06/11/18 Eric Eikenberry on the Saudi / UAE attack on Al Hudaydah

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All right you guys, introducing Eric Eikenberry.
He is Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Yemen Peace Project.
It's at yemenpeaceproject.org.
Welcome back to the show Eric, how are you doing?
I'm doing okay, how are you?
I'm doing great, really appreciate you joining us here today.
So very big news in terms of the Yemen war here.
One of the Yemen wars, the Saudi-UAE attack on Hodeidah, and that is the major port on the Red Sea there, which has been blockaded to all commercial traffic for three years, but at least has been open to relief organizations most of this time.
Although the Saudis have attacked the cranes and there have been all kinds of different delays, complications and so forth.
But is it still an upcoming attack, a final assault on Hodeidah by UAE forces?
Or do you know where we're at right now with that?
It looks very imminent.
It looks like it may well occur sometime in the next 48 hours.
Conversations that I've been privy to, the UAE thinks that with the Trump administration focused so much on Singapore and the North Korea summit that they can kind of flip this in at a time when opposition within the U.S. government to this can't be mustered quite as quickly as it otherwise would.
It's also very discouraging what happened today.
We just saw a statement from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about developments in Hodeidah, saying that he was following things closely and he wished all parties respect access to the port and work with the UN Special Envoy for a peace process, which is very boilerplate.
And it was missing something big, which is the United States condemns an effort to assault the port and the United States will withdraw or otherwise temper security assistance in response to any attack on the port.
Also very concerning, the last two days we've seen the UN agencies and various humanitarian organizations pull out almost entirely of Hodeidah.
So essentially the city is being set up for a complete bloodbath.
Yeah.
And now, well, so what about the Houthis?
Because they keep being underestimated all this time, starting with Saleh back 10 years ago.
What's their relative strength to the UAE on the ground there at this point?
I mean, there's a lot of claims and counterclaims of what's going on on the ground, who's winning, who's losing.
The Houthis are, relative to their overall historical arc, they're certainly still very strong compared to where they were, say, in 2004 or even 2010.
They control territory.
They control Sana'a, the capital city, which is the most important area of the country for them to control.
My understanding recently talking with a Yemeni political analyst who was recently in Sana'a, was that he's actually seen recruitment numbers in Sana'a go up.
But they are relatively weak on the coast, especially into December 2017 following the split with Saleh.
That's sort of why this offensive moved forward beginning in December.
And they've rapidly retreated up the coast in the last several weeks and sort of withdrawn into the city.
Now, this is somewhere between sort of a collapse of their coastal forces and kind of a more considered retreat to a more defensible position within the city itself.
They are outnumbered.
They don't have an air force.
They don't have necessarily a navy.
But they do have, from my understanding, a core of very committed fighters in the city.
They have been sending reinforcements into the city.
I don't know if an offensive goes forward.
It's likely that eventually the coalition will, quote-unquote, win.
How quickly that victory happens is unknown.
But the Houthis are prepared to turn it into a bloodbath to destroy infrastructure and to invite, furthermore, overreaction from the coalition, aerial bombings of residences, hospitals, of poor infrastructure, of vital transportation infrastructure in and out of the city.
So regardless of how long an offensive lasts, whether it's three days or three months, best indications are, even with a solar core there, they're really ready to raise hell.
Well, I'm not sure I follow the logic on all of that.
When the Saudis and the Americans bomb infrastructure, that's the Houthis' fault?
Yes.
Well, I mean, the argument would be from the coalition side.
And the coalition's been pushing this very, very hard, this narrative that the Houthis are using residential areas as human shields.
And there's an argument to be made.
Certainly the Houthis, they do occasionally bunker down in residences.
They do stockpile weapons in civilian areas, like most guerrilla forces do, to raise the cost of an attack on them.
And this is reprehensible behavior, but it in no way justifies the Emiratis or the Saudis going ahead and going, OK, well, we think there's a Houthi force in this residence, so we're going to pull the trigger on this missile strike and kill 10 civilians.
