For Pacifica Radio, March 21st, 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 author of the new book, Enough Already.
Time to end the war on terrorism.
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All right, introducing Scott Paul from Oxfam, and he's got this important piece at justsecurity.org.
The fight for Marib threatens millions of lives in Yemen.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you?
Thank you.
I'm doing all right, Scott.
Great to be back with you.
Millions of lives at stake in this one major set piece battle happening in this now six year long war for Yemen.
Is that correct?
That's right.
Can I set the stage for this battle a little bit?
Because the floor is yours.
It requires some imagination to really sort of grasp what's happened.
Marib is a place that six years ago, if you had driven on the road east of Sana'a, you might have passed it right by without noticing.
There were about 40,000 people in the city now and about 350,000 people in the governorate.
So local organizations are saying now that there are about 2.2 million people in that governorate and probably a little less than half of them in this city.
Right.
And it's a long neglected city.
Now there's luxury hotels and major highways running through it.
The front line is coming nearer and nearer.
And we urgently, urgently need all the parties to observe a ceasefire because the people who have fled there, they won't be able to stay.
They will have to leave.
And the only place for them to go is into a desert and into communities to the east and south where there just isn't infrastructure to support them.
So one of the many things that need to happen right now in Yemen and one of the most important things is the parties just urgently need to agree to stop fighting there.
Now, hold those horses.
How could it possibly be that this town of 40,000 is before this battle capable of hosting 2.2 million who would then be at risk if they're forced to flee from here as well?
You mentioned something about luxury hotels in the middle of the war in Yemen where at minimum a quarter of a million people have died and at minimum a hundred thousand.
And we all know it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people have died of starvation and malnutrition and otherwise easily treatable diseases in this siege warfare, medieval genocidal campaign by the U.S., Saudi and UAE against these people.
How could that be?
So as I've been on this show before and I've explained a bit that this the humanitarian crisis in Yemen is really an economic crisis.
The entire economy has collapsed and largely because of the war.
So you have to imagine basically that the economic issues affecting almost all of Yemen have put Yemenis up against the brink of famine and disease, except in Marib where some of the energy is being produced and where people have for the first time been allowed to keep the control of the revenues they've generated.
They've been really smart and they've invested that into local development in ways that this is the city has not done in decades.
So wait, I'm sorry, you're saying that once the government in the Ahadi government in Sana'a fell and the Houthis took it over, the Houthis were unable to tax the people of this town and siphon off all their oil revenue.
So they've been able to essentially build up a local economy as a little independent city state there east of the capital, right?
Yeah, that's yeah, that's pretty close to the Marx guy.
I mean, for decades, Marib had been sending its oil and gas revenues to Sana'a and wasn't getting a whole lot back.
And when the Houthis took control of Sana'a and later a number of different, there were a number of different arguments about the central bank and how revenues are split up.
And essentially they got cut off and they reached an agreement with Hadi's government to keep some of these revenues for the first time ever.
And so as people kept fleeing.
I'm sorry, with Hadi or with the Houthis?
With with with the Hadi government.
I see, before the Houthis took over, they already had worked this deal out.
So they had this accommodation with the Hadi government that lets them keep these revenues for the first time in decades.
And so as people have been fleeing northern Yemen and in Houthi controlled areas, they've been coming to Marib.
And let me be really clear, the situation there is not good.
I think a lot of a lot of people who have sort of heard about Marib in the news have imagined, well, maybe it's OK because this development is all happening.
People are living in some pretty horrible conditions in camps.
And you'd imagine that has to happen when such a small city and governor with a low population takes in all of these newly displaced people.
But it's been relatively safe for people.
And and it's benefited from all of this money that that that Marib had never seen before.
So now it's just important to make sure that fighting stops before the frontline gets closer to the city and pushes all these people into the into the desert.
And now so about that, I know there's been heavy fighting near Marib, I guess, sometimes in the city or not quite yet.
The fighting is in the outskirts and it's in the outlying districts, the IDP camps, the camps of where these displaced people are living in those districts have already been forced to be evacuated.
But the shelling and the missiles have already affected some people in the city.
So the battle is getting closer.
And then so is this actually finally because I've been hearing talk like this for years, Scott, is there a reason to think that now that the Houthis have this kind of position of I don't know if it's total strength and dominance, but they're moving much further east in this case against the city than they have in the past?
