For Pacifica Radio, March 29th, 2020.
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 book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Very happy to welcome back to the show Hasan El-Tayyab.
He is the lead lobbyist for the Friends Committee on National Legislation's Middle East Policy and Affairs Division.
And he has this very important article in The Hill.
After five years of war in Yemen, American complicity must end.
Welcome back to the show, Hasan.
How are you, sir?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
So happy to be back.
Great, very happy to have you here.
And this is the most important story in the world.
And there's some kind of crazy ratio here between the level of violence and cruelty and the total media blackout and the lack of American awareness that this war is even going on.
After all, since Obama started this war back five years ago, we've been leading from behind in this Saudi-led coalition, as the media refers to it when they refer to it at all, even though America is the world empire and Saudi Arabia is our client state.
So could you please take us back five years and explain what in the world is this war?
Where did it come from?
And how are we still fighting it?
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.
So March 25th was the fifth anniversary of the brutal war in Yemen or the US-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen.
So that's when officially the US got involved with the Saudi coalition to do airstrikes and a naval blockade around Yemen.
And the goal was to oust the Houthi rebels and restore Yemen's ousted President Hadi back to power.
And they got early and generous support from our military and through mid-air refueling, targeting assistance, weapons sales, logistical support.
And what has unfolded is the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
14 million people at risk of famine, 24 million people rely on food assistance for survival, over 85,000 children under the age of five perished from malnutrition, 2 million people infected with cholera.
I mean, I could go on and on and this obviously goes without saying, but in the middle of COVID-19, the situation in Yemen is probably one of the most fragile on earth.
And while they don't have an outbreak yet, this five-year-long war has set up the conditions for what could be an apocalypse of Yemen.
It's just a very scary situation.
Yeah, and now this is the poorest country in the Middle East.
I guess they have some oil, but even before this war broke out, very little of it developed and for sale for any kind of real profit on the open market.
All the countries on the Arabian Peninsula, Oman and the rest, this is by far the very poorest, correct?
Yeah, it's the poorest country in the Middle East and it's just been devastating to watch, Scott, as the U.S. supports these war crimes going on in our name.
And now, again, for people who are just not familiar with this, it's not your fault in a sense.
I mean, it's all of our responsibility to care and know about what our government is doing around the world, but there has been an almost total news blackout.
If you don't know that you're supposed to be following this story, you could go year in and year out and not even know that America is at war in Yemen.
And yet, this is absolutely as bad as Iraq War II.
This is just as destructive and cruel.
The amount of suffering and grief created by this war is no less than the very worst of what this government has done in this century.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And I will say things have progressed as soon as Congress started taking up the issue.
And the last time I think I was on, we were talking about the Yemen War Powers Resolution and different congressional vehicles that were bipartisan.
And we've seen progress as the U.S. and our leaders have tried to cut off that unauthorized military support.
I mean, it's no coincidence in my mind that the Stockholm Agreement in December 13, 2018 paved the way for the ceasefire in Hodeidah City, which is Yemen's largest port.
And that was signed the same day that Congress passed the Yemen War Powers Resolution to end military support for the coalition.
Granted, that just happened in the Senate, so we didn't get a bicameral passage.
But still, as Congress has forced more and more of these votes in the Defense Policy Bill, the NDAA, we've seen quite a bit of progress.
We saw the UAE draw down its forces in Yemen.
We saw congressional pressure help spur a reduction in cross-border violence between Saudi and the Houthis, and even a revival of negotiations between the warring parties.
But as it stands, things are still really desperate, and it's all the more urgent right now, in my opinion, to end U.S. complicity in this war.
Absolutely.
Now, it's also so important, and I know that you helped to a great degree to make that happen, but it is just something to behold, something I'd never thought I'd see in my life, that the U.S. Congress, both houses at the same time and working together and with the same language to make sure, passed resolutions invoking the War Powers Act in order to try to force Donald Trump to end this war.