You saw a similar tactic the Houthis used in Aden in 2015, where they had a smaller force again, and they were being pushed back by the coalition.
And they would post snipers, one to two snipers, in large buildings, like an entire hotel.
The coalition would bomb the entire hotel in Aden to take out one or two Houthi militiamen there.
That's the tactic they're using.
And it's a tactic that the coalition has fallen for repeatedly in helping to exacerbate this crisis.
Well, even that, I mean, the way you're framing it, though, is kind of insane.
The Americans bomb a hotel, and that's a Houthi tactic to get them to do it.
I mean, it's, I mean, yeah, there's some nuance, but you still have the frame from Riyadh and Washington, D.C.'s point of view, rather than just humanity's point of view.
America bombs a hotel.
America bombs a hotel.
To kill two men.
And I'm just, pardon me for interjecting, I'm just giving what they, what the coalition will advance as a justification for this.
Oh, I got you.
Why an attack on Hodeidah is so heinous to begin with.
This attempt to conduct a military assault that you know is going to result, when you know the enemy is, and when you know it's an essential humanitarian, you know that you are going to end up, it's part of the plan to end up taking out vital civilian infrastructures and killing thousands and potentially tens of thousands of people.
This is not, this is why we've been warning against this offensive from the beginning, because these attacks, the tactics aren't justified, but the counterattacks of the coalition are absolutely not justified.
And the planning, as you're pointing out, is insane.
So let me ask you about the port of Aden then, or Aden.
So, I mean, people try to picture the Arabian Peninsula, right?
It's just a big rectangle tilted to the northwest there.
And we're talking about the very, what counts as the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula here.
On the left side there of that angle, that's the Hodeidah port on the Red Sea.
But then there's the Gulf of Aden in this, the port, this is where the USS Cole was bombed, of course, back in the year 2000.
In the Gulf of Aden, it's called there, on the way to the mouth of the Red Sea between the Horn of Africa and Southern Arabia, the Southern Arabian Peninsula there.
But so, as you were saying, the Houthis last controlled that port.
When?
And does that mean then that the siege has been lifted and that the UAE does, and Saudis do allow trade into Aden, just not into Hodeidah or the Sana'a airport?
The Houthis, yeah, to give a bit of context, the Houthis invaded when they were allied more closely with Saleh and Saleh's old military forces and loyalists.
They did push down in 2015 into the south and led a very bloody campaign and attempted to capture Aden.
And there was a very furious counter-attack by local Yemeni resistance forces, local to that area, and also with help from the Saudi-led coalition.
And they got into the city.
It took months, though, to push them fully out.
So the coalition has been in control of the port for the last two and a half, coming up on three years.
And the situation in Aden, actually, Scott Paul, who's the humanitarian policy lead from Oxfam in D.C., recently took a trip to Aden.
And the situation in Aden port is absolutely outrageous because the coalition has seemingly purposefully mismanaged Aden port.
You'd be surprised because it's in coalition-controlled territory, but the coalition is still subjected to the kind of arbitrary delays, or still subjected, pardon me, importers and commercial shippers, the kind of arbitrary delays and secondary inspections that they do to enforce their partial blockade of Hodeidah port.
They even will send an importer that's trying to dock at Aden, they will even send him all the way up to Jeddah for secondary inspection.
And in the meantime, they have an arbitrary and unwritten list of banned commercial items.
And these aren't weapons.
These are things like batteries, right?
That, you know, if a container ship contains, you know, even one container, a ship contains 50 crates or 50 containers, even one of these has batteries in it, they'll send it back for further secondary inspections.
Aden port currently, from my understanding, parts of it, holding areas are stacked high with containers of perfectly usable commercial goods that have not passed.
Coalition inspection measures, even if, and I made this argument in an article last week on low blog, but even if the coalition has a nice, clean, easy liberation of Hodeidah port from the Houthis that everybody is promising that they will have, they're still likely to subject Hodeidah and commercial shippers to these kinds of arbitrary secondary delays and secondary inspection measures.