Is that finally pressuring the Saudis to actually deal rather than just go through some motions?
I don't I don't want to say how willing anybody is to deal.
I mean, if you if you believe the news reports, the Saudis are saying yes and the Houthis are saying no.
But, you know, we don't know exactly what's in the deal.
Right.
We're sitting on the outside.
But what what what is pretty clear is, at least in the big picture on this Marib front, the Houthis have been pushing east towards the city and there's a bit of a seesaw taking place.
But from a humanitarian point of view, the fighting there just cannot continue any longer.
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Now, so this guy, Lender King, who's been appointed the special envoy here, I guess, or what's exactly his title?
Can you help me out?
He's the he's the U.S. special envoy for the special envoy.
OK, so and they say they got him from the Trump administration, but that, you know, he's really an expert on this country and he really cares about what's going on here and he wants to do something about that.
But then I saw him on PBS News and he said essentially what you just said.
Yeah.
Oh, you know, the Saudis want peace, but it's really hard time to get the Houthis to want to negotiate this kind of thing.
It sounded fundamentally dishonest to me.
Now, I guess I got two things there.
If he's essentially saying whatever he has to to make the Saudis feel good about stopping this war, then I don't care.
Diplomacy is diplomacy.
Go ahead and lie.
Call it victory.
Call it whatever you want if you end the damn thing.
Right.
But then, of course, the opposite of that is he's just spinning for the Saudis and saying, yeah, you know, when will these damned Houthis stop defending themselves from the foreign attack against their country?
Those aggressors, they.
Yeah.
Let me look.
I mean, let's look at the big picture with Special Envoy Lenderking's appointment.
I first came on the show, I think, Scott, in 2015 under the Obama administration and we had a very real conversation about how the U.S. was fueling this war.
I then came on a couple of times during the Trump administration to talk about the same thing.
It's too soon to tell exactly where the Biden administration is going to come down in its Yemen policy.
But I think it is a really important step that there is an official focus on what's good for Yemen.
And that that was coupled with at least an announcement, a first step towards taking support for offensive operations in the war off the table.
So I'm not in a great place to say who really wants peace, who really is posturing.
I mean, the reality of the last six years is that no one's wanted peace if it's not on their terms.
And my suspicion is that's true to this day, unfortunately.
But I think it's really important that for the first time, even when there are some things that come out of a U.S. government official's mouth that are suspect, that it's fundamentally about Yemen.
I would like Special Envoy Lenderking and the Biden administration to be much more clear that fuel in particular, because, you know, there are restrictions on all these imports coming into Yemen and not just in Houthi controlled ports, but in Aden, in Mukalla, all over the country.
I think the Biden administration needs to be clear that all these restrictions need to go away and that fuel most urgently needs to be allowed to come into Hodeidah.
There's been no fuel shipments allowed into Hodeidah now since the end of December, and that's causing a bump in prices all around the country.
And it's been really damaging for everybody across all different humanitarian issues.
They have said publicly that they want to see free and unfettered imports into Yemen.
I think they should put more of their back into it, frankly.
Yeah.
Most of this is done out of the Treasury Department, right?
Through the Congress and through the Treasury and through the United Nations.
They have different sanctions and things that prevent companies from importing to Yemen without ever having to come near a Saudi or American ship because they wouldn't bother.
They just go around.
If I may, Scott, that was actually a really important issue that came up over the past few months.
As you might recall, just in the last week of the Trump administration, Secretary Pompeo applied these broad terrorism designations to the Houthis as an entire group.
Right.
And as I've made clear and as Oxfam has made clear to anyone who will listen, it's not our job to judge who's a terrorist, right?
It's a political distinction.
And we all know that everybody involved in this war had committed horrific acts.
But we also knew that the authorities that the Trump administration wanted to use would make it very difficult to get aid into Yemen and would make it almost impossible to protect that flow of medicine, that flow of food, that flow of fuel and other critical imports that was going to come in.
And so we made that very clear.
And we were grateful that just a couple of weeks into the Biden administration, they actually removed those designations.
Yeah.
Well, believe me, I'm very grateful for that, too, and every humanitarian on the planet.
And that absolutely was part of the narrative.
Pompeo added them to this terrorist list at the last week or week and a half of the Trump government.
