All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, y'all, introducing Shereen Al-Adeemi.
She is a Yemeni activist and assistant professor at Michigan State University.
On Twitter, she is Shereen818, and she wrote this one for Business Insider.
You can also find it at yahoo.com.
Biden has merely rebranded the brutal war against Yemen.
Welcome back to the show, Shereen.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks, Scott.
Great to have you here.
So a year ago, Biden promised to end support for the Saudi war and UAE war inside Yemen.
And he said he would support their defensive efforts, in other words, Patriot missiles and I guess Aegis radars and whatever for shooting down drones and incoming attacks into Saudi Arabia from Yemen.
But other than that, we're calling it off.
And they were pretty specific.
Intelligence, logistics, maintenance, resupply bombs, all the things that the Obama and then Trump government had been doing.
We're stopping all of that.
And then they just didn't, huh?
They didn't.
And then he introduced, I think, this language that didn't exist before.
Before it was U.S. support for the war in Yemen.
And then we had this big policy speech a year ago.
And he said, well, we're going to reconsider and we're going to stop irrelevant arms sales.
And he said we're going to end offensive operations.
So he actually didn't clarify what he meant by offensive versus defensive and continued business as usual and just, you know, kind of ignored Congress's attempts to understand what exactly the Biden administration continued to do and what they stopped doing in Yemen.
Yeah.
I think it was in May last year that Admiral Kirby, the spokesman for the Pentagon, said, well, of course, I mean, we're still supplying them with maintenance.
Otherwise, their planes couldn't fly, you know.
And so, in other words, these little princelings aren't going to maintain their own planes.
That's what American contractors and military men are for.
And so but without that, I mean, that's kind of the key to the whole thing.
And I guess implied there was since that was one of the things they had supposedly called off, you can pretty much take it for granted that they really hadn't called off any of it.
Yeah.
And this is what we've been saying from the start, that when we're looking at Saudi Arabia and the UAE, these people have a lot of money, but they don't manufacture anything.
They don't train anybody to use any of the equipment that they bought.
They rely on the U.S. for maintenance, logistics, you know, choosing targets, intelligence.
They are so incredibly incompetent that the U.S. is basically allowing them to continue this war, hand-holding them through this whole entire process.
And stopping this little aspect of support here, this little part there, we're still, the U.S. is still helping them every step of the way.
And without U.S. support, you know, they're just going to fumble their way through this.
They're not really going to be able to stay on the air, you know, bomb Yemen the way they've been conducting their bombing campaigns over the past seven years.
All right.
Now, I'm not sure if you've seen it yet, but you will soon if you haven't yet.
It's a clip of the great Dave Smith on the Joe Rogan show explaining the Yemen war.
And so far, as of this recording, it has over 700,000 views on YouTube.
That's the short clip that they took out of the interview there.
And of course, Dave does a great job of explaining what's going on here.
But it's clear that Rogan, and they've talked about this before on the show, but Rogan, I think, you know, quite well representing every man here, doesn't know too much about it.
Tell me about Yemen, Dave, go ahead, because we all need to hear it.
Nobody knows this stuff.
That's the reaction.
In fact, that was one of the tweets I got this morning was when I said, look at how many people have clicked on this.
He says, yeah, imagine that people would react to someone just telling them the truth about something important going on for a change.
You know, it's kind of gone viral for that reason.
People saying they don't know anything about this.
So you tell us for the people who haven't seen Dave explain it.
You tell us who's on whose side and who's bombing who and why in this war, Shireen.
Yeah.
And, you know, the clip that you're talking about was just incredible for me to even hear that this was this platform gave time for an issue.
So it's so, so important and that it was discussed in such an open and honest way.
And like you said, when Americans, when people find out about what we're doing in Yemen, they're absolutely appalled by it, shocked by it, because every time this conflict gets represented in mainstream or corporate media, oftentimes it's kind of disconnected.
There isn't it's not contextualized.
The role of the U.S. is completely either ignored or kind of diminished as not being central to this war.
So to answer your question, this war began in 2015 when Saudi Arabia decided that they weren't happy with internal politics in Yemen.
Yemen was going through a period of tumult after the Arab Spring of 2011 and various groups were vying for power, essentially, but they were able to sit down and almost reach a deal that was overseen by the U.N. envoy at the time, Jamal bin Omar, and they formed a coalition government that was going to account for all of the different political parties.
And Yemen has a complicated history like every other country does.
But the point was that they were all going to get together and form a unity coalition government.
And then Saudi Arabia decided two days later that they were going to start bombing in order for them to get their own kind of choice into power, which is the interim president at the time who's been in exile in Saudi Arabia since then.
So they're trying to impose their will onto the Yemeni people.
They didn't expect Yemenis to fight back, and they did, and they have been fighting back with whatever little means they have over the last seven years.