And we should stop and point out that this effort was led in the Senate by a current presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, who many of us, including me, do not support for a great many reasons, but this is absolutely probably his finest moment and the most important thing he's ever done, and I might as well take a moment, too, to slam Rand Paul, who knew about this and was good on it before he was bad on it and used to talk about it before he became silent, and that's obviously because Donald Trump lied and promised him, don't worry, I'll give you Afghanistan and Syria if you just shut up about Yemen, and so he did.
And so instead of it being Sanders and Paul, who were opposite on everything except this most important issue, it was Sanders and, I don't know, Mike Lee and a couple of others who don't have the prominence and it really, in terms of public relations and all of that, is a major detriment that Rand Paul didn't have the moral courage to stand up with the other leaders in the Senate when they were actually taking the political risk and making the hard choice to push this thing, which, of course, Donald Trump turned around and vetoed, but he might not have been able to if Rand Paul had really been one of the major leaders of it in the Senate and had done everything he could to make a big deal about this and to help people to understand just how bad it is.
And so the war continues.
Trump just vetoed it, pretended like it never happened.
Yeah, I mean, to Rand's credit, he did vote in favor of the Yemen War Powers Resolution, but with a situation this desperate, there's not enough any of these folks can do.
They should be pounding the pavement every day, making phone calls, making this a top priority because it is the world's worst humanitarian crisis on the planet and the onus falls on Congress to do something when the executive branch is failing to act because Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is absolutely clear that only Congress has the power to declare war and our Constitution is designed to let the people through their elected representatives decide when our nation goes to war.
And that's really important.
I can't stress that enough.
And Congress has not authorized military action in Yemen and we should not be there.
We should not be permitting funds to be used in the fighting.
Right, and just think if he had made this his top priority and had done nothing but scream and yell about it and do everything he can to get on TV and teach people about the reality of the crisis.
And you know what?
And because he is the most prominent anti-interventionist member of the Republican Party and in the U.S. Senate, and here is a guy who absolutely knows the score.
It's not like he can plead some kind of ignorance.
I'll point to an appearance that he made on the Neil Cavuto show on Fox News a couple of years back.
Rand Paul said to him, listen up to me very carefully here, Neil.
If we succeed in accomplishing our goal of driving the Houthi regime out of power in Sana'a, they could be replaced by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The guys that bombed the coal.
The guys that helped coordinate the September 11th attack.
The guys that did the attempted underpants bombing over Detroit on Christmas day 2009.
The actual enemies of the American people.
That's whose side we're fighting on here.
Do you understand?
And Neil Cavuto actually learned something from Rand and said, oh, I didn't really realize that that was the danger that we were running.
If we overthrow this Shiite faction, we might put the very worst Sunni faction in power, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood if we're lucky, right?
I mean, this is nuts.
Yeah, I mean, it goes a little bit beyond that even because Saudi Arabia is actually giving weapons training and funding to Al-Qaeda cells in their anti-Houthi army now.
And so we need to think really carefully about how we send weapons abroad to really make sure that we have good, solid end-use monitoring.
I mean, as a Quaker organization, we don't support any of that, but the very least, we should know where the weapons are going.
And right now, the weapons we're sending to Saudi Arabia are falling into the hands of Al-Qaeda Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, and I think that's a really tragic mistake and something that we're gonna be suffering for in the long run when we let these weapons get into the hands of terror groups like Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, and for those not familiar, there's just no question that this is the case, that even when you're not talking about direct support, the war has created the space for Al-Qaeda to take over military bases and seize all the armories.
They even had total control over a couple of major towns and were collecting taxes and really ruling and had grown, you know, if Obama's drone war against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was growing them with every bomb attack against them.