And then the Biden people have been promising they're going to stop support for the war against the Houthis kind of for the last year, more or less.
And right along with that was, and you better take them right back off the terrorist list because every humanitarian organization on this planet, including Oxfam, was screaming that you can't do this because of the effect it will have on civilians and that they reacted to that.
So you and your organization deserve a lot of credit for that because it very easily could have gone the other way.
Thank you, Scott.
And thank you for bringing attention to that, too.
Yeah, no, that's huge.
And look, I mean, I'm of the opinion.
I don't know how you feel about this.
I don't know exactly what the polls say, but I think most Americans don't have the slightest idea that we've been helping Saudi and UAE and Al-Qaeda wage this war against this Houthi regime that seized power there six years ago and the effect that it has had on the civilian population there.
Famously, MSNBC talking about their ridiculous Russia conspiracy theories all day did not utter the word Yemen for 365 days straight.
So people just don't even know.
They don't even know.
It's really something I've been I've actually been amazed at how much people care when they find out.
I've done a fair amount of of speaking in at the community level, just meeting people in, you know, at universities and churches and wherever people want to meet.
And people are curious, but it's not.
This is the stuff that, you know, people like you and I talk about, but but which hasn't broken through over the past six years.
And I think when people learn, they're really outraged.
Yeah.
And then unfortunately, there's a really big public relations push by the Saudis to say, oh, look, we're trying so hard to deliver humanitarian aid to the poor Yemeni people.
And then they actually can truncate the antecedents that blatantly.
And few will notice that you're the ones starving them in the first place, guys.
Yeah.
And just I mean, you're bringing up another really important point, which is the U.N., you know, had this this big global appeal, right?
Nearly $4 billion.
What it's going to cost to meet the most urgent needs in Yemen.
And the international community basically came up with half of that, a little bit less.
And it's a it's a pretty poor showing.
And look, aid is never I want to be really clear.
And I've been clear when I've talked about this in the past.
Aid is never going to solve the problem.
Aid is a bandaid.
Aid is going to save lives and has been saving lives for six years.
But it's a political settlement that helps the economy rebuild.
That's ultimately going to help put people back on their feet.
In the meantime, though, to see to see the international community come through with less than half of what's needed last month was was pretty discouraging.
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And now can you talk to me a little bit about the situation in the town of Aiden?
I know that there's been all kinds of different, you know, struggles and transfers of power there and different agreements between different groups.
And I guess mainly it's the UAE supported Southern Transitional Council there.
Are they undergoing the same kind of deprivation that the people of the North and the people more dependent on the Hodeidah port are going through?
Yeah, they're they're suffering, too.
People people are suffering, unfortunately, all through.
Nacala is the other major port town on the southern coast, right?
Yeah.
And what you're describing, what you're describing is this, you know, the the difference of opinion between the STC, which is the Southern Separatist movement with the internationally recognized government and one of the parties involved in that.
But you're also raising a really important point, which is, and I alluded to this before, the commodity markets in Yemen are more or less national markets.
For some of them, Marib has been an exception.
But if you can't and I remember I remember talking about this and learning about this when I was in Aiden a few years ago.
But if you can't get fuel into Hodeidah, people are going to suffer the consequences at the pump in Aiden and vice versa.
So anybody who thinks that just, you know, that cutting off supplies to one part of the country only affects people there.
I mean, I hope that's not what they want to do is affect people there.
But if that is what they want to do, they're very, very sadly mistaken.
It affects everybody.
And now when the United Nations says that they estimate that 400,000 children could die over the next 12 months, does that sound right to you?
A staggering number.
It does.
Because if you think about the numbers right now, you've got basically 50,000 people who are in famine-like conditions now.
They're starving to death.
Then you've got 5 million people who are one step away from famine.
And then you've got about 13 million people, which will be 16 million by June if current trends continue, that are still so hungry that they can't fight off the most basic of diseases.
Forget COVID-19.
COVID-19 is having, sadly, a field day in Yemen because people, the entire country is immunosuppressed.
But we're talking about cholera, diphtheria, dengue.
I mean, diseases that shouldn't affect healthy populations.
And so 400,000 kids dying in that period doesn't sound like a crazy number to me at all.
