For Pacifica Radio, January 24th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and I'm the author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,400 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right.
Introducing Hassan El-Tayeb.
He was at Just Foreign Policy and now he is at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
That is fcnl.org.
The great Quaker lobby for peace in Washington, D.C.
And he's got this piece at truthout.org.
Biden must address Yemen on day one and move immediately to prevent future wars.
Okay, so Donald Trump's out.
Joe Biden is in.
He was vice president when Barack Obama helped Saudi Arabia to start the war in Yemen in 2015.
Well, the current phase of the war in Yemen in 2015.
And his campaign promised all last year that they were going to end the war.
And even his new secretary of state designee, I don't know if they voted to confirm him yet, but Antony Blinken in his confirmation hearing said that they meant to end the war.
So my question to you is, have they ended the war yet?
It's been four days.
That's plenty of time.
I could have ended the war by now if I was them.
But then the question is, if the answer to that is no, and I'm afraid that maybe it is, then what are we doing about it?
And I know that you, sir, are the very best person to answer that all important question for us here today.
Well, thank you so much, Scott, and for all your really important work and getting the word out about this and so many other really important things in the anti-war movement.
So Blinken has not been confirmed as of yet.
We expect that he will.
There were hearings all last week.
They were able to confirm a few appointees in Lloyd Austin at DOD, Secretary Ann Averill Haynes with DNI.
But, you know, there's a lot we have to do.
Indeed, President Biden did make a lot of campaign promises saying that, you know, he didn't want to support the war in Yemen.
They didn't want to continue fueling the weapon sales that are fueling the war.
The Democratic Party platform is also there as well.
But no, it hasn't happened yet.
And I have reason to believe that it will, but I don't like to take anything for granted.
And I think it's really important that we continue to push on all the places we can.
Now, there are a couple of things coming up very shortly that I think folks can really participate and engage in.
Rep Khanna from California is going to be introducing another Yemen war powers resolution to end unauthorized U.S. military support for the Saudi-UAE led war in Yemen.
I haven't seen the final text, but if passed, that would end logistical support, intel sharing and all of our military participation in the war.
So I think that's really important that members of Congress are hearing from constituents right now that we need to push this forward.
Now, another thing is H.J. Rez 15 and H.J. Rez 16.
Those are joint resolutions of disapproval for Saudi weapon sales.
And that those have been introduced by Chairman Meeks of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
And so that on top of ending the military support with the war powers resolution, we should also put pressure to cut off the weapon sales.
Yeah, that's great.
And then there's also the question of the listing that Mike Pompeo, Trump's outgoing secretary of state, made just in their very last week in power of the Houthis as a designated terrorist organization, which all of the human rights organizations and aid groups screamed and and complained and said would essentially outlaw their providing food aid to starving civilians.
And then so but that's the kind of and then I saw, oh, the Biden government is going to review that.
Well, what's to review if Mike Pompeo just inflicted it on them over everyone's objection a week ago and then call me a cynic?
But I look at that like kind of maybe saying that they're not going to end the war that, well, we're we're going to start by reviewing this whole designating them as a terrorist thing here, which sounds like a delaying tactic on something that's horrible.
Obviously, the interfering with the delivering of aid here and everything, but is only half a step.
If we were ending the war, then you could go ahead and delist them at the same time.
And that would be a side issue at that point.
Right.
What am I missing here?
Yeah.
So there I think you have a lot of the right analysis.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration, they inherited many messes on many different fronts, foreign and domestic.
The same ones that he left Trump, by the way, to be fair, just four short years ago.
But anyway, well, the Iran nuclear deal was in place for, you know, but but you're right.
There's a lot to do here.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in his final weeks in office, really complicated aid delivery as he issued a foreign terrorist organization or FTO designation on the Houthis of Yemen.
The designation, like you mentioned, received widespread condemnation from the U.N., operational humanitarians, former career diplomats, civil society groups, FCNL.
We led a 50 group letter to the Biden administration and to the Hill, urging that this be reversed on day one.
And bipartisan members of Congress have spoken out.
And obviously, you know, Houthis, they do share much of the blame alongside the Saudi coalition for horrific human rights violations in Yemen.