So the Saudi-led coalition mostly conducts this campaign through the air, and then they hire mercenaries on the ground to do the fighting.
And then on the other side, you have the Houthis who are, you know, they don't have any control over the airspace.
They don't have any fighter jets or helicopters or let alone even a commercial, you know, just a regular airplane.
And so they've been fighting on the ground.
But in the last few weeks, I guess, really over the last few years, but they've gotten better at this.
They've been sending some drones and missiles to Saudi Arabia and more recently to the UAE, kind of getting the attention of the UAE to say that, you know, we are fighting back on this, on your own territory, in your own backyard, so to speak.
But that's kind of led to a certain escalation of the war the last few months.
But the U.S. is supporting the wrong side.
The U.S. has been funding the Saudi Arabian military and the UAE military and training them and their air force and providing logistics and, you know, going as far as supporting people who work with al-Qaeda on the ground.
And so all in the name of reinstating this puppet kind of government to power.
Hmm.
On that last point, let us elaborate for a moment.
I'm pretty sure you're familiar with this, but I'd like to make sure and I always like to bring this up to the audience over and over again, because I think it really helps ground people in this situation because it is so far away.
People don't even know where Yemen is a lot of the time and this kind of thing.
So if you go back seven years, we weren't quite at this stage of the war yet.
We still had a month to go.
If you go back exactly seven years ago, America had allied with the Houthis.
I mean, not that they signed a treaty, but they were working with the Houthis, the new government that had just seized the capital city there at the end of December into January as the turn from 2014 into 15 there.
And our current secretary of defense, General Lloyd Austin, was the commander of Central Command, a four-star general at the time.
And he had this alliance with the Houthis where he was passing intelligence to them for use against AQAP.
And that was reported in the Wall Street Journal on January the 29th, 2015.
And a few days before, I forgot the exact date, just a few days before by Barbara Slavin in Al-Monitor.
And she had talked with Deputy Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers when he came to visit at the Atlantic Council and explained all about this.
And she got to ask him follow-up questions and everything.
It's all right there for you.
And so then the point is, it was just two months later, not quite, on the calendar two months, it was, you know, six weeks later that Barack Obama stabbed the Houthis in the back and took Al-Qaeda's side against them.
And we know from Mark Perry's reporting at the time that the guys at CENTCOM were howling about this.
And we know from his later reporting that, at least supposedly, that Lloyd Austin almost sent a very strongly worded letter to the president denouncing this and was talked out of it at the time and instead clicked his heels and went along.
And now here he is, the Secretary of Defense, continuing this same war that he knows as well as any man on this planet is treason.
The exact reason that you just said that when they switched from the Houthis, they switched to Al-Qaeda, who are supported directly by the UAE in this war.
I mean, none of this makes any sense.
The U.S.'s involvement in this war makes absolutely no sense.
Why Saudi Arabia started bombing is just a classic case of hubris.
You know, they thought they can just come in and control this country that's an independent, sovereign country, and they could just dictate whatever happens there.
Sure, we'll call it decisive storm.
We'll stop bombing.
It'll be a two-week campaign.
Done.
Here we are seven years later.
But if we're talking about U.S. interests in Yemen, and I really hate to frame it this way, but this is how, unfortunately, in the years, in the post 9-11 war on terror years, countries get looked at from the lens of counterterrorism.
But even when we look at that lens, it makes no sense for the U.S. to be involved because the Houthis were not only the most effective at getting rid of al-Qaeda in Yemen, but they're also the most motivated because they're not ideologically aligned with al-Qaeda.
And al-Qaeda has killed more Yemenis than they have Americans or anybody else in that area.
And so for the sake of security and stability in Yemen, they were, as they were moving forward to catch, to capture the capital, they were having all of these armed battles with al-Qaeda forces and successfully removed al-Qaeda from areas that they control.
So right now, the Houthi-controlled areas have no al-Qaeda presence, whereas coalition-controlled areas, you have ISIS, you have al-Qaeda, like I said, who were armed by the Saudis and have been filmed and documented working with them against the Houthis.
You have a government that's based in Riyadh that can't even land in the areas that they supposedly control.
You have another government that was propped up by the UAE that actually wants to secede from the North.
And so it completely goes counter to what the coalition is even trying to do.
And they've just created a mess out of South Yemen, where about 20% of the population lives.
And they're trying to capture the North from the Houthis, who, you know, many people support them, many people don't, but they have, they are the opposition, the ground opposition to what's happening.
And it just makes no sense.
And the other issue is that the U.S. says that they're worried about Iranian influence in Yemen.
Well, by taking the side of the Saudis and arming them against the Houthis, the Houthis have gotten closer to Iran, not in the way that we like to think about it, because they are under blockade.
They're not able to receive the kind of support that one would from an ally in war.