They're still likely to slow down and arrest economic activity in the country, because I'm sorry for rambling a bit, but just because the Houthis control Sana'a and Sana'a is the economic, the economic center of gravity of the country to where the greatest concentration of purchasing power is, for example, 80% of imports entering Aden port in the South eventually wind up in Sana'a, just from basic market forces, just following the lines of supply and demand.
That's likely to happen with Hodeidah as well.
And that's why they're still, even though the Aden port and that whole area of the South is under the control of forces who are friendly with the UAE, they're still subjecting those people to these stringent measures because they know that these goods and services are making their way to the North, and they're trying to starve the people of the North out.
Yeah, and there's an argument, absolutely, you're right, and there's an argument being circulated that Hodeidah, one of the reasons this will be such a crippling blow for the Houthis is that Hodeidah is a cash cow.
It pulls in tens of millions of dollars for them a month, and it does.
To the best of our understanding, they do sort of have significant rent-seeking or profiteering from just being able to control customs collections at the port.
But if you take away control of the port, all you do is you shift the rent-seeking line, the taxation line, the customs collection line, wherever, you shift it inland.
All you've done is you've moved the front line inland.
And for the same incentive that causes the coalition to now obstruct commercial flows into Hodeidah, it's still going to remain because they know, as you point out, they know that the bulk of the goods entering Hodeidah are going to make their way to Sana'a.
It's amazing, isn't it, how the context has always lost that.
This is America laying basically a naval siege to this country.
I mean, Saudi this and UAE that means nothing without the US Navy here.
We're the ones blockading.
We, the USA government, are the ones blockading this civilian population, deliberately attempting to inflict a famine on them.
Yeah, I mean, American complicity in this conflict and in the way the coalition has conducted its side of the conflict has been something we've been, obviously, heavily critical of for years.
In many respects, it's reprehensible.
You're also looking at not only the diplomatic cover we've given them, internationally conduct these things, the naval support we give them the Red Sea, but it's very likely that once this attack commences, if it commences in the next 48 hours, the bombs dropped on civilian areas in Hodeidah are going to be potentially American-made, American-made precision-guided munitions from Raytheon still to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
The planes flying these missions will be refueled by the United States.
They will potentially be receiving targeting assistance from the United States as well.
So even though the United States is saying formally, officially to the Emirates, you know, we think this is a bad idea.
Please don't move forward with it.
The United States is bound to be complicit in whatever happens in terms of IHL violations, human rights violations that occur during this assault.
Yeah, well, and the UAE is not going to move forward without permission.
They might say publicly that they don't want them to, but if they move forward, that's because America gave them the green light.
Or, and I agree with you, but it also depends on how that green light is interpreted.
What I think we're seeing is not a formal, necessarily a formal green light, a formal, you know, you have our blessing to do this or a statement.
Please go do this.
This is the military.
This is a strategically good idea.
But you're seeing a situation in which the United States is essentially washing its hands, where the United States can say, well, we warned them.
We tried to say it.
Nothing we can do here, you know, as if we are not selling them billions of dollars in weapons, including a potential $2 billion weapons sale to both Saudi Arabia and the Emirates that's upcoming, as if we're not refueling their planes.
It's been insane and frustrating to watch the United States government in this process, because they warn and warn and warn.
And they say, this is a bad idea.
You shouldn't do this.
You shouldn't do this.
But they act as if they have no leverage or no material involvement in this conflict, which they definitely do.
I guess what I'm trying to say is the inability to actually exercise leverage is in and of itself a form of a green light.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Unwillingness.
And, you know, I saw Aaron David Miller, who's kind of a liberal Israel lobby type, but not too bad compared to some of them.
But I saw him on Twitter.
And I cite him because I think he really represents sort of the think tank center.
You know, what's the narrative over at the New America Foundation or the Council on Foreign Relations or something?
And what he said was, oh, hey, you know, I don't know what you're talking about.
This is all Saudi's war and UAE's war.
And this isn't, you know, Obama didn't do this.
This isn't even Trump.
It's them there.
I don't know.
