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 hacked.
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 they army, but 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.
All right, you guys, introducing the humanitarian policy lead from Oxfam International.
Scott, Paul, welcome back to the show.
Scott, how are you?
I'm okay, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
Really appreciate you joining us today.
And, you know, obviously the story is we need an update from you about the humanitarian situation in Yemen.
I guess the first thing I'll ask you is about this new study.
I'm sure you saw it.
Obviously, I know you didn't do it, so you don't have to comment necessarily.
I don't know.
But ACLED data put out this thing where they said at least 50,000 people have been killed in the violence of the war.
Never mind excess death rates from hungry, starving and sick people.
But just in the violence of the war, the media has been saying 10,000, 10,000, 10,000 for years now.
And, you know, when I talked with Nasser Arabi, a reporter based out of Sana'a, of course, he told me his count was up to 50,000, I think more than a year ago, well over a year ago.
And again, this doesn't include cholera or any of that.
And so he was saying he thinks it's quite a bit higher now.
But so I wonder what's your reaction to that development?
Saddened but not surprised.
Even the folks who compiled the 10,000 civilians stat, they knew their methodology was conservative.
And it's a shame that there's a whole lot of folks who didn't know that, you know, who just read the top line and then say, oh, OK, it's probably 10,000.
If you've been following the conflict, you know it's considerably higher than 10,000 people.
50,000 could be right.
For all I know, their methodology is conservative as well.
We may, because the health system in Yemen is so, is so gutted from inside, from inside out, we may never know how many people die from any of the various causes of death.
Right.
Well, and I guess, you know, the excess death rate as it was measured in Iraq, we may not know.
Like, say if we have a peace deal here within the next few months or something, and anything like a return to normalcy, and we send the humanitarian workers out there with their surveys and what have you, the best we can get, pretty clear we're going to find that hundreds of thousands of people have died of deprivation during this war.
Yeah, it's going to be guesswork.
But, I mean, for anyone who's making policy decisions about Yemen, let's just save them the trouble.
There's, I mean, people are, one of our guesses is that 100 people a day are dying from preventable disease.
That's on top of people dying as a result of the airstrikes and the shelling and the landmines.
So just, if you're making policy, stop trying to do the math.
So that's what, 40,000 a year then?
Something like that?
Back of the envelope math, maybe, I'm not sure.
How about just 365 and add two zeros, so.
But, yeah, bottom line is, it's an absurd number of people to be dying in a war of choice that's basically only continuing because there are a bunch of guys with guns, or who command guys with guns, whose egos need to be satiated.
That's what this is about at this point.
Got that right.
I mean, there's certainly no strategic interest in it.
You know, to talk about the politics, I know we've talked about the politics of it a little bit here before, but I think we've known from the very beginning of this war that the Saudi stated goal of reinstalling the Hadi government was absolutely beyond impossible.
So forget about it.
The entire purpose of the war was unachievable from the very get-go, and everybody knew it, and they did this whole thing anyway.
If you're being sympathetic to the Saudis, they have international law on their side.
You have a formally recognized, internationally recognized government requesting assistance, so they have consent to use force, they have collective self-defense if they want to lean on that, too.
But at some point, and I think those of us in the humanitarian world would hope that it's, you know, was way sooner rather than later, we shouldn't be having this conversation now, there's got to be a measure of reality introduced.
And the reality is that none of the parties, not President Hadi, not the Houthis, not any of the various parties or armed groups that have popped up over the past three and a half years have shown any interest in governing or any interest in the welfare of civilians.
So there's got to be a different way.
Right.
Yeah, I was just reading this great piece by Michael Horton, no relation to me, where he's really a Yemen expert, he's at the Jamestown Foundation and so forth, and boy, was he talking about how war is the health of the Houthis, and how here are guys who know nothing about being a government in terms of providing services of any kind, security or anything else to people, and who are strict authoritarians, although he said they're not really like the Taliban with insane cultural restrictions, and they don't really have the ability to enforce real authoritarianism.
But they're basically a bunch of lawless hotheads and have no business really being in charge.