But they have been driven closer to Iran.
And if that was the goal, then, you know, they didn't, supporting the Saudis is counter to that goal as well.
So none of this makes any sense at all.
And the victims are the Yemeni people.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Well, we're going to do, I'll let you do a whole bit on the humanitarian crisis here in a minute, but on the politics here, well, especially in fact, on the point of AQAP, one more thing was, I'm sure you're probably familiar with the Yemeni journalist Nasser Araby, who used to write for the New York Times back when America was still bombing al-Qaeda there.
They used to like him and what he had to say then, but not so much anymore.
But one time I says to him, I says, well, Nasser, it's in the news that America's going after AQAP right now.
They got a whole new mission going on.
And he just laughed and scoffed and said, you know, despite himself and just said, oh, America's bombing the UAE's militia on the ground, are they?
Yeah, no, I don't think that that's right.
Of course, that's not right.
Or, you know, maybe they do one tiny limited mission against three supposed high value targets or something and let the other, you know, 700 of them get up in the morning and go back to battle in their American armored personnel carriers again.
I mean, if you were an al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula member right now, you would be very confused because on the one hand, you are supporting this coalition and its goals.
You are getting paid by people who are, you know, working with the Americans.
And then on the other hand, you're getting bombed and you're, you know, your cousins and children and neighbors might also die as collateral.
You know, no respect for civilian life.
And so you would probably be very confused as a member of al-Qaeda in Yemen, given the U.S.'s kind of dual role there.
Again, if they're interested in getting rid of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, then don't work with the people who are arming them.
Don't arm them.
You know, don't go fight wars against people who are actually successfully have been removing them from from parts of Yemen.
Yeah.
And, you know, and that's the whole other thing is just think about what the future is.
Let's say that somehow they listen to us and the Senate called a halt to this right now.
They refuse to fund it anymore.
The whole thing stopped.
We still have a whole other war on terrorism against AQAP.
It wouldn't be stopped.
They would just be switching sides back again against these guys who, after all, did try to blow up a plane over Detroit and are motivated to, you know, try to kill Americans.
And so I'm not saying I endorse that, but not not one bit.
But I'm just saying it seems like that's what we're facing here is if if we got what we wanted and enter this absolutely horrifying, devastating war, that at best we probably go back to the horrible war on terrorism as it existed from 2009 up until 2015, you know?
Yeah.
And like I said, there's this idea that, you know, Yemenis are not invested in getting rid of Al-Qaeda.
That's absolutely not true.
I think if Yemenis are left to their own devices without foreign intervention, not only will they sort their issues out, but they will also turn their attention back to Al-Qaeda, who has been a hugely destabilizing force in the country.
There was a you know, they went as far as bombing hospitals and killing Yemenis, hundreds of Yemenis at a time before this intervention began.
And so Yemenis themselves have have quite the incentive to get rid of terrorists in their own country.
And the U.S. coming in and joining people and then going back and arming them is just making things worse for civilians in Yemen.
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OK, now we got to talk about the recent news, which is that the Houthis have been getting some rockets off toward the UAE and Biden is now promising an escalation in the war.
He's promised this now to the UAE and to the Saudis separately.
That's the top headline on antiwar dot com today.
What do you think of that?
I mean, the United Arab Emirates and the Saudis have been saying that they are, you know, working toward reinstating President Heidi to power when it made sense, when it didn't make sense.
That was their line.
They were sticking to it.
They were saying that they were engaged in warfare with the Houthis warfare and they were justifying the blockade because they were saying that we don't want Iranian shipments going to the Houthis.
They were justifying playing, you know, controlling food access, access to food because they were saying that they wanted to starve out Houthis.
They were justifying bombing hospitals and schools and all of that because every time every time anybody questioned them on a target, they would say, well, this is a Houthi area or this is, you know, Houthis are using the civilian structure or whatever it is.
But when the Houthis finally fight back, now it's considered terrorism.
This is the part that doesn't make any sense to me.
And I'm not saying that the Houthis should be sending drones to Saudi Arabia or the or the United Arab Emirates.
But the narrative here is that the UAE now is trying to, you know, get additional support from the United States because the Houthis are bombing them.
But they're not.
They're fighting back.
Right.
That was the point of what we thought was happening over the past seven years.
And if it wasn't war that they were engaged in, then what was it?
Was it genocide?
Because I'm looking at what, three or four Emirati civilians who have been killed and 377,000 Yemenis who have been killed so far.
And that's an underestimate.
So what is it that they've been doing in Yemen?
And why is it all of a sudden that they're getting hit back when they're getting hit back?
They're crying wolf and they're saying that they need to be protected additionally by the United States.
I think what's clear here is that, you know, there are U.S. interests in the UAE.