Well, just think of how much advantage they've taken when we actually switched sides and took Al-Qaeda's side against the Houthis here, and then, as you're referring to, there's also, of course, the direct support as CNN reported last year, and I know people are rolling their eyes at CNN, the liars, but in this case, it was absolutely credible reporting and backed up by the AP and the rest, where here are Al-Qaeda guys driving around in American MRAP, armored vehicles, and are being outright armed and supplied and inducted right into the UAE's forces on the ground as well, and, you know, I had even talked with the Yemeni journalist, Nasser Araby, about this, and I said, well, Nasser, I'm reading in the press that at the same time we're helping the Saudis and the UAE fight against the Houthis, that the drone war, the CIA war against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is still taking place as well, and he just laughed and said, oh, really?
The CIA is bombing the UAE's militia on the ground that all the Al-Qaeda guys have been integrated into?
False.
The war against AQAP is on hold because this is the war for them, and in fact, oh, one more thing I'm going to rant at you in the middle of my interview with you is that people can find in the Wall Street Journal and in Al-Monitor from January of 2015, when it was the Barack Obama administration that CENTCOM, in fact, General Michael Vickers explained all of this at an event at the Atlantic Council, that CENTCOM was working with the Houthis and was passing intelligence to the Houthis for them to use to target and kill Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and it was just two months later, in March of 2015, that Barack Obama turned around, stabbed the Houthis in the back, and took Al-Qaeda's side against them, which is treason.
Well, you know, one thing I wanted to mention, there's been a few breaking pieces of news that came out this week.
One, I mean, we knew that it was going to happen for a while but today, actually, the US is suspending all USAID funding to Yemen right now.
Now, we may disagree about the efficacy and the need to do humanitarian assistance abroad, but I think in this unprecedented moment of COVID-19, you know, an outbreak of COVID-19, there hasn't been one yet, but an outbreak would just be so devastating.
And I just really wanna call out, I think it's immoral for us to be cutting humanitarian assistance to Yemen like this at this particular moment when things are so fragile and they need to prepare their hospitals, you know, to get ready for a potential outbreak.
After five years of US complicity in this brutal war, you know, Saudi has been targeting hospitals left and right.
So only 51% of Yemen's healthcare facilities are fully functional right now.
And basic necessities like clean water, and the CDC keeps telling us, we gotta wash our hands and social distance.
Well, there is not really access to clean water in Yemen right now.
So stopping the spread of COVID-19 in Yemen will require massive international effort.
And I think we really need to reconsider the USAID cuts because, you know, COVID-19 doesn't respect borders, race, religion, and it's incumbent on all of us to come together to support each other through this time.
Right.
Ah, it turns out the Yemenis, they're civilians, innocent by definition.
And you know what's funny is people still call them, even in your article, I don't know if it's you or the editor, people are just used to this, the Houthi rebels.
They haven't been the rebels since December, 2014.
That's not that they were elected, but they are in fact the regime that rules at least the entire Northern half of the country.
And yet they're still called rebels as though we can crush their insurgency at any time when really the so-called government is just a bunch of kooks in a hotel room in Riyadh, right?
Well, I mean, you make a good point.
I mean, the Houthis control territory where 80% of the population lives.
This is not a fringe insurgent movement like you said.
They are responsible for caring for, if you wanna call it that, and providing assistance for millions and millions of people.
So this is something that we really have to take into consideration when we're cutting off aid, when we're talking about the Houthis versus the UN-recognized government of Yemen.
And I think some people fail to recognize how much of the population lives in their territory.
Right.
Yeah, and that narrative certainly contributes to that.
It makes it sound like they haven't taken the capital yet when that's the whole point of the war is that they have.
Yeah.
And now, so I talked last week with Scott Paul from Oxfam, and he was warning that they are on the verge right now of the rainy season, and necessarily then a third major outbreak of cholera when the previous two have been the worst recorded outbreaks of cholera in modern history.
And that includes the cholera epidemic that George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton helped to deliberately inflict on the people of Iraq in the 1990s.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's very concerning.
I mean, right now there are about 2 million active cases of cholera, making it the worst cholera epidemic in modern history.