And yet, but we know that that's not true, because even the White House press release that the Obama team put in The New York Times that's based on 17 official White House sources says, yeah, they came to us and asked if we could do this.
And we said, yeah, go ahead.
In fact, it says in there, they knew they knew the war would be, quote, long, bloody and indeterminate.
Can you imagine in a post-Iraq War II era, launching a war?
Never mind Iraq War II.
But launching a war that you know from the beginning will be, quote, indeterminate.
You don't even have a plan for what surrender is even supposed to look like in this thing.
But they said, yeah, but we had to do it to, quote, placate the Saudis after the Iran deal, which we won't get too far into.
But on the surface, the Iran deal, of course, secured Saudi's interest by locking down Iran's civilian nuclear program.
But to make up for that slight of dealing with Iran at all, Obama gave them a green light to launch a genocide.
Yeah.
And one thing I would like to add to that, because I didn't get to it earlier, but something that really needs to be pointed out, you talk about the war being long, bloody, indeterminate.
There actually, and there's no guarantee this would work, but we're closer to legitimate peace negotiations right now.
We're as close as we've been since 2016 with this conflict.
Particularly, we've got a new UN special envoy who's talking to all parties.
Importantly, the Houthis are willing to engage with him, speak with him.
He's currently leading, or maybe he's given up at this point, but I hope he's still trying to broker a last-minute deal that would hand control of Hodeidah Port to the UN, which is what the coalition said for a long time they wanted.
They wanted the port in UN control.
Apparently, and this is from a leak from the Wall Street Journal, apparently the Houthis actually have offered this in the last several days.
We'll see if the UAE bites on it, or if they decide to hell with it.
We've got so many troops there, we're going to go ahead and score this great victory.
But what I want to emphasize is the timing is so terrible, because in just, I think, about a week, maybe 10 days, Martin Griffiths, the UN special envoy, was set to present his negotiating framework for how to resolve, at least to get a ceasefire and to begin some de-escalation by both sides.
He was to the UN Security Council.
This offensive would blow that up entirely.
And it's a real shame, because the United States' policy is to support a political settlement.
I mean, you hear in congressional hearings, you hear it in public statements from the NSC, from the State Department, hell, even from Secretary Madison, the DOD.
You hear that the ultimate goal is to broker a political settlement to this conflict.
And for the first time since late summer, early autumn 2016, the outlines of a political settlement are actually taking shape.
And the UN actually has some leverage and some leadership in this process.
And the Emirates, seemingly with a US acquiescence, are just going to blow it up entirely.
Well, that may be one of the big reasons for launching this attack now, then.
Potentially.
I mean, I can't necessarily speculate on those motives.
I can't refer to public statements.
Yeah, sure.
But, I mean...
Well, let me ask you this.
The political settlement, what is that supposed to look like?
Because, of course, the launch of the war was based on the premise that the Saudis are going to end the Houthi rule of Sana'a, and they're going to put their guy back on the throne.
They haven't backed off of that stated goal since then, I don't think.
But even if Hadi is out of it, do they think they're going to really be able to negotiate the Houthis out of Sana'a?
It depends on what each side is willing to give up.
The outlines, and this is based on sort of where negotiations left off before they fell apart in 2016.
But the outlines about any deal on the Houthi side would involve them handing over their heavy weaponry to some third party and withdrawing from the major cities, from Sana'a and from Hodeidah, in exchange for several conditions.
I think one big one would be a guarantee that they play some role in any future transitional government or future shared national government.
And then once you get beyond that, this kind of guaranteed potential role they would have in a transitional process in a peaceful setting, it gets very murky.
The Houthis want some things.
They want certain political concessions.
The coalition wants other things.
They want some political concessions.
From the coalition side, I know some people feel like even allowing the Houthis to continue existing is a concession in and among itself, although as the last three and a half or three and a quarter years have demonstrated, they're not actually in a position to totally militarily defeat the group.
But the peace process in its immediate sense would, at the very least, if it were to go forward under Griffith's leadership, result ideally in some type of de-escalation.
The Houthis stop shooting ballistic missiles.