You know, man, I read this great piece we ran at antiwar.com by this young woman about the locust plague in East Africa that's hitting Somalia so hard that a huge part of this is attributable to the coalition war in Yemen.
Because at X university, whatever it was, had a great team of scientists who had a real effort at grasshopper control and really suppressed them.
And because they've been unable to do that with all the resources taken and all the chaos of the war, these hordes of insects, they made the transformation.
They got so overcrowded.
What happens is, she talked about this, it's when their legs rub against each other.
When they're so overcrowded that their legs rub against each other, that's what spurs their transformation into locusts.
And then they spread this plague from Yemen into Eastern Africa, where now many more hundreds of thousands of people are going hungry and worse because of that aspect too.
Even the locusts are attributable to this.
I'll have to read about that.
I know it's also, in addition to Somalia, it's having a big impact in Kenya.
And now across Ethiopia, including in the Tigray region, where just some very, very difficult circumstances are unfolding there.
Barack Obama should be on trial and Donald Trump with him.
And Biden has a very short amount of time here before he goes up in the dock with these guys for crimes against humanity.
What excuse do they have for this?
That somebody who had been to Tehran before had taken over the capital city?
Like they have any authority whatsoever.
In fact, they all signed and ratified the UN Charter, which explicitly forbids regime change and intervention in other people's countries like this.
And our constitution certainly doesn't allow it.
And they're murdering kids.
They're murdering little babies under five years old, starving them to death.
What do you do with a man who does that?
It's probably not going to reach Americans, but I would actually really like to see, and I'm echoing the call here of some of the leading human rights activists in Yemen.
I'd like to see international justice come to reach all of the parties.
My colleagues make a really important point, which is the level of impunity throughout the country has just spiraled.
And when you have an anything goes attitude in a humanitarian crisis, it just means that the most vulnerable suffer more and more and more.
And I agree with you.
The Obama administration and the Trump administration have both had a hand in fueling that impunity.
Yeah.
And, you know, to read Robert Malley, who's now the special envoy to Iran, apparently one of the best doves in the administration, relatively speaking, he wrote about this in the Atlantic when he was having a crisis of conscience about how they got into this war.
And it reads like a play about a farce about how some kooks get us into a war.
Like, you've got to be kidding me.
He recites how nobody really remembers the conversation the same way.
It was just apparently one conversation they had in the Oval Office.
Well, gee, I don't know.
What do you think we should do?
I don't know.
Maybe we should do whatever the Saudis want.
Oh, OK.
I guess we should.
And then he says some people say that the way they remember it, Obama said, OK, but only defensive support.
But other people, they don't remember it like that at all.
And then, you know, we didn't have Congress debate a declaration of war against the Houthis for the crime of winning a civil war and seizing the capital city, which is absolutely none of America's business whatsoever, other than that they helped create the crisis in the first place with their, you know, counterproductive support for Saleh and war against al-Qaeda there.
There's no declaration of war.
In fact, there's barely even a declaration of war by the president.
Obama shrugs, OK, go ahead to his staff and then they implement it.
And then their declaration of war is a press release from the State Department.
Or by anonymous sources in The New York Times.
I think the quote from if it's the same article I'm thinking of, the quote that stands out was, we knew we might be getting into a car with a drunk driver.
Yeah, dot, dot, dot.
But then didn't really finish the sentence.
But what?
Like, but we didn't have any choice, but there was no better option.
But we said, oh, well, it's just Yemen.
And I know a lot of the people who have been doing the administration who were involved in those decisions have done a lot of soul searching since then, because I think they appreciate they made a really bad call with consequences that have been horrific.
Well, not Samantha Power.
She wrote a book about how great she is and how she deserves another job in the government.
And all the liberals love her.
She came and gave a big talk at the Texas Book Festival.
And all the NPR ladies were there talking about, wow, it must be so fun to have so much power, huh?
And none of them had to reckon with the fact of how many babies she helped starve to death in her life.
The lady who wrote a problem from hell about how America has to stop genocides.
There is, I don't remember exactly who signed it, but there's actually a letter, it's worth going back and reading from former Obama administration officials, basically admitting they made a huge mistake.
Right.
And I don't remember who signed it and who didn't, to be honest with you.
It was quite a few of them, though.
Yeah.
And then when they announced that in early February that they were ceasing all offensive support for the war, and then Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, announced the next day that, oh, yeah, no, we meant to no more resupply, no more maintenance, no more logistics, no more intelligence.
