they're great.
And in Obama times, they stayed anti-war the whole time, unlike a lot of people on the left, progressives and liberals and others.
They definitely had their priorities straight and still do.
Yeah, no, I'm in tremendous respect for Code Pink.
Absolutely.
Really admire what they've been doing for years.
I mean, for me, I would never move to D.C.
I'm not going to spend years of my life living in D.C. trying to, as much as I do care, I'm just not going to live my life that way.
I can't.
So, I mean, I really give extra credit to all those of you who would dare to put up with that, you know, being anywhere near the heart of the beast that way.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
D.C. has its charms, but none of them are near the capital.
Two quick organizations, and I'll let you go, but I just want to highlight one is because they don't get spotlight.
Their work doesn't get spotlighted enough in the United States.
But there is a Yemeni human rights organization called Muwatana.
In English, you transliterate that as M-W-A-T-A-N-A.
They do English language and Arabic language reporting on human rights violations and war crimes in Yemen.
They're fantastic.
They cover a lot of very heavy stuff.
And their work is very, very difficult.
And they're put under a lot of constraints by both parties, by the coalition, by their bombing campaign, but also by rebel factions, the Houthis and others on the ground and various militias in Yemen.
Extraordinarily respect for them.
Extraordinary bravery.
They're not an advocacy organization you can get plugged into so much.
But if you want to know more about the conflict and know more about the human cost of the conflict, I would really recommend visiting Muwatana.
You can look up and find their website, find their Twitter, read their reports.
And that's M-W-A-T-A-N-A.
And yes, and what we know about, and they record human rights violations by all parties, but what we know about U.S. munitions and the complicity of U.S. munitions, we know because of their work, in part.
They've been on the ground sort of digging that up and putting themselves at risk.
So really want to spotlight their work whenever possible.
And also, you know, finally, you know, seriously look at the major humanitarian organizations operating in Yemen.
They have, you know, their staff in D.C. and in foreign capitals are, you know, people from the areas are Americans, but the people working on the ground in Yemen are Yemenis themselves that are putting their lives on the line to get food, water, very basic rudimentary forms of medicine and health care to the millions and millions of Yemenis in the area.
Very many to name, but I think ones that have a big U.S. presence and that are really shaping the U.S. debate, you have Oxfam, International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, the Norwegian Refugee Council.
I could go on and on and I can leave some colleagues out, but look into their work.
Definitely donate to their efforts if you can as well.
Doctors Without Borders, would you say too?
Yes, absolutely.
Doctors Without Borders, MSF, so like the French medicine or Doctors Without Borders.
But if you go to MSF.org, yeah, they're doing huge.
I'm sorry, I spaced out.
I didn't hear you say that, but I'm sure you did.
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, no, I didn't.
But I'm afraid if I keep naming, I'm going to leave a colleague out and then I'm going to unintentionally insult someone.
But if you can donate to those organizations that are doing the human rights documentation and doing the humanitarian intervention on the ground, that I think is maybe not as politically gratifying as going and yelling at your representative.
Although I do recommend that for therapy, if nothing else.
But you can also give and these organizations will turn it around and help keep people alive on the ground.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's really important for people to know that there are charities where you can trust that your money is not just going to get pissed away on some administrative job or some advertising campaign, that it's really going to go to make a difference for people.
Yeah, absolutely.
And Doctors Without Borders, I know they have a great reputation for that.
But anyway, there's others on the list there, as you mentioned as well, Oxfam and others.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you again for all your great work, Eric.
I really appreciate it and really appreciate your time on the show here.
No, thank you so much, Scott.
Thank you for continuing to pay attention to this.
I'm very happy to talk about it.
And I really appreciate all the attention you're bringing to it as well and bringing this to your listeners.
Yeah, sure thing.
Okay, well, thanks very much, man.
Talk to you soon.
Have a good day.