There are financial interests that the U.S. wants to protect in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
And, you know, they didn't expect the Houthis to fight back in Yemen and they certainly didn't expect them to fight back on Saudi ground or on UAE ground.
And so this is where we're seeing the panic set in right now.
Well, they can always rely on the U.S. media to pretend that history began this morning and they never have to explain why anyone in Yemen might want to shoot a rocket at anybody else.
There's not reasons, you know, other than, I don't know, maybe Islam or something like that, I guess.
Right, right.
There's no context.
There's no, you know, mention that this is not an unprovoked attack.
This is them fighting back in whichever way they can.
And it's still not symmetrical.
You know, the drones have been intercepted almost every single time.
This is still an asymmetrical war where you have the world's richest, most well-funded armies and air forces launching war in a country that doesn't even have control over its airspace or its waters.
Right.
That's what we're talking about.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, let's talk a little bit more about what you said about Iran.
I think if you ask the Hawks, they would say that's what this is all about.
You want to let Iran have a beachhead on the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula where they could close the Red Sea and all of these things.
If we have to carpet bomb and starve every last humanity, we got to prevent that from happening.
What do you say to that?
Right.
Right.
And I have heard this directly from certain Hawks.
The role of Iran has just been so overestimated in Yemen to the point where seven years later, people are still talking about proxy war or this really is a Sunni-Shia war.
This really is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
It's neither.
It's neither Sunni-Shia war, nor is it a proxy war.
Houthis are independent.
This is not Syria.
This is not Iraq.
Iran doesn't have the same kind of interest to get involved in wars in Syria and Iraq as they do in Yemen.
They've not had the kind of interest.
I mean, Yemen is not at their borders.
They don't have the same kind of relationship with the Houthis that, let's say, Bashar al-Assad did with them or the Iraqis did with Iran.
But they have been used as a scapegoat to justify increased military expansion into Yemen, whether it's US or Saudi.
The narrative has been that the Iranians are supplying Houthis with weapons.
Well, first of all, where are those weapons?
Iran is a pretty sophisticated country.
Where have those weapons landed?
Because I'm not seeing anything more than a few drones and missiles come out of Yemen, which the Houthis, of course, have access to.
But also, the country is under a blockade.
It's under land, sea, and air blockade.
So if civilians can't even leave, if a CNN reporter has to smuggle herself into Yemen in order to report from within the country, if children are dying because there's no Tylenol on the counter at the pharmacy and a simple fever could kill them, if the entire country, you know, millions in the country are starving and a child is dying at a rate of one every 75 seconds because they're being starved to death because there's no food coming into the country and the fuel is limited because of the Saudi blockade, then how are Iranians supposed to surpass all of these navies and air forces and somehow bring weapons to the Houthis?
But that's the fiction we're working with here.
And like I said earlier, you know, the Houthis probably are getting some kind of intelligence support.
So I don't know, maybe the Iranians are going on Skype and teaching them how to do certain things with the missiles or drones.
But that doesn't amount to the kinds of support that the other side is receiving from the US, the UK, France, and half the world really with weapon sales.
And it also doesn't really underscore the, I think it diminishes the agency that Houthis have in Yemen and that, you know, they're not Iranian proxies.
They're independent.
But controlling the Houthis, I mean, it's enough for the Houthis to control Bab al-Mandab Strait for it to be a problem for the Saudis and the US.
Iran doesn't have to control Bab al-Mandab Strait.
It's enough that the Houthis hate America and the Saudis so much now, especially after all these years, that if they control Bab al-Mandab Strait, then that could be a problem for international shipping and oil products and things like that that go through the port every single day.
All right.
Now, I don't want to diminish the previous wars like what America under George W.
Bush and Barack Obama specifically have done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, as bad as they have been.
But, you know, I think there's, well, I'll put it this way.
I think there's been a lot of collateral damage and a lot of, you know, careless activity.
I think the Air Force also, they can, the American Air Force, they can devastate a city like Raqqa or Mosul just a little bit at a time and tell themselves that it's all surgical strikes, you know, and it's not quite carpet bombing with B-52s like Nixon in Vietnam kind of thing.
But in this case, you have this diffusion of responsibility.
And believe me, you know, there's more than a million dead for sure around the Middle East.
Don't get me wrong.
But I'm just saying, this case seems to be special and different to me, where there's a diffusion of responsibility, where the Americans are what they called in Libya, leading from behind.
And so it's not our war.
It's the Saudi-led coalition.
Even though we're the world empire and they're the client state, it's their war and them in the UAE.
And yeah, they're pretty barbaric.
But since the responsibility is theirs, somehow the fact that it's really ours and that they're absolutely just, you know, deliberately and in every way, shamelessly violating every Geneva Convention here in the way that they are bombing the civilian infrastructure and the civilian population of the country and have been all these years seems like a special case.