We're done.
Which was a huge admission that they'd been participating on all of those things up through that time.
Not that anyone could have denied the bomb sales, but the rest of that stuff, most of that was secret.
And he was admitting that, yep, we're turning all of that off.
But then they said, well, we're going to still provide defensive support.
I interpreted that to mean, and I'm usually not charitable, but it sounded right to me that what they really meant by that was anti-drone tech, Patriot missiles, things to prevent Houthi attacks over the line so that no one will say that they're just selling out their friends and abandoning them.
We'll still help defend Saudi from attacks in their country, but we're not going to continue Saudi support for Saudi attacks inside Yemen.
Did you read that the same way?
And has that held up?
Is America still supporting them after all?
Because there's been a huge air war over Sana'a over the last week and more.
And are the Americans not helping with that at all, you think?
Or what is that?
I mean, I don't have any special look under the hood, but I interpreted it the same way as you did, Scott.
And I think that's the standard that we, I think that's the standard they should be held to.
I don't believe that US involvement, military involvement in offensive operations inside Yemen in this conflict has had anything, has had any positive consequence and has only brought really, really horrible humanitarian consequences over the course of the years.
And for me, the way to actually sort that out, the way to see whether that really is the line they're going to look at is which arms sales they stop and which they're going to move forward.
As you say, you know, if this is a question of Patriot missiles, I know some human rights organizations will say there should be a complete arms embargo against Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
But at a minimum for organizations like mine that work in Yemen that are focused mostly on what's happening in Yemen, at a minimum, you can't be selling weapons that can be used in an aerial or land war that can be used in any sort of offensive nature.
And if they go ahead and do that, I think it's fair to say that they're breaking that promise.
Right.
And just so people understand, Patriots are essentially anti-missile missiles.
You can't shoot them at people.
They're for shooting down incoming missiles, things like that.
But anyway, you know, of course, Joe Biden could say that, go on TV and say that Mohammed bin Salman better end this war right now because I'm starting to get annoyed.
And if he said it like he meant it, that would be it.
In fact, if he called his chief of staff in the room and said, tell the secretary of defense to call Mohammed bin Salman and tell him, I'm getting really mad.
I really want the war to be over the day after tomorrow or else who knows what I might do when I'm cranky.
The war would be over.
That's all he has to do.
That's all Obama has to do to start a war is shrug and mumble something.
Then Joe Biden can end one.
There's a question as to whether that would end the Saudis' participation in the war.
But one thing that I'm really focused on, and you may disagree about this, Scott.
But one thing that I think is really important is that the Biden administration focus its efforts not only on ending its role in the war or the Saudis' role in the war, but on ending the war.
And I should be really clear, that should never be an excuse to continue providing any offensive support to any party.
There's no way to militarily leverage an end of the war.
But the war that the U.S. and the Saudis entered six years ago is not the war that exists today.
And it's going to require a very, very complex diplomatic balancing act to keep things like the offensive in Marib from moving forward and driving a million people into the desert.
And it's going to bring all of the parties back to the table, bring civil society back into their rightful place at the negotiating table and start to pull together something that might resemble a foundation for economic success.
And there never has been one faction strong enough to rule all the rest.
Even when Saleh was the dictator, he was essentially like Tony Soprano up there making deals and trying to keep everybody happy.
And the Houthis would be nuts.
I don't think they are nuts.
They'd be nuts to think that they can just rule over the whole country without having compromise.
They clearly control the capital city and that's not going to change.
But there's no reason to think that they just want to lord it over everyone else rather than make the kind of compromises that they would have to to stay in power over the long term.
And it's up to them anyway, not us.
This is going to be a settlement.
And the U.S. needs to act with some humility.
We're not going to dictate the end of Yemen's war.
But we can play a modest role pushing the parties together.
And for me, what's just important is it's about ending the war in a way that matters to Yemenis, not just in a way that matters to Houthis or Saudis or Americans, but in a very modest way.
All right, you guys, that is Scott Paul at Oxfam.
And he wrote this very important article at JustSecurity.org.
The fight for Marib threatens millions of lives in Yemen.
Thank you again for your time, sir.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, you guys, and that's Anti-War Radio for this morning.
Again, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
And you can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.