And yet, the more America and Saudi bomb them, the more the people of Yemen rally to the Houthis and say, this is the security force, as Tom Russell said, you go to war with the security force that you have, and they'll take the Houthis over the Americans killing them.
I mean, they derive whatever legitimacy and popular support they have from resisting foreign intervention.
That was their rallying cry in the 1990s and the 2000s when they were just getting off the ground, and that's their rallying cry today.
Foreign intervention is the jet fuel that powers the Houthi machine, and they don't have a governing ideology.
Now, I was just in the south of Yemen last week.
It doesn't appear that the government of Yemen or any of the associated entities that are governing in the south have a governing agenda either.
And so what it all comes down to is, there's got to be a different set of international incentives that are put in place so that people who actually have a stake in the country's future, civil society, journalists, human rights defenders, women, if we're being broad in general, not to be overbroad, have some formal role in determining what the government is going to look like.
Hey guys, check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, by me, Scott Horton.
It's about a year old now.
The audiobook is out too, if you're interested in that, and a lot of people seem to like it.
It's got all good reviews on Amazon.com and that kind of thing.
Check it out.
And guess what?
I'm writing a new book.
I know I told you I didn't want to, but I got away with not doing it.
It's a transcript of a presentation I gave, so the whole first draft is really done for me.
I just have to edit it a hundred thousand times until it's good enough to put out as a book.
So, and it's going to be, you know, basically one chapter on each of the terror wars of the 21st century.
Try to keep everybody, to get everybody caught up there.
So look forward to that and help support the effort if you like at scotthorton.org slash donate at patreon.com slash scotthortonshow, stuff like that.
Well, seems like they had that opportunity back in 2011.
And then Hillary and Obama and the Saudis intervened and stuck Hadi in there when he had no real support.
And that was what led to this crisis anyway.
So I don't know, man.
I guess the bus bombing was, you know, after all the civilians have died there, that one was really a turning point.
And I think it was Nasser.
I didn't talk to him about this.
Nasser Arby, who was the one who identified the bomb parts as American and all that.
So that was a scandal.
And then, of course, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist, has done a lot politically to try to change this.
So, but I wonder, are you feeling that?
I'm going to get back and ask him about the South in a minute.
There's a change.
I'm feeling the change.
But there's a real danger in this change.
You know, on one hand, the good news is that these developments, I think, make a bit more transparent the Saudi and Emirati propaganda that's going around in the U.S.
The danger that's associated with that is now, particularly following the Khashoggi assassination, there are people who just want to punish the Saudis or people who just want to sort of rebalance the conflict to hurt them.
And in a way, that's actually as harmful to Yemenis and as dismissive of the worth and the aspirations of Yemenis as the status quo.
We need U.S. policymakers to end support for the Saudi-led coalition.
But not just to hurt people because a journalist was brutally murdered in a capital a thousand miles away.
It needs to be with an eye towards actually restarting a political process to serve Yemenis.
And people have to be clear about that.
All right.
Now, so going back further into history, I'm certainly no expert, but this is a former British colony.
And I guess I gather that down near Aden, there are so many people who are, you know, quote unquote immigrants, but even generations and generations ago, kind of.
And that they have sort of a, you know, a lot of a separate culture around the port city of Aden.
And that, you know, there are a lot of socialists there.
You have, of course, Muslim Brotherhood and kind of right-wing religious guys, Islamic State and al-Qaeda-leaning types.
And of course, the somewhat Shiite Zaydis and, you know, where the Houthis come from in the north of the country.
And I know that the country was split previously.
Now, my guy Nasser, he says that there are people in the south who are perfectly happy to negotiate and work with a Houthi government in Sana'a if the war would come to an end.
But I wonder, you know, whether you think that that's really right or if that sounds like such a tough road to hoe that maybe they should just separate and go back to having north and south Yemen.
Or, you know, very strong autonomy and, you know, therefore very little to fight about in terms of who controls the capital city.
You know, it's funny you led off with Aden being sort of like a city of immigrants.
I was really struck.
I've now been struck both times I've gone by, you know, everybody in Aden having a story about where their family's from.
A lot of them not from there, from Mukalla, from Sa'ada, from Sana'a.
So people have a very cosmopolitan outlook.