Saudis and Emiratis stop their air campaign or significantly reduce their air campaign.
And then there's some ceasefire.
And there's things to criticize about the UN-led process, but I don't think there's anything to criticize about a de-escalation by all sides and a potential ceasefire.
I think that is an uninhibited good in and of itself, and it's a shame that it's on the chopping block right now.
Yeah, definitely.
Hey, listen, help me out with this, Eric.
From the launch of this war, all the humanitarian aid organizations three years ago said, this is the poorest country in the Middle East.
This is a society, which I had an expert actually on the show, Professor Mundi, was it Martha Mundi, explain how it was the IMF and the World Bank who gangsterized these poor people out of their sorghum crops and into global cash crops instead, like more coffee and this kind of thing, which I know that's where coffee's from.
But they really got them right, because, hey, don't worry, you can import your food.
Welcome to the global economy, which is great until we put you under siege.
So this was a country that was greatly dependent on imports, not even especially relief supplies, but just in trade from foreign countries put under strict blockade now.
And we were told from the beginning, from 2015, that you have X many people on the brink of famine, or will be hungry, will be starving, this kind of thing.
And it's been three years.
And then, plus, we have the cholera outbreak, where they estimate as many as a million people had cholera last year, although it kind of came out in interviews on the show.
That meant, well, they were estimating a million cases of diarrhea, and they were calling all those cholera.
But at least 3,000 people died of that, somewhere around there.
But I don't really know.
And then, you have the U.N. saying, I guess, what, a year and a half ago, that, well, they think it was about 10,000 people killed, and that's the highest quote anybody ever quotes, except that Nasser Arabi on my show says he's counted 50,000 killed in attacks, never even mined, from extraneous causes, and being stuck, and the hospital being closed, and the rest like that.
But so, I just wonder what you think we should think about all this.
What's the gray area, or what's the scale?
How do you judge the difference between the 10,000, that's the latest U.N. number, I guess, or maybe there is one that I don't know about that's more recent than that, versus the reality of the situation on the ground, the amount of deprivation, the amount of violence that people are suffering through here?
It's been three years.
Yeah, I think an important place to start there, and it's a very thorny question, but I'm glad you've asked it, is there are better estimates than the 10,000, which, yeah, has been circulating since late 2016 or early 2017, I forget, from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
God, I'm going to butcher the name, so I'll just give you the acronym, but the organization called ACLED, it's a data project which seeks to track fatalities from conflict in various parts of the world, has been keeping a sharp eye on Yemen recently, and they estimated that in 2017, total battle fatalities were about 28,000.
They don't have numbers for 2016, I don't think.
That includes combatants on both sides, but it would also include civilians.
This war is intensifying.
You can assume that probably a similar number was killed in 2016, a similar number was killed in 2015.
We're looking at probably over, as your other correspondent said, probably over 50,000 direct fatalities, but that's direct fatalities, and that's a large number.
Indirectly, though, from this humanitarian crisis, we're looking at numbers that we will never even be able to properly count, unfortunately.
I don't think we'll ever really know the scale of the disaster that's been visited upon these people, but when—I mean, this West Coast Offensive already, for example, regardless of how the assault moves forward, since December, this West Coast Offensive has displaced over 100,000 people already.
In humanitarian terms, it's already a disaster.
And then you have a situation in which you hear different estimates of, oh, well, so many children died.
I think it was Save the Children—I hope I get this right—I think it was Save the Children estimated in late 2017 that so many children died a day, maybe I think it was 30 or 40.
When I did the math out of the broad numbers, it was well over 100,000 child deaths during the course of the conflict.
You're never going to get a—or you may get something of a more holistic picture.
You're never going to get probably exact figures and exact a recounting as the international community should provide and as the Yemeni people deserve.
But you should know that we're talking about a death toll, all tolls, both from direct fighting and the indirect effects of the humanitarian crisis, well into the hundreds of thousands.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing.
It's the excess death rate.
We're going to find out later from the surveys the extent.
And even then, like you say, we'll never really know.