And like I said, to prevent the spread of COVID-19, you need sanitation.
You need to wash your hands almost every time you come in and out of buildings.
How do you do that in Yemen if there's not clean water?
You know, it's just, they're so vulnerable, and it really breaks my heart what's going on there.
I'm not gonna lie.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's because you're a human being.
Yeah.
I will say that one positive thing that happened, there's silver linings in this global pandemic.
And one of them is that the warring parties in Yemen, Saudis and the Houthis have agreed to a nationwide ceasefire just as of yesterday.
Granted, this morning the ceasefire was breached, but I still think that it's a major diplomatic breakthrough in progress, and talking is better than fighting.
So I hope that holds, I really do.
And the reason why is because folks on the ground, they wanna prepare as much as they can for a potential COVID-19 outbreak.
And, you know, who knows where this is gonna lead, but I think it's a welcome sign that diplomacy may be working.
Yeah, that is great news.
And yeah, the silver lining on the coming COVID epidemic, which is almost certainly coming very soon to Yemen, and which would just be absolutely devastating.
Again, I wanna reiterate what you said, that I think it's saved the children's estimate of 85,000 children have died, you know?
Think about how, you know, audience, think about how afraid that the Americans are right now of this epidemic, the COVID-19, coming to our first world country, where we have hospitals who can provide for us in the worst circumstances.
This is what our country has deliberately been inflicting on the people of Yemen this whole time.
And it's not just collateral damage, is it, Hasan?
The plan, as you said before, they're bombing the hospitals, they're deliberately destroying the water, the sewage, the hospitals, the very infrastructure of the basic necessities of life for these people.
Yeah, I mean, you said that perfectly.
It's, you know, been a targeted campaign, a blockade that has cut off the flow of food, fuel, medicine, and clean water.
And, you know, the blockade needs to end, you know?
Like, it's, you know, we welcome the ceasefire, but the real killer in Yemen is the lack of access to, you know, a commercial life.
They can't import goods that they need on any regular basis, and it's heavily restricted.
So, you know, a ceasefire is great, but really, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, they need to end the blockade.
And just think about those numbers, right, where we haven't had anything near 85,000 dead from COVID around the whole world yet.
And we're talking about 85,000 dead children in Yemen, this one tiny country alone.
And that doesn't, and that's just the one fraction of the approximately quarter of a million people who have either been directly killed or have died as what they call excess deaths, deprived to death from a lack of food and medicine and clean water here.
Yeah, and, you know, after five years of unimaginable human suffering, we keep saying it, but Yemen just cannot wait any longer.
And Congress really must renew its efforts to end military support for the war.
They need to force more votes, whether it be war powers resolutions, whether it be NDAA provisions.
You know, they need to end weapons sales, logistical support, and pressure the warring parties to sit at the bargaining table and to bring this devastating war to an end and build on this ceasefire.
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And by the way, America could lean on the Saudis and say, that's it, we really mean it.
Forget Bernie Sanders.
The president of the United States says he wants this thing resolved and it'd be resolved in a day or two.
Yeah, and that's what we've seen is that congressional pressure has really moved the conversation and imagine if that was coming from the executive branch.
I think this war would be over immediately.
Absolutely, and think about that, ladies and gentlemen.
That means that Donald Trump and Barack Obama before him, they could end this war with a spoken word.
You know, Chief of Staff, tell the Secretary of Defense that I said I want him to turn this light switch off and the thing would be over in a day.
He doesn't even have to make the slightest effort but to wag his jaw a little bit and it's over but he won't do it.
I mean, you know, whether or not all of the violence in Yemen would stop immediately if the U.S. pulled out, you know, it remains to be seen.
You know, I think that's a tall order for anything but we are complicit in a huge part of the suffering.
We're making it worse.
We have leverage over Saudi Arabia who's imposing the real danger to Yemen which is the commercial blockade of the country and, you know, we certainly can do a lot of good by ending our military involvement and also just get in line with our own constitution.