But these designations do nothing to address the concerns.
But like you said, they will prevent the delivery and help prevent the delivery of critical humanitarian assistance to millions of innocent people in Yemen and also really hurt the prospects for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.
You know, and further undermine the United States as a good faith diplomatic actor in the region.
And that had already taken a hit from, you know, so many, you know, destructive moves that we've made, not just in Yemen, but in Iraq, in Iran, just in so many different places.
So we're working to get them to reverse this.
Now, as far as I understand, it can be reversed through an executive order.
They are in a review process right now.
But we need to turn up the heat and get more and more members to to call out this designation for what it is, is something that can plunge the entire country into a widespread famine.
That's what the U.N. is saying that, you know, right now, 50,000 people are in famine.
Sixteen million people are living on the brink of famine in Yemen.
It's the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
But they think if this designation persists, that up to five million people could be plunged into a famine.
And that would be one of the worst famines we've seen in decades.
So we can't let that happen.
I'm you know, I am frankly disappointed that the designation wasn't reversed on day one.
But we need to keep the pressure on and make sure that that does get reversed and that we do swiftly end our military complicity in the war.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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All right, everybody, it's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Hassan El-Tayeb from the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Great Peace Lobby Group in Washington, D.C., and he is heading up efforts to pressure the Biden administration to call off this war in Yemen right now.
And you mentioned Representative Khanna is introducing the War Powers Resolution again.
At that point, that's forcing Biden's hand.
What's he going to do?
Veto it like Donald Trump?
But I guess I'm begging the question.
I'm assuming already that Khanna is going to be able to get this passed and that Pelosi and Schumer aren't going to just defer to Biden to kick the can down the road.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think it's a very important political step by Rep Khanna's office.
I hope that we can secure bipartisan support.
I have early, you know, early indications that we are going to get some Republicans on board, too.
And this is something that, you know, the Democratic Party has said that they wanted to do and that Biden said he wanted to do.
So I think it's going to be very difficult for members to vote against this.
And as we've, I think, discussed before, because of the structure of the War Powers Act, these votes get procedural expedited status.
So it forces a vote upon, you know, 14 legislative days after introduction.
And so, you know, Pelosi and Schumer and others, they can't really block it.
If it's introduced, you know, we have to get a vote.
And so I think it's going to be very difficult for, you know, the House and Senate to not vote in the way that they have in the past.
And I think also given the promises that Biden has made, it's going to be difficult for him to veto this.
And so that puts us in a really good position.
One, I think it would, you know, send a really important signal to all the warring parties in Yemen that the U.S. no longer wishes to be complicit.
And it's not just coming from the executive branch, but it's also coming from both chambers of Congress.
It can't be reversed with an executive order.
So I think that's another piece that's really important.
And it also, you know, really helped the peace talks, in my opinion, if you have, you know, these this united government saying that we want to end complicity in the war, you know, by pushing other complicit states like the UK, like France and others to end their support as well.
So I think all around that's really important.
And lastly on that, I think it's really important to strengthen the war powers as a vehicle for ending and preventing other unauthorized wars.
You know, we we have, you know, unauthorized wars happening all over the world, including in Syria, you know, and I think it'll help build momentum and recognize the constitutionality of the War Powers Act.
It's an open legal question.
It's never been tested in the courts with regards to war powers in particular.
So one of the things that we were trying to do is to get Rep Khanna and other folks actually sue the Trump administration for not recognizing, you know, the constitutionality of the War Powers Act that was passed and the the concurrent.
In other words, their position was he should not have been able to veto it, that because of the separation of powers and so forth, that he should have just had to respect their authority on that, because that law was passed over Richard Nixon's veto with supermajorities in both houses back then.
It's the law of the land, right?
Exactly.
And it's that particular question of war powers, you know, hasn't been tested in the court.
So that's one thing.
So a joint resolution, that's pretty standard on many things that, you know, we support on the on legislation where it has to pass one chamber, you know, pass through committee, pass through one chamber and then pass through the other chamber and head to the president's desk to either be signed or vetoed.
I believe this new one will be a joint resolution.
But, you know, we can get super deep into the weeds.