But something that Scott Paul, I think it was, said on the show from Oxfam that you mentioned earlier was, you know, people die of the flu or easily treatable diseases that even in a poor country like Yemen would be fine at any other time.
But because the entire, you know, health care system, the entire economy of distribution of health care is so broken across the country that people are dying of things that otherwise they wouldn't die.
And also just because they're so hungry and weak.
And so even a rhinovirus will knock you right on your ass kind of thing, you know?
Yeah.
And the other thing I would like to highlight is you were talking about it's been at a tipping point.
People have been warning of famine for years.
And it's important to point out that even before this current crisis and the current conflict in the Saudi intervention or the Saudi-Emirati intervention, that Yemen was already experiencing a humanitarian crisis, as you did, I think, rightly point out when you were setting up that question.
But we are really—I mean, the Hodeidah Offenses is being so warned against because we are really at—right now it seems to be an inflection point where infrastructure is so destroyed, where access to commercial flows out of this major port are so low, that if you remove this, international organizations, both of the U.N. and NGO community, tend to be somewhat circumspect or tend to be careful when they say something is famine.
But I think you're really going to see that shift if this attack moves forward and lasts for any duration or if it damages the ports or damages networks of transportation in and out of the city, because Hodeidah itself is definitely a choke point for all these commercial flows.
And so even if the port is spared, any attack in the city and the transportation networks leading out of the city is likely to have the same effect as if they bombed the port directly.
Yeah.
And what has been two or three different times that they bombed the cranes, right?
And then the U.N. had to come and bring in new cranes.
So that's enough.
And you talked also about just deliberately delaying the inspection process and all this until the food's rotten and making it as difficult as possible for people to import anything.
And that's even the humanitarian aid, right?
Because the port's been closed to all commercial traffic this whole time.
We're talking about the hell that they put Oxfam and the Red Cross through to get food in?
Not quite.
So the port has been, for much of the duration of the conflict, the port of Hodeidah has been in what people call a partial or a de facto blockade, in which the secondary inspection measures, these arbitrary delays you're talking about, was really slowing down and crimping commercial access.
But there was still commercial access.
Then in November, after particularly threatening ballistic missile strikes in the Houthis, the Saudis instituted a full-scale, full-on blockade of all traffic for about a 30-day period and only lifted that very slowly.
But what you've seen in the months spent is two factors.
One, after this blockade, commercial traffic to Hodeidah has been severely depressed.
It is well below the levels it was, even in October, September of last year, despite the depth of the conflict.
And the second factor you see is that over the last five months post-blockade, the coalition has placed a de facto blockade on all container ships entering into Hodeidah port.
Hodeidah, just for some background, is one of two container ports in Yemen.
When you think of containers, you've probably seen them.
Think of the major, big, rectangular metal, essentially, holders that can carry so much more material than any other form of shipping.
Those have been warded away by the coalition from docking at the port for the last five months, I think with maybe one or two exceptions.
And humanitarian organizations have pointed this out.
And then you have the other container port in Aden in the south, a situation where containers are being stacked high because they're not meeting whatever the arbitrary inspection process that the coalition has put in place there.
And so, yes, you have a situation where even though Hodeidah has been, quote-unquote, open to humanitarian or commercial traffic, there have been delays, and there has been a concerted effort by the coalition to make sure that it doesn't meet its full potential of what it could be bringing in.
All right.
And real quick, before I let you go, what exactly is this magical thinking that you refer to in your article here at The Low Blog, the magical thinking behind an attack on Hodeidah?
Yeah.
So there have been two streams of conversation about an attack on Hodeidah.
One is an argument over how easy it would be, relatively, to scale the humanitarian crisis.
Some people saying the Houthis will collapse pretty easily.
It'll be a short fight.
We can mitigate the humanitarian fall pretty easily.
Others saying, no, it's going to be long.
It's going to be terrible.
I wanted to table that and focus on some of the strategic claims that have been floating around from a variety of sources, some in D.C., some from coalition sources, some even in Arabic-language media, although I didn't source any of those.