People also have a very pragmatic outlook.
And what that means is a lot of people I spoke with felt very strongly about secession and about going it alone with south Yemen.
But we're equally open to sort of entertaining the possibility of an autonomous federal relationship if the broader federal arrangements were right.
I want to be really clear.
The future, the political future of Yemen is going to be decided by Yemenis.
And someone, I don't have any place outlining what I think that should look like.
Oh no, but still, you know what?
Like anything we learn about your point of view, though, is instructive as to the situation as it's going.
So you don't have to be in charge to make your own call.
But bottom line is like people I talk to in the south, particularly the most vulnerable people, the people who are cutting back meals and have been cutting back meals now for months and years, they say the same thing as the people in the north.
And likewise, people in Taiz who were subject to the Houthi siege will say the same thing as people in Hodeidah who've been subject to a coalition offensive.
They don't blame just one side.
They blame everybody.
And the reason they want peace is because they want the price of bread and rice to go down, not because they have some abstract idea of what government should look like.
They just want to be able to get a job and afford bread.
Right.
So in other words, there's plenty of room to negotiate.
Yeah.
Get trade back going again.
If you're really listening to the people who are most affected, there's a huge amount of room to negotiate.
But the problem is it's a small number of people who command a lot of guys with guns who are mostly out to satisfy their egos.
That's ultimately what this has come down to at the moment.
All right.
So talk to me a little bit, if you could, Scott, about the history of the siege at the ports.
I know there are a couple other cities that are ports too, but it's really Aden and Hodeidah are the major ports, right?
Right.
It's the Gulf of Aden, but it's basically on the last little bit of the Indian Ocean there on the south side of the Arabian Peninsula, and then where Hodeidah is on the Red Sea on the western side of the Arabian Peninsula there for those keeping track on the map in their head there.
So if you could give me, to what degree have either of these ports been open for one trade and two aid at various times throughout this thing?
I'm glad you asked.
It's a super complicated question.
There's also Makala Port, which is pretty easy.
I know, and I'm sorry I asked it in such a broad manner, but I need that in-depth of an answer, so go ahead.
So what Oxfam and others have referred to all of this as is as a de facto blockade, because the overarching story over now nearly four years is that the Saudi-led coalition has imposed such onerous requirements on everything coming in that the delays that have resulted have inflated the prices of the goods so greatly and marginally reduced the supply, at times hugely reduced the supply, that by the time things come in, they're either spoiled, if it's food items.
A lot of these food items and containers are spoiled.
And what isn't spoiled is so expensive that people with no jobs, depending on day labor, seeing the value of the riyal diminished by the month, have no prayer of affording as much as they need.
So it looks a bit different when you consider which port you're looking at.
In Hodeida, there's no containerized goods coming in, even though it's a major container port.
You get some bulk and break-bulk cargo, a lot of food coming in, commercial and aid, but it's hugely delayed.
Now, in Aden, what you get is you also get bulk and break-bulk food, but the capacity for that is less.
And the container goods, even, that are coming through Aden, even though it's ostensibly an Emirati-controlled city, they're subject to inspections in Saudi Arabia that can take as long as six months.
The port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia has now basically become sort of a container depot.
And stuff sits there for six months, and then these small ships come and take it into Aden, and by the time it arrives, it's been so long that half of it is spoiled, and the other half is so expensive that people can't afford it.
All right.
And please help differentiate between aid and trade, too.
In fact, I guess I'll say that I was under the impression, I guess, that all international trade had been halted, and that the only things that were being allowed, at least into Hodeida, were only aid ships, or whatever, Red Cross or whoever else, sending in grain like that.
But then someone corrected me about that and said, no, that's not right.
There's business and open to international trade.
It's not a full blockade on food, but then I think probably the rest of the answer was a lot like what you just said, about how it amounts to one anyway because of the long delays and all of that kind of thing.
At the same time, though, I think I had been told repeatedly that international businesses and trading companies, that they weren't in it, that the only things getting in were aid.
Technically, yes, there's commercial food coming into Hodeida, but, number one, in order to get any food into Yemen, you need to get letters of credit, and you need to procure that food three months in advance.