But, you know, the concurrent resolution has been difficult to bring up.
You can force a vote in the House.
But what we've had trouble with, we passed a concurrent Iran war powers resolution and McConnell, because of some weird arcane procedural rules, didn't even take up the Iran concurrent war powers resolution for a vote.
Whereas, you know, we might have more luck with the joint res, but we still only have the vice president as the tie breaking vote in the Senate.
So that really could cut the other way, right?
Yeah, except for the fact that I believe Republicans are going to vote for it.
I think we still have I think we still, you know, Rand Paul has been great on this.
Senator Young has been great on this.
What about bad Dems going the other way, though?
That's a good question.
I don't think that's going to happen because it's in the party platform for my conversations.
It seems like folks are open to this.
But that said, we can't take anything for granted here.
There's too many lives at stake.
So we need to reach out to our members of Congress right now and make sure that they're hearing from constituents.
I think that pressure is really needed.
Yeah.
So two part question here.
First of all, what we're addressing here is an absolute horror show of America and Saudi Arabia's war against Yemen.
And we started this discussion really focusing on what are we doing about that right now?
But it's not the case that everyone understands the situation.
But I'll go ahead and claim and you can say whatever you want in whatever terms you want.
But I would ask you to describe it.
But I would posit that this war is every bit as bad as Iraq War II or the Obama's covert war in Syria, each of which killed between half a million and a million people and just brought that region to chaos.
And this is just as bad as that or the war across the strait in Somalia, where certainly by now half a million or more little children have starved to death in the famines that have been made so much worse because of the war that George Bush started there in 2001 and made so much worse in 06.
This really deserves our attention.
This really is the worst thing that's happening in the world right now, America and Saudi's war against these people.
Yeah, it's it's absolutely devastating.
We haven't seen this level of widespread hunger in in a long time.
I mean, 16 million Yemenis are living on the brink of famine.
There are millions of cases of cholera.
Polio is back in Yemen.
That had been snuffed out a long time ago, but that's that's coming back.
And we have covid-19.
It's one of the deadliest places in the world for covid-19, one because of the Saudi blockade on Yemen and all ports of entry and cutting off the flow of food, fuel and medicine and clean water, but also because Saudi airstrikes and the war has blown up and really damaged or completely destroyed 50 percent of Yemen's health care infrastructure.
The U.S. is providing the logistical support, the intel sharing for the airstrikes, the spare parts that are keeping these warplanes in the air.
Every time a F-15 or F-16 lands, you almost have to you have to replace many spare parts in them, including the tires.
Almost every landing, you have to replace these critical components of this hardware.
And without the constant flow, the day to day flow of this, the support, these these airstrikes couldn't continue.
And that's not even to mention the massive amounts of weapon sales to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Trump administration, during the lame duck, tried to ram through a 23 billion dollar sale to the UAE and 800 million dollars in sales to Saudi Arabia.
So, you know, we've got our work cut out for us where we definitely have blood on our hands.
The U.N. has said that we may be complicit in war crimes.
And there's blood.
Yeah, there's blood on the hands of of the U.S. because of because of this war.
And it's our responsibility.
It's it's critical that we do everything we can to end this human suffering because it's a crime against humanity.
And, you know, even The New York Times had this incredible story about how in the Obama administration and in the Donald Trump administration, the lawyers in the State Department and the Defense Department, too, in one or the other, I'm pretty sure it was Obama's Defense Department as well, that they had the lawyers had written memos saying we think we could go to prison for this.
This is against the law.
America's ratified these Geneva conventions.
We have a war crimes statute that says that it's a felony to do what we're doing here.
And then they put these memos, they took these memos and put them in a drawer, Hassan.
And maybe they went up the chain.
Maybe they didn't.
Nobody knows.
But somebody finally leaked it to The New York Times that these guys know that they are guilty of war crimes.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's like I said, it's just tragic.
It's horrible.
It's absolutely horrible.
If I may, I'd like to talk about humanitarian aid into the country, because I think that's an important component.
In a 2020 U.N. appeal for assistance to Yemen, it fell about 1.5 billion dollars short.