You know, in other words, I'm really not trying to apologize for Bruce or Obama, but I'm just saying Obama and Trump and now Biden have been even worse in this case than any of the others, it seems like, because they can say that, oh, it's all deniable.
This is somebody else's war.
All I'm doing is handing them F-15s and bombs to drop and guys to maintain them and spies to pick targets and experts to do the logistics to run the air traffic and every other, oh, and Navy to help back up their blockade and all these other things, but still the Saudi-led coalition, Saudi-led, you see.
Exactly.
And this is what worried me about this from the start as a Yemeni-American looking at this.
And I remember I was in college during the Iraq war and people were protesting and I was in Canada at the time and we protested our little hearts out until, you know, because we didn't want Canada joining the forces that were going to go invade Iraq.
But there was a sense that this war, you know, Iraq war was an American war because Americans were coming back in body bags, you know, same with Vietnam.
Americans were coming back in body bags and people were seeing the effects of the war here at home with veterans coming back with PTSD or not coming back at all.
But there are no American veterans of the war in Yemen, right?
And that's a scary thing.
And so this is so far removed that it's modern warfare.
We don't have to send a single U.S. soldier to Yemen in order for this, for us to help turn this war into the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
And it's still over there and it's under the guise of, you know, oh, well, we're just supporting these guys from, you know, behind the scenes and we're just protecting Saudi territory and we're just protecting Saudi interests and we're just helping our allies out.
It's no big deal.
But Congress thought it was a big deal in 2019 when they invoked the War Powers Resolution for the very first time, passed the War Powers Resolution and challenged the sitting president on an illegal war.
I mean, they've all violated this War Powers Act of 1973 and they were never challenged on it by Congress until 2019.
And so it does amount to U.S. participation in the war, illegal participation in the war.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's worse in a sense because of the blockade.
So it's not just that they're bombing people who can't fight back.
They are starving them to death.
They are targeting their water facilities.
Just a couple of weeks ago, they targeted a water facility in northern Yemen that cut water supply to 126,000 people.
They've declared entire governorates, entire provinces as military targets.
So what are people supposed to do in that case, right?
They've displaced 4 million people internally because these people can't leave the country.
They're under blockade.
They have, you know, people are resorting to just eating leaves to survive, you know, or just choosing between food or medicine or starving yourself so that you don't have to starve your child.
And there's no humanitarian crisis that's worse than this in the world today at such a large scale across the whole country.
You know, 80 percent of the population is really, really suffering.
And it wouldn't have been this bad if the U.S. wasn't involved, wouldn't have been this bad if people just let Yemenis sort their own issues without intervening in this incredibly brutal, violent, genocidal way.
Yeah.
And it's clear, too, by the way, that, you know, first of all, with the British, that either Obama or Trump or Biden, they'd change their mind at any time, could just pick up the phone and call the British and say, we're stopping now.
You're stopping with us, OK?
And they would say, OK, because they're playing a huge role here with their Typhoon aircraft and their BAE Systems contractors and all the rest.
So but they would do what we say if we say we're stopping a war.
The British would go along with that.
And the president would probably have to be stern with the princelings in Saudi and UAE and say, we're putting our foot down.
We really mean it.
We're we're stopping this right now.
We're stopping all support for you guys.
And their war machines would grind to a halt.
And I remember when the Senate in 2019 voted the War Powers Resolution, which Trump vetoed and they let him and they still didn't defund it.
So, you know, but anyway, they voted for that.
The UAE pulled their official army out, left only their Al Qaeda type militia guys.
And then they sent an emissary to Tehran to start talking right away because they thought, oh, boy, the U.S. Senate wants, you know, they're getting tired of this and we don't want to try their patience.
That's not in our interest.
So, you know what I mean?
In other words, it's very easy for the Americans to use their way the other way and put a stop to this if they want to do it.
And of course, this is all up to Joe Biden, the president, the king of the world.
Apparently, the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Constitution don't have a thing to do with authorizing any of this.
It's just like when Obama started it and Trump continued it.
It's on their authority alone to do these presidents.
And so, you know, I don't know, but tell us, because there is a new effort to get another War Powers Resolution going, right?
Is it worth it or maybe we just need to all put our pressure directly on the White House?
I mean, all of the above.
We just need to be doing as much as possible.
We need to call Biden out for committing war crimes in Yemen after saying that he wouldn't, you know, after saying that he was going to make MBS a pariah and stop all forms of support for the war.
And, you know, his advisors coming into Yemeni American communities and say, please vote for us, we'll end all support for the war.
And this was a big mistake.
And I was part of those conversations with them.
And, of course, I wasn't convinced because I know Biden was part of the administration that started it.
But we have him on record saying he's going to end something.
And now he's just saying, oh, well, never mind.
I'm just going to keep doing whatever I want to do.
But, you know, why would the the this is just so sad that it has to come to this.