And the central bank of Yemen has now been under such pressure and has imposed regulations that actually make it difficult to issue those letters of credit.
So that's one thing that makes it more difficult.
Separately, there's a set of processing plants in Hodeida that have suffered damage from the fighting, that are in danger of being cut off.
Also, that depend on chemicals being imported in order to keep the manufacturing line going, that are now prohibited by the Saudi-led coalition.
So Yemen's food production lines are also under attack.
And now that's just during the periods, like now, when technically food is allowed through.
There have been periods, like November and December of 2017, where the coalition just prohibited all commercial food shipments altogether.
So it's a super complicated story.
The bottom line is, at any given point in the conflict, including and up till now, the food supply, as well as the fuel supply, to be honest, are being suffocated by the policies of the Saudi-led coalition, and it's one of the major, major drivers of malnutrition and starvation in the country.
Yeah, man.
Alright, now, so let's talk about cholera for a minute here.
The number, a million, gets thrown around a lot.
I forget, I think it may have even been you that helped clarify.
No, no, no, it wasn't.
It was, I think, McGoldrick from the UN on the show that clarified that, well, anybody with diarrhea, we're calling it cholera, because what are you going to do?
We can't test them all and we have to treat them all the same anyway, and this and that.
And so, you know, that makes me really wary, because, you know, you don't ever want, especially for, you know, the anti-war forces, pro-humanitarian forces here, don't ever want to get caught looking like we're exaggerating something that's already a genocide and doesn't need to be exaggerated.
And I understand the predicament that doctors are in and aid workers are in, saying, well, count another, you know, batch of 1,000 people came in sick today or whatever.
You know, I don't know what you're supposed to do.
But the point of it was that they were still estimating that more than 3,000, I think it was, people had died of cholera, and most of them, of course, young children.
And then that was last year, and I guess the seasons changed and the cholera kind of went away for a little while, but now it's back.
Is it as bad as last year?
I know the Saudis are deliberately bombing, specifically bombing cholera clinics.
You know, that's not an accident when they're bombing all the hospitals and specifically cholera hospitals, these guys.
With American help every step of the way, by the way.
But anyway, so what is the situation with the outbreaks of disease there?
So you are 100% right about the seasonal changes.
We are now back into, the North has already seen the rough season.
The South is going to see the rough season shortly.
There is likely to be a fourth wave in this cholera outbreak.
And I doubt, well, so far it has not been as bad as it was a year ago.
A year ago really seemed to be the peak of the spread.
Absolutely, the Saudis and the coalition have bombed cholera clinics.
Now, the Houthis have also hit cholera clinics and hospitals with shelling.
And it's really, really difficult to say much about the patterns of attacks, except to say that none of the parties give a damn about maintaining the health system.
One last note about the stats.
Absolutely fair point.
We don't want to be exaggerating the numbers either.
And we try to be clear that the more than 1 million, I think 1.2 million now, is some combination of cholera and acute watery diarrhea.
The thing I'd note is that's the standard basis of comparison for the past cholera epidemics on record.
So when you read about past epidemics, and you see a number that's way lower than the number in Yemen, that number also refers to cholera and acute watery diarrhea.
Which is also deadly for the same reason, right?
Exactly, exactly.
And so, because testing isn't necessarily the best way to treat whatever it is, we're probably never going to know how many of those cases are cholera.
Hey you guys, if you're good libertarians, go ahead and submit articles to the Libertarian Institute.
Maybe I'll run them.
You can find out all the submission guidelines there at libertarianinstitute.org.
So I did quit Twitter.
Not because they banned me for a week, but because I've been trying to quit anyway.
I've got a lot of book reading done, and now I'm writing another one here.
And so I'm glad to be done with that.
But I am still on Reddit, but it's a private Reddit group.
Tom Woods convinced me to do it.
He wanted me to do Facebook, but it's on Reddit.
Anybody who donates more than $5 a month by way of PayPal or patreon.com or whatever you want, send a check.
You get access to the private Reddit group at r.scotthortonshow.
We've got about 90-something people in there now, and it's a good little group.
And so I spend some time in there if you want to check that out.