The magical thinking I'm describing is essentially the Hodeidah offensive for coalition supporters is a cure-all for everything that ails them.
From UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Ghargash, who thinks that capturing Hodeidah will put enough pressure on the Houthis to get them to capitulate to coalition demands and negotiate fairly.
To some people who believe that coalition-controlled reports, despite what I just described for you, the situation is an odd one, that coalition-controlled reports, particularly of Hodeidah, will mean the sort of flowering, the springtime of commercial and humanitarian access because they will just be so much more competent and they will be able to invite shippers back and restore the port to its full functioning.
Now, I describe it as magical thinking because there's not really a logical sort of flow laid out for how you get from A, attacking the port, to C, whatever your desired outcome is.
There's no B. You say attacking the port is going to lead to Houthi capitulation, and there's no B of why the Houthis would capitulate.
The Houthis could capitulate.
They could be that weak.
I doubt it at this point, given their control of Sana'a.
It really does seem they're just as likely to retrench and hold on to the most important thing they have.
Liberating the port of Hodeidah will allow an increase of humanitarian activity and an increase of commercial flows.
It will help stabilize the economy.
There's no B there.
There's no B explained of how the coalition is going to manage the ports better.
Furthermore, we have direct evidence from other ports taken over by the coalition in this context, this conflict, that they will actually continue to run the ports poorly and continue to put in these arbitrary delays.
I was trying to criticize this, what I called magical thinking, this notion that an attack on Hodeidah will lead to whatever I want the outcome of the conflict to be, and I don't have to explain the intermediate steps of how I get there.
Well, is there anyone on the National Security Council who wants to put an end to this thing rather than let it drag on?
Oh, I think there are.
I think there's, my sense is there's legitimate debate within the government of people who are supporting this as a good idea, something that I quoted in the article I had written, that, quote unquote, could be good.
This could swing things in the coalition's direction without exactly explaining how it would swing things in the coalition's direction.
But I think there are people who are legitimately cautious across agencies, and I think this is a legitimately bad idea.
I don't think, however, that this administration is in a place to act, given how deeply they've courted the Saudis and Emiratis and how deeply the Emiratis and Saudis have worked to court them back, given their commitment to this conflict.
I do think there is room, however, and as somebody who does legislative advocacy for a living, this may be overly hopeful, but I do think a really strong push from Congress sometime in the next few days, including threats to withdraw security assistance if this attack moves forward, I think could be the one thing that will stop the administration, or it could be something that gets the administration to actually commit to its stated rhetoric on not attacking Hodeidah, and makes the Emiratis think twice.
And there's some powerful senators who are good on this, right?
Yeah, and I think, I mean, I can't say what's forthcoming or what's not.
I am hopeful.
There was, well, there was a statement from Senator, a joint statement from Democrat and Republican, Senator Gene Shaheen and Senator Young last week, saying that if an attack on Hodeidah moved forward, it would be met with, I think they used the word unprecedented, I want to double check that, would be met with significant opposition from Congress, which is a real threat, because Young has been, and Shaheen as well, been keeping their eyes on the humanitarian situation before.
Other senators have made public statements criticizing this.
Senator Chris Murphy, who's been very active on this, made a series of tweets criticizing this.
I think you're going to see public statements come out very shortly from certain offices and certain relatively powerful senators that they are prepared to move and they are prepared to revisit the security relationship with these countries, at least as it pertains to Yemen.
And then I think once they make these statements and if the attack moves forward, they will have committed or they will be committed to some form of action, particularly if the very sober assessments of the humanitarian community and the fall of the conflict turn out to be right, which I would place my best much more with the humanitarians than I would with coalition commanders being interviewed by certain think tanks or certain news outlets.
Right.
Yeah, well, let's hope that's right.
And, you know, let's hope it won't be too little too late.
But it looks like it.
But yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
Eric Eikenberry, everybody, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Yemen Peace Project.
That's yemenpeaceproject.org.
And he's got this one at Jim Loeb's blog, Loeb Log, The Magical Thinking Behind an Attack on Hudaydah.
Thank you again.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
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