So amid rapidly increasing cases of COVID in Yemen, health experts are really sounding the alarm that we have a convergence of crises that could completely overwhelm this country.
And at a time of really untold human suffering, we saw the Trump administration make some drastic cuts to aid to Yemen, including a 73 million dollar USAID suspension to Houthi held territory, making up about 80 percent of the Yemeni population.
And I know we haven't really gone into the different factions, but really you have the Hadi government, you have the Southern Transitional Council in the south and the east, and then the Houthis control much of the biggest population centers in the north, which is about 20 plus million or so people that live there.
So and this suspension of USAID funding occurred alongside a 50 percent cut in most of the to most of the country's budget for the World Food Program, the closing of about three quarters of the U.N. aid programs, a rollback of W.H.O. programming.
And, you know, I think I so that's devastating at this really critical moment.
There's all this, all these aid cuts.
And one more thing I just wanted to mention that it's important to note that aid alone can't support this population of 30 million people.
We must end the Saudi blockade that's choked off the economy and is one of the main contributors to the humanitarian crisis.
So without cutting off the block, you know, ending the blockade and restoring aid, it's going to be hard to see this going anywhere in a productive way.
And I'll just note that Saudi Arabia and the UAE must increase their funding pledges for Yemen.
The UAE last year gave pledged nothing and gave nothing despite having twenty three billion dollars to spend on on F-35s and Reaper drones.
Yeah.
Oh, and they love to brag about how much aid they're giving the people of Yemen.
Look at us when they're the only reason that they need the aid in the first place.
It's just completely bananas.
But, you know, I want to point out something that you said at the very beginning here that's such an important detail and important for people to understand that.
This legislation that's been introduced is to end the war that started in 2015 against the Houthis, the words you use was something like unauthorized.
Yeah, because this is completely unauthorized.
But that is obviously implying and taking into account that Congress did pass this AUMF authorizing CIA and military and whoever U.S. forces to target al-Qaeda and and very broadly defined.
And in fact, AQAP was in on September 11th.
They helped organize that plot and they blew up the coal and tried to blow up a plane over Detroit in 2009.
And so that war is a separate issue and no one on this show is endorsing it.
But for people who would say that we're calling off the fight against the terrorists, in fact, the war we're talking about here is the war for the terrorists.
This is the war against al-Qaeda's worst enemies, the Houthis.
And as no one should ever tire once they learn this, should ever tire of showing and explaining.
In January 2015, the Wall Street Journal and Al-Monitor both ran stories about how America was backing the Houthis.
Guess who?
Lloyd Austin, our brand new confirmed secretary of defense at the time, was the head of central command.
And he was bragging about it and his not his, but the deputy secretary of defense for intelligence, Michael Vickers, a former general himself.
I don't know if he's a civilian at that point or still a general.
Anyway, Michael Vickers went to the Atlantic Council and talked all about it.
And the Wall Street Journal ran a big piece all about it.
January 2015, we're passing intelligence to the Houthis for them to use to kill al-Qaeda.
Now, the war we're talking about now began two months later when Obama turned around.
And I know this from talking with the great Pentagon reporter, Mark Perry, over Lloyd Austin's proverbial dead body.
Barack Obama turned around two months later and took al-Qaeda's side, i.e.
Saudi and UAE and al-Qaeda's side.
Against the Houthis.
And we've been fighting that side of the war this whole time.
So there's one reason to have hope, too, is that, I mean, he did it.
He clicked his heels and he did it, Hassan.
But apparently he was grinding his teeth the whole time and was really upset that they had this brand new ally that they were using.
And after all, the Houthis were allied with the former dictator that America had backed for 30 years up until a year and a half ago, two and a half years ago at that point.
Right.
And so he was saying, look, we got Saleh and the Houthis and they want to kill al-Qaeda.
We can do it.
And then this is the war.
You know, it's the other war, the betrayal of that operation that we're talking about ending here.
And that's no endorsement of the war against AQAP, but just the bitter context of what is really being discussed at this issue here.
Scott, that's really important history you're sharing.
You know, I think more people really need to understand some of these complex dynamics.