And then, so what do you think about the numbers of low thousands or higher thousands?
Tens of thousands maybe?
Or how many people do you estimate or your group estimate died last year in the cholera?
I think we had 2,000 was the UN figure which we're working off of, if I'm not mistaken.
But it requires a huge amount of treatment.
And my guess is we're not out of the woods.
Yeah.
I'm sure you saw, and I just want to bring it up again for anybody listening.
I interviewed her last week.
Anybody can hear it.
But I'm sure you saw the new report by Martha Mundy that she wrote for Tufts University there about the deliberate targeting by the U.S.-Saudi coalition of...
I mean, I guess I already knew this from what sources.
I don't know, but it's just really, she draws such a picture of where they're even attacking flocks of sheep and pigs in their pens, or I don't know, pigs, I guess not.
Whatever livestock, whatever chickens or whatever.
Hitting all of the irrigation ducts and just doing everything they can to bomb farms, to bomb civilian food production.
At the same time, of course, the sewage plants, the waterworks, the hospitals, you know, repeatedly, things like water.
I mean, this is just absolute...
Can you imagine if Russia or Iran were doing this in a neighboring state to them?
What the U.S. would have to say about that?
What we are doing to these people.
It's just insane.
Yeah, I mean, we're not, because we're not an investigative agency, we're not in the position where we can impute an intent.
But, you know, the study is, I think, points out something that's apparent to everybody, which is there is an awful lot of food production sites, of industrial sites, of health sites, education sites that have been destroyed by Saudi-led coalition bombing.
And you can draw your own conclusions about what that means for intent.
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear.
All right.
So now, I mean, the New York Times is finally covering the famine in a significant way.
That kind of thing.
But I guess, can you compare the hunger and the starvation as it is this year compared to last year and the year before that?
Something like that?
Oh, we're worse off.
Let me be really clear.
What's different about the crisis in Yemen than a number of other crises that I've followed in my career and worked on is when you hear about Yemen in the news, it's because things are getting a lot worse really fast.
But when you're not hearing about Yemen, it's not because families are recovering.
It's not because people are accumulating assets again and figuring out how they're going to generate income for themselves and their families.
They're not sort of building up their coping capacity and improving their health outcomes.
There's no rebuilding going on.
It's just getting worse more slowly than when you're hearing about it in the news.
So a few years ago, things really went off the rails.
And, you know, what was a terrible humanitarian situation even before the conflict escalated in 2014-2015 became even worse.
And every time there's a spike in news coverage, we just get that much closer to famine.
And because of the nature of the crisis, because it fundamentally has to do not with scarcity and also not with drought, but with high prices and low incomes, you see more people pushed to the brink of famine before you see people go over.
Because Yemenis are generous, they help their neighbors, and they try to help the people who are most vulnerable.
Also because international and national aid operations have helped an awful lot.
So now we're at a point where there are more people, now 14 million people, just teetering on the edge of famine.
And it's not clear to me whether there's going to be a famine declaration any time in the immediate future.
There could be.
There's no question that conditions are worse now than they've ever been in Yemen.
This is the largest and now the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world.
It really makes you wonder if I could call ceasefire right now, whether this would all still take place anyway, whether it's too late to stop this.
It probably would.
Because in addition to a ceasefire, what we need to see is Yemen's basic institutions begin to function again, and imports begin to come through without obstructions.
And even in the event that happens, it's going to take Yemeni communities a decent amount of time just to build up their coping skills again.
Yeah.
Well, and all of their markets and systems of distribution basically all have to just start over from nothing.
Right.
Well, yeah.
I mean, if you think about the person who, let's say, has a six-person family, maybe used to have a job in the local factory.
For two years, that person has been essentially dependent on day labor.
And two years ago, that person could get day labor two out of every three days.
Now that person's getting day labor maybe a few times a month.
And there's no savings left.
There's no credit left.
There's no coping capacity.
All of the bodies in the family are weakened.
Immune systems are weakened.
So if there is a cessation of hostilities tomorrow, how long is it going to take for that person to get reliable work again?
How long is it going to take for those bodies to recover and for prices to come down in order for people to afford an amount of food that's going to allow them to recover?