But the U.S. has made hundreds and billions of dollars in weapons sales to the Saudi Arabians just in weapons sales.
And then they're also paying them for the contracts that have to do with maintenance and logistics and intelligence and all of that.
None of that is for free.
And so, yes, the U.S. could absolutely use this leverage and say we are grounding you tomorrow.
2 p.m. war is over.
No more of this shenanigans.
Just cut your losses and move on.
But there's just no incentive because there's such a huge financial and geopolitical interest.
And there's no pressure.
There's no pressure from the international community.
There's no pressure from the U.N.
Everybody's saying, OK, well, I guess we can sell weapons to the Saudi Arabians, too, and make a bunch of money like countries like Canada, for example.
But in Congress right now, we have a commitment from representatives Jayapal and Defazio who are saying that they are working with members of Congress in the House to push another war powers resolution through by the time of the anniversary of the seventh anniversary of this war, which is March 26th.
And so I'm hopeful that we will get this support.
And it's been very difficult, to be honest, over the past year to convince members of Congress to move on this.
I think they wanted to give Biden time.
They wanted proof.
They wanted to believe that Biden was going to end this war.
But it's just not believable anymore.
They just can't give him any more grace because he's just outwardly saying he's going to go protect Saudi interests at all costs now.
So I really want people to call their Congress people and just push for this as hard as they can, because, you know, I mean, I can't even describe how bad it is in Yemen, how awful it is to be living in that country right now because the U.S. continues to support this genocide against the Yemeni people.
Give me just a minute here.
Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our donors.
And who wants to stand in line all day at the post office?
But Stamps.com?
Sorry, but their website is a total disaster.
I couldn't spend another minute on it.
But I don't have to either, because there's EasyShip.com.
EasyShip.com is like Stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible.
Go to ScottHorton.org slash EasyShip.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
You know, the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books.
Mine, Fool's Errand, Enough Already, and The Great Ron Paul.
Two by our executive editor Sheldon Richman, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
And of course, No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late great co-founder and managing editor at the Institute.
Coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent Voluntarist Handbook, edited by Keith Knight, a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons, one more collection of essays by Will Grigg, and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagenen and Brad Hoff and his co-author, Zachary Wingard.
That's LibertarianInstitute.org slash books.
All right, now, I'm sorry.
I forget which is which, but there's a continuing resolution and a concurrent resolution, and one of them is supposedly veto proof.
And last time they passed it, which was world historic.
They passed the War Powers Resolution, invoked it.
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 to try to force an end to the war for what it was worth.
But they passed the veto-y kind.
And so, so much for that, you know.
But I wonder if we can be specific this time.
None of that, I forget which one is which, but make sure that they know that we know that not to pass the weasel kind.
And that also, really, they could defund this thing at any time.
Exactly.
They can defund it.
They need to pass something that is not veto-able, you know.
I mean, how can we really say that Congress is in charge of war if the president can just say, oh, never mind, I'm vetoing your decision to hold, you know, the executive branch accountable for launching illegal wars.
But we don't have a bill number right now.
They're still in talks.
They're still trying to build support.
And we need, you know, grassroots kind of pressure to make sure that your Congress people and senators are hearing about this and hearing that this is an issue that they need to support ASAP and not just continue to wait around for something to end.
Because the other thing we didn't talk about is, you know, Biden is now threatening to list the Houthis as terrorists.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Talk about why that's important.
Yeah.
So first of all, as we talked about, they're on the other side of this thing from Al Qaeda.
So it sounds sort of like a bait and switch, but that's not your point.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a misuse of the term, of the designation.
And the Trump administration actually gave the Emiratis and the Saudis what they wanted before he left office and did designate the Houthis as terrorists, this FTO, Foreign Terrorist Organization designation.
And then the State Department, the Biden State Department in one of its first acts in office actually delisted them, which was the fastest delisting of any terrorist organization ever, because they understood and they said that they listened to the UN, they listened to humanitarian organizations.
They understand that this is a misuse of the term.
They understand that it's going to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis and that they weren't interested in doing that.
And so they delisted it before it really went into effect.
But now here we are a year later, and it's under serious consideration again.
And The Intercept reported recently that there are major talks happening behind the scenes considering this designation.
And here's what this is going to do, Scott.
It's going to starve 70% of the population of Yemen, plain and simple, because these people who are living under Houthi controlled territory, 70 to 80% of the population, most of them have come to rely on aid in order to survive because again, they're under blockade.
And when their government, which is the de facto government in Yemen, the Houthis, is listed as a terrorist organization, then banks won't be able to operate in those areas.
Aid organizations aren't going to be able to operate in those areas.
Shipping is not going to be able to come through the port, which is severely blockaded already.
And so it's essentially starving the entire population of northern Yemen.