Now, the War Powers Resolution, they're most likely, if it's if it looks like what SJ Res 7, the first War Powers Resolution that, you know, the one that we got to Trump's desk, there's going to most likely be a carve out for the 2001 AUMF operations against al-Qaeda.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to pursue repealing and not replacing those outdated AUMFs.
And that's another thing that FCNL and the anti-war movement is really focused on this year.
Right.
So but you make really important points of that relationship.
And I think Mark Perry wrote a great piece in Foreign Policy talking about, you know, how DOD Secretary, you know, Lloyd Austin was opposed to the the intervention, the Saudi coalition intervention in Yemen for precisely the reasons you mentioned.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that's one thing we've got going for us.
I don't know.
We're still talking about a four star general turned secretary of defense here.
So nobody be foolish.
No, no hope and change here, but at least, you know, an open mind.
So next on the list here is what about just defunding the thing?
Isn't that the giant elephant in the room and all this stuff about War Powers Resolutions and all this other activism is sort of, you know, kind of avoiding the real point, which is that Congress can force an end to the war by simply refusing to spend any money on it because they are the ones who spend the money, not the president.
Yeah.
And that gets into, you know, an even larger question about defense spending overseas, contingency operations and, you know, using these other vehicles like the NDAA or the National Defense Authorization Act and DOD appropriations.
And that's another place where we were trying to insert language.
Unfortunately, there's just so much momentum around the Pentagon budget because of the way the military industrial complex has, you know, spread its tentacles to every single congressional district.
And they have so many jobs.
But you're right.
That's that's something that we really have to focus on.
Now, you know, I don't have a ton of hope for drastic cuts to the Pentagon budget.
One thing I am following, though, and something that I do have some hope, you know, in a realistic, clear eyed way that if we can get rid, get rid of OCO or the Overseas Contingency Operations Fund, which is about 80 to 100 billion dollars a year.
And a lot of these, you know, overseas operations are paid for by this fund.
Yeah.
The war slush fund.
Right.
Yeah.
It's basically the Pentagon slush fund.
If we can cut that out and I think we have, you know, a lot of reasons to cut that out considering we're in this pandemic, you know, we have budget shortfalls because of all these stimulus packages that have been passed and we can cap the Pentagon budget to where it is now or even go back to Obama Biden era levels, then we can start rolling back some of this bloated Pentagon budget.
And that's something that I think we should also be pursuing.
You know, I would prioritize passing these war powers resolutions and blocking the weapons to Saudi and the UAE.
But longer term, I definitely think those are really important places for the antiwar movement.
Right.
OK, everybody, it's Hassan El-Tayeb.
He is at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
That's the Quaker Peace Lobby in Washington, D.C., and he is leading up the effort starting right now and including you to force an end to America and Saudi's war on Yemen.
Very quickly, Hassan, tell them any and everything that they can do to get in touch with your group and any other of the most important groups working on this so that they can participate in ending this very worst thing happening in the world right now.
Absolutely.
So go to FCNL.org and sign up for the email list and go to the Middle East page and our action page to take action and let your lawmakers, let your members of Congress and your two senators know that you want them to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
And I think if everybody did that, we would, you know, get this get this train moving and our complicity and get Yemen back on the road to peace.
OK, just in case there's a Sunday morning cynic listening out there.
Yeah, yeah.
Call my congressman.
Tell me why I should believe that that really helps and matters.
Oh, well, because it does matter.
And we, you know, the executive branch is, you know, it's part of a system that and they need the legislature to be able to pass legislation and get other priorities to happen.
And that's, you know, that's the tool we have.
Is it perfect?
No.
But I think it's, you know, right now we've got to be as loud as we can and get our members to be as loud as they can to end support for this war.
That's right.
It's all about volume in both senses.
Right.
The total number of calls and the strength of the conviction behind them.
And absolutely, you know, so every individual counts.
It really does count.
It really does matter.
So thank you, everybody.
That's Hassan El-Tayeb.
He is at the Friends Committee for National Legislation.
That's FCNL.org.
You can look up all the information about how you can participate and do your part to help force Joe Biden to end the war on Yemen.
Thank you, Hassan.
Thank you so much.
All right, you guys, and that is Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
And I just published the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