That's going to take a lot of time.
Oh, man.
Well, I guess, you know, it looks like maybe we'll have a start to an opportunity to do something now that we have Mattis and Pompeo saying they want to see the beginning of the end of this thing a month from now.
I don't know what that really means.
It's a good start, that statement.
And you're right.
It's a step change from where the U.S. government has been for quite a long time.
But they're going to be tested.
There are an awful lot of folks who are making a lot of money off this war and who still believe they have more to gain from fighting than talking.
Well, in that Michael Horton article at the American Conservative, he was saying, you think the Saudis are ready to call this off?
You're wrong about that just because you want to.
I mean, they really need us.
And when you say the Saudi-led coalition, that's false.
America is the world empire and Saudi Arabia is our satellite.
Our Navy enforces the blockade.
Our Air Force created their air force and runs it from top to bottom and including the bombs and the training and the fuel and the rest of it.
So neat little invention of theirs like the Brits to use, you know, indigenous forces from one tribe to attack another or something like that.
But that doesn't make this war any less belong to Obama and Trump, who after all, and that's the test, right?
Is could or could not Donald Trump end this war with one spoken command?
And the answer is absolutely could.
He wouldn't even have to lift a pen.
He could just say, that's it, it's over.
And that would be it.
I think the answer is maybe.
I'll be honest with you, I'm not 100% sure.
But I am sure that the U.S. has not used close to all of the leverage it has.
And even with this statement, there's an awful lot of leverage still to be used.
And it's going to take, it is going to take all of the U.S. government's leverage on its security partners in order to forget bring peace.
Peace is actually a long way away.
But just to get a cessation of hostilities between the principal parties in this conflict and start to get the Yemeni economy functional again.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
So I know this is also a little bit outside of, you know, I keep, you're the humanitarian guy and I keep asking about all different facets and aspects of this.
But it just seems so important here to mention about the media blackout all this time on this war.
Famously, I meant to say this in my speech the other day in Houston and I forgot about how MSNBC made, you know, won a record or something, won an award for going a year solid without saying the word Yemen once on that channel.
For all of their coverage of Stormy Daniels and all this crap, they didn't say the word Yemen once for a full 365 days.
I'm pretty sure it was fairness and accuracy and reporting that nailed them on it.
And, you know, it's because partisanship requires that everybody avert their eyes because Obama started it and Trump's continuing it.
And so rather than be hypocrites by attacking the other guy, they're hypocrites by just being silent while the thing continues to go on.
And that includes the partisans who run all the news channels.
Of course, Fox News are partisan for Trump.
So they can't figure out a way to make it only the other guy's fault.
And so there's this terrible conspiracy of silence.
And that's what's led us to this.
And you know what?
The American people disappoint me and you and everybody all the time.
But I'm pretty sure that if people had been told what I've been learning from people like you on this show with its small audience all this time, that the American people would not let it be this way, that we would stop this thing.
But it's basically in secret, in a sense, certainly from the masses of people.
And let me say also, I completely agree with you about the TV news.
Let's also add, there's a whole lot of journalists who want to go to Yemen who aren't being allowed to go by the Saudi-led coalition because they approve all the manifests of the flights in and out.
And there's a whole lot of Yemeni journalists who are being routinely harassed by the Houthis and can't tell the stories, can't get images and stories out of Yemen.
I mean, if you want to put it this way, the conspiracy to silence the voices of Yemenis who are fighting starvation and disease is all-encompassing.
Yeah, that's really sad, especially when, you know, these Houthis, for whatever war crimes they commit and whatever laws they break, they sure are just terrible at public relations.
Everything that they do, when they have the solid argument that maybe they're not the good guys, they don't have to be the good guys.
They're the ones who are mostly in the defensive position here and could invoke the right to defend themselves and could invoke the horrors being inflicted on their country.
And yet, nah, they're just as bad as they could be, too.
When all they would have to do is restrain themselves a little bit and they'd probably be in a lot better position for having things go their way on an international level.
Well, they've done a pretty good job convincing people that they are in the defensive position.
They were the ones who resorted to force during the National Dialogue Conference and ousted, for whatever it's worth, the transitional government of Yemen.