And that's what's going to happen.
People like me who live abroad, who send money back home, aren't going to be able to do this, send remittances.
Yemen's economy relies heavily on remittances, again, because they're such a poor country.
And all of that is going to stop because of this political move.
And that's what I think we also need to stop.
And Congress needs to say, you know, this is not right to just threaten genocide.
Let's just call it what it is.
The president's threatening genocide.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny, you can't quite say, Shireen, again, it's just not quite true to say no one in this country ever attacked us because, yeah, they did.
But it's the side we're on in this war that did, not the side that we're bombing.
Never mind all the innocent civilians caught in the middle who are, of course, the real point.
Exactly.
We're not going after al-Qaeda here.
We are supporting the people who are, we are bombing the people who have not posed any threat to the United States at all.
And just because we don't want them in power in Yemen.
And, you know, we freak out over Russian intervention or involvement here and Russian meddling in elections.
But in countries like Yemen, we're just going in and, you know, trying to install whoever we see fit at the expense of essentially starving the entire population and continuing to wage war and destroy this country.
In fact, you know what?
As long as I got you here, could you go back to that first point you made way back at the beginning of the interview about how once the Houthis seized power in the capital city in alliance with the former dictator, Saudi and American backed for, you know, 20 years, Saleh, 25 years, when they took back over, you said they started negotiating with the rest of the powerful factions in the country.
And I didn't know this part.
And man, I wish I'd had this in the book.
But you even said that this was overseen by the U.N. representative, Mucky Muck, somebody or other at the time before.
And then the bomb started dropping just a few days later.
Yeah.
So here's what Jamal bin Omar, he was the U.N. envoy to Yemen in 2014, 20, after the Arab Spring, essentially up until 2015.
And he writes about this in Newsweek.
And I also had a personal conversation with him.
And he explains that he worked with the various parties.
So the Houthis took over the capital in late 2014.
This was after months of protests against the lifting of fuel subsidies.
OK.
And so you had the former dictator, Saleh, who was kind of, he resigned, transitioned power to his vice president.
His vice president, Haidi, stood in a one-man election, really just a symbolic kind of election, was given a two-year term, surpassed his two-year term, got another year extension and still didn't do anything and still didn't bring various parties together or, you know, hear what the people of Yemen wanted.
And so the Houthis essentially ended up kind of applying pressure by taking over the capital in late 2014 and putting him under house arrest and kind of forcing him to work on the things he said he was going to work on.
And he resigned like twice during that time and took back his resignation and all of that.
But still, Jamal bin Omar was still able to sit down with all of the parties, the Houthis, Haidi government, members of the separatists in the south, all of these people who were going to go at each other and have another civil war.
He sat them down and they agreed to a unity coalition government.
And he said that he was in talks with the Saudis because the Saudis looked at the agreement, didn't object, but they wanted the signing of this agreement to happen in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia.
And so he was kind of in negotiation with them about when are we going to sign this, where are we going to sign this?
And he says two days later, they start dropping bombs.
And so people who say that the Yemenis could never figure this out by themselves, you know, have no idea what was happening or just are completely, you know, denying what had already happened, that even after the Houthis took over the capital, they still sat down and they were ready to form a unity government with everybody else involved.
And that's what's going to happen in the tribal society.
The intervention, if the intervention ends, foreign intervention ends, the Emiratis and the Saudis and the Americans are no longer bombing Yemenis.
Well, Yemenis are going to have to live with each other at the end of the day, and they will form whatever alliance of convenience is necessary for them to continue living in that country together.
So that's kind of, for us as Yemenis, that's really sad for us to know that there could have been, you know, hope for a coalition government, yet here we are now and the Houthis have gotten stronger than they ever were before and because they're seen now as like the only ones kind of left behind who are fighting this intervention.
Well, we're Twitter friends, so tweet that Newsweek article out and so I can read it and retweet it.
I just searched Newsweek and I'm actually surprised actually how much coverage they have of Yemen at Newsweek.com right now.
And I can't find the one you're talking about, but I'd love to read about that.
And I knew that one of the things was the Houthis had proposed creating a new lower house of parliament to represent women and the youth, I think is the way that they put it at the time, which that's pretty progressive for Yemen, right?
They have a proposal like that, as they put it.
But again, I mean, look, I'm not supportive of any party in Yemen.
I don't live there, but I think what we really want to see as Yemenis is Yemenis decide whoever is best for them on the ballot poll, you know, through elections.
Yemen is not Saudi Arabia or Oman or all of its neighbors are monarchies, by the way.
All of these people bombing Yemen, the Saudis, the Emiratis at the time, the Qataris, whoever, Bahrain, Kuwait, they're all monarchies.
Yemen is the only republic in that Arabian peninsula.
And so there's a spirit of democracy and they will go to the ballot poll and make their voices heard.