Where I would agree with you completely is that they've behaved abominably.
Well, I guess I'm also referring to the international conflict.
I saw someone coming at me going, oh yeah, well the Houthis fired rockets at Saudi Arabia in the year 2016.
And I'm going, yeah?
Does that mean they started it?
Is that what you're trying to say or what?
Because the war didn't start in 2016, pal.
It's interesting you raise that because it's those cross-border missile attacks that Secretaries Mattis and Pompeo want to insist have to end as a first step towards the cessation of hostilities.
Which when you think about it, it's still, look, I don't want to diminish how much of a change that position is that they've taken.
But what they're still trying to do is assuage the egos of very fragile men.
Because these cross-border attacks, while the Houthis have absolutely no right to do them, they are probably the least damaging facet of the conflict to ordinary people.
There was at least one person in Saudi Arabia, I think he's an Egyptian, an Egyptian expat who was killed in a cross-border attack.
And I am deeply sorry that that attack ended his life and that they've caused terror for so many Saudi citizens.
But the bottom line is the impact that they have compared to, say, the impact that Houthi landmines have or that the Houthi siege of Taiz has had or that Houthi snipers have had on thousands of Yemenis is incomparable.
And so the idea that this is the step that the Houthis need to take show that the process that's going forward, it's really about assuaging egos.
It's about giving the Saudis and Emiratis the face-saving exit that they've said that they've wanted for so long, not about actually addressing the drivers of people's suffering.
Right.
All right.
One last thing, man.
And again, I know this is not your speciality, but then again, you have spent some time there over these years and that kind of thing.
I certainly haven't.
And so, and I know that you're familiar with all the accusations, but what do you know of Iranian support for the Houthi regime there?
Not a lot, to be honest with you.
And I think that's telling in a way.
I am absolutely inclined to believe the media reports that the Houthis receive support from Iran.
I, at the same time, find it, well, I think it's inaccurate to say that the Houthis are Iranian proxies.
They don't do Iran's bidding.
They have their own agenda, which clearly has some overlap with the Iranian agenda.
And even to describe them more accurately as Iranian clients or Iranian local partners probably distorts the importance of Iran in the conflict overall.
And I hope that you and your viewers have been listening to me say a lot of negative things about the Houthis.
This is not a group...
I appreciate that too, because in my telling of the story, you know, certainly, I mean, and look, under the international law and whatever, if you have a civil war, that doesn't mean that neighboring states get to attack you.
So the fact that they did a regime change in Sana themselves and took over that capital city despite Iran's warnings that they should not, you know, that might be bad or what have you, but that doesn't change the fact that they're in the defensive position being attacked by the American and Saudi coalition.
And so that doesn't speak to anything else about them or their conduct really in any way.
And then so it's always actually very nice and refreshing for me to hear bad things about them, because I don't want to sound like I'm their big apologist.
I'm just the accuser against the U.S. and the Saudis, rather than any specific defender of the Houthis.
Sure.
And to tell you the truth, I still don't buy that you can say they're in the defensive position.
You can say that they have inferior firepower.
Well, like in the American Civil War, did France and Britain have the right to attack the North or the South?
Because, hey, there's a civil war going on and we say that you can't have one.
You know what I mean?
It's kind of not their business.
And even under the United Nations Charter, it's not their business.
I guess the U.N. Security Council could vote to do something about it.
No, the other relevant provision is that a government, a quote unquote legitimate recognized government can request assistance and others can act in collective self-defense.
So there's a legal basis even outside the Security Council for the U.S. and Saudis and Emiratis and everybody else to be doing what they're doing.
The problem is that the way that the U.S. and others in the international community have framed that assistance and support, they're basically saying we're going to fight till the end of days with you, no matter how many violations you commit and no matter how unrealistic your political strategy is, you know, if you have one.
So that's my legal reading.
There's also, I mean, and then there's the factual reading.
And the factual reading is a bunch of different groups control different territory in Yemen.
None of them are truly legitimate.
And that's why we're calling for the international community to take such a strong stand.
That sounds like the right position.
I'm sorry I interrupted you, man.
Yeah, but yeah, the international community just has to say, look, enough.
Regardless of who has the legal right to call for what intervention, none of it's worth 14 million people being pushed to starvation.
Right.
Absolutely.
And, you know, yeah, it is all a bunch of legal finagling and definitions anyway about who's legit.
And like you say, you know, all of these guys are just warring militias.
So where's legitimacy for any of them to claim a monopoly on force anyway?
And apparently none of them are able to claim a monopoly on force in anything more than one small part of the country at the time anyway.
Also true.
Man, so you know what, too?
It also sounds like this war, with or without the U.S. and Saudi, is going to continue on in Yemen for a while, too.
Unfortunately, that seems to people who know a lot more about Yemen and Yemenis who've studied their country's history.
That's what they believe.
And at this point, the conflict is so fragmented that we can hope to maybe put together some institutions again and help save an awful lot of lives.
So that's worth a lot.
But the idea of a real peace is a distant, distant hope.
Yeah.
You know, it really is.
It's just like with Iraq War II, where this didn't have to happen at all.
I'm sure you knew about the old New York Times story, but there's this new New York Times story, too, from the New York Times Magazine this week by Robert Wirth, where he reiterating what we already knew.
He says, One former administration official told me the decision was partly a measure of tensions with Riyadh over the pending Iran nuclear deal.
And so, in other words, as I say, refusing to back the Saudi adventure could have damaged an important relationship.
And the risks of supporting it seemed acceptable.
These are the same guys who previously had told the New York Times that they knew the results would be long, bloody and indeterminate.
The war would be indeterminate.
But they did it anyway because they had to placate the Saudis over something that had nothing to do with Yemen or the threat that Yemen posed to the U.S. or U.S. interests, as you could define them in any way.
But simply to make the Saudis feel better, that don't worry just because we're doing a nuclear deal with Iran doesn't mean we're tilting back toward them.
We're still your best friends and we'll prove it to you by helping you commit genocide against these helpless people in Yemen that never did anything to the United States of America.
I mean, that is insane.
People say whatever they want about Trump, but Barack Obama goes down in history as one of the worst presidents ever.
For that alone, never mind his escalations in Afghanistan, his wars in Libya and Syria and Iraq War III and the rest of it.
But just for that, starting a war of genocide to make a princeling feel better?
We knew it was the case at the time.
And unfortunately, and this is maybe, this is probably going to sound like splitting, splitting hairs on a much smaller matter.
But Yemen, I mean, the recent history of Yemen is actually a recent history of Saudi Arabia.
The decisions that have been made about Yemen are really fundamentally about Saudi Arabia.
So it would be a shame if the next decision about Yemen were really about punishing Saudi Arabia for the Khashoggi assassination.
Let's actually make it about the 14 million people who are struggling to survive.
Right.
Yeah, at least start asking the right questions about what is to be done here instead of putting these crazy people and their horrifying interests first.
Right.
Yep.
Hey, listen, man, you know what?
I'm sorry I'm keeping you so long, but I didn't even really give you a chance to tell the world what Oxfam is doing right now.
What's going on over there and how that they can help with that?
Because that's really the most important thing we should have started with, really.
Not at all.
My pleasure.
Well, part of what we're doing is this.
We see speaking out on behalf of the millions of people who we work with in communities all around Yemen as a core part of our mission.
So a lot of what we spend time and money on is trying to figure out how do we stop this conflict?
Or at least how do we get the policymakers and decision makers who we talk to to start prioritizing the survival of these 14 million people?
But we also have reached more than 3 million people with lifesaving humanitarian aid in the past three and a half years.
A lot of that is just help buying food in the markets.
A lot of it is building latrines and helping people access clean water sanitation and hygiene service so that they're resilient to the kind of preventable disease that is rampaging throughout Yemen.
If you'd like to help, please visit our website.
It's www.oxfamamerica.org.
Awesome.
Thank you so much again for your time, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
Really appreciate your time.
All right, you guys.
That is Scott Paul from Oxfam International.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
You can find me at libertarianinstitute.org at scotthorton.org antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow Oh, yeah, and read my book Fool's Errand Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us