And if they choose the Houthis, they choose the Houthis.
If they don't, they don't.
But there's an indication that when the Arab Spring broke out, I mean, the Houthis and Salah's forces have been fighting for quite a while.
But when the Arab Spring broke out, the Houthis, you know, I guess slung their rifles on their back or left them at home.
And they came out to protest peacefully in the town square with everybody else, right?
Yeah, they joined the peaceful protests in 2011.
They're not the ones who turned the protests deadly.
The Islah party, the Islamist party in Yemen who were allies, longtime allies of Salah are the ones who kind of co-opted the people's revolution and turned it into an armed battle between themselves and Salah.
But, you know, the interesting thing is that even with the Houthis and Salah, the relationship, and this is what I was saying about Yemeni alliances, Yemenis are very pragmatic people.
Salah and the Houthis had fought all of these wars in the early 2000s.
And yet they were still able to work together, at least for a time before they turned on each other again and killed Salah.
But at least for the first couple, two and a half years, they were working together alongside each other against society-led coalition.
So Salah even joined the Houthis and worked with them, mobilized factions of the Yemeni army that he controlled, even though he was no longer president.
They fought this occupation together for a while.
Yeah.
It's such a shame.
I mean, just to think, the worst thing in the world, completely unnecessary in every way, farcically treasonous when you look at the growth of AQAP here.
It's just unbelievable, like some bad movie.
And then the humanitarian crisis, the cholera outbreaks, and all the targeting of the civilian infrastructure, all combined with the virtual media blackout and ignorance of the population of the country responsible for it all.
And here's something we hadn't talked about, which I guess we'll have to leave it here if you want to comment, is this stalemate of the war, where they're fighting give and take back and forth over Marib and a few towns around there, back and forth.
Neither side really wants to quit.
The Houthis are more or less ascendant.
They're certainly not beaten so badly that they have to come on their knees to Saudi terms.
And the Saudis are losing, but they're losing in somebody else's country where they're not really in that much danger to take a couple of rockets here or there.
And so they can keep pumping oil out of the ground and paying for this war for the time being.
And see, not all Biden's just going to let them do it.
And so everybody has an incentive to just keep the damn thing going.
No one with power is saying that we need a new UN Security Council resolution or we need to repeal the old one or we need to kick start a brand new effort here.
I mean, it really is up to you to do this.
Because the old UN Security Council resolution was written by the Saudis and then wasn't vetoed by the Russians like people expected.
So it literally gave power to the Saudis to do as they please in Yemen, written by the Saudis and passed unchallenged.
And there's no representation for Yemenis.
Yemeni citizens are just sitting there getting bombed and starved.
And the whole world keeps thinking, oh, this is a great idea because they're either making hundreds of billions of dollars out of it.
Or like you said, it's not on Saudi ground for the most part.
You know how many Saudi civilians have died?
A couple maybe, right?
And so they're not threatened by anything.
The UAE now is freaking out because the Houthis sending drones to UAE means that they are putting this whole stability into question, the UAE stability into question.
But it's like sunk cost fallacy, right?
The Saudis have already put so much effort into this.
So much money has gone.
They're hemorrhaging cash, $200 million a day by some estimates.
But they feel like how can we possibly lose to a group of people who don't even have an aircraft?
And so let's just keep going.
Let's just keep going.
Let's just keep going.
And they don't understand that the Houthis have nothing else to lose.
And so they're just going to fight until there's nobody left, you know, until there are no Houthis left.
And they like to think that the Houthis are a small group, but they're not.
There are probably millions of people in Yemen who support them at this point, who probably didn't before the war, by the way.
And so it's just a matter of sovereignty or death for people in Yemen.
And for the Saudis, as long as there's cash, they're going to continue doing what they're doing.
And so it's really up to us here in the U.S. to stop our own government involvement.
Yeah.
All right.
Last word, what can people do to get involved?
Which URL should they click on?
What number should they call?
Give them some good advice.
1-833-STOP-WAR.
And then talk to your congressperson and tell them to support the War Powers Act that's about to be a resolution that's about to be introduced by Jayapal and Defazio.
Basically, the basic message is stop intervening in Yemen.
We're not asking for the U.S. to do anything.
We're asking the U.S. to stop doing what they're doing in Yemen.
But 1-833-STOP-WAR is a good resource.
And then every75seconds.org.
And the 75 is in numbers.
So every75seconds.org will connect people to other organizations that are working to end U.S. involvement in this war.
Excellent.
OK, thank you so much for your time on the show.
Again, I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
I appreciate you continuing to cover this in such depth.
All right, you guys.
That is Shireen Al-Adeemi.
She is a Yemeni activist and assistant professor at Michigan State University.
And read this important article at yahoo.com.
Biden has merely rebranded the brutal war against Yemen.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