You know, like I said earlier, you know, we just need to get into the habit of authorizing war.
We're gonna be using military force.
It's very simple.
Congress needs to vote on it.
Right, which they wouldn't dare in this case.
You know, fake threats of Iranian intervention notwithstanding here.
And now, so, you know, it's worth mentioning too the just war theory of Western civilization.
One of the major mandates there from St. Thomas Aquinas is that it must be possible, it must be at least conceivable that the goals of the war can be achieved and yet we've known all along, haven't we, from 2015 on that there is zero chance, less than zero that Mansour Hadi will ever be the dictator of Yemen again.
Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, he has no legitimacy in Yemen.
Really, this is turned into a proxy battle from international players and Yemen needs to decide what happens to Yemen, plain and simple.
We don't need Saudi, the UAE, Iran, the US, the UK, France, Canada.
We don't need any of them trying to decide what happens to the future of Yemen.
And, you know, that thinking is what got us here and we need to think about this situation differently if we want a better outcome.
Yeah, you know, I like how you point out in the article here, Hassan, about how this thing was named Operation Decisive Storm when they started it and they really thought that it would just take a matter of days or weeks before they got their way.
Yeah, I pointed that out because after five years, you know, that's just a ridiculous name for this mission.
And yeah, it's tragic.
I, you know, I don't know what else to say, except, you know, it's time to end our support for the war and end our complicity.
Well, and also, you know, something worth pointing out is the reporting at the beginning when this thing took place that Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now the Crown Prince, had just been named Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister.
And as Patrick Coburn reported at the time, this was mostly done as a matter of internal politics inside Saudi Arabia, as this brand new, very young Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince with ambitions for the throne himself did this in order to build himself up and to help marginalize his political opposition in the country, straight out of public choice theory.
This was never even in the national interests of Saudi Arabia, much less the United States.
This was in Prince Mohammed bin Bonesaw's interest to do.
Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point that Mohammed bin Salman has really used the Yemen war to advance his own personal political interests and catapulting him to, you know, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, you know, over his, you know, cousins and his brothers and his uncles.
And I think that's significant.
He's really used this crisis in this situation for his own gain.
But clearly, you know, he's bankrupting Saudi Arabia with this very costly, drawn out war.
I mean, this is Saudi Arabia's Vietnam.
And I think it's also causing a lot of unrest inside the kingdom, inside the royal family.
And it's really behooved Saudi Arabia to bring this war to an end.
And I think on some level, Saudi Arabia does know that.
I think folks in Riyadh do know that.
They are trying to push for an end to the war.
And I would argue that us cutting military support gives them an out.
Right, that's a very important point here.
After all, the air war, which is mostly what this is, the UAE has their mercs on the ground, but the Saudis' role is mostly in air war, and they can't wage that without us.
Our bombs, our expertise, our, you know, contractors' care and feeding of their jets and everything else.
Yeah, and the spare parts transfers are pretty critical.
People often forget that.
They just think it's about the weapon sales.
But they rely on a steady flow of spare parts from the US to keep these planes in the air.
You know, you have to replace an F-15's tires almost every time you land.
You need electrical equipment and spare parts that go into the computer systems.
That would take many years to switch over to another hardware.
If we cut off support, oftentimes I hear interventionist folks on the Hill say, well, Russia would just swoop in and provide all this military assistance.
Maybe so, but not immediately.
That would take many, many years.
And they've sunk billions and billions of dollars into all this US hardware.
They don't want to see that all go to waste.
Right.
Yeah, and what's the point of this huge investment in Saudi's military machine if it hasn't made them dependent on us this whole time that we can have an influence in how they use these weapons?
Yeah, absolutely.
And President Trump himself and Barack Obama, this is what he meant to say.
But Trump isn't shy.
He has said numerous times, we're doing this for the money.
USA is mercenary incorporated and we kill people for dollars.
And that's why we do this.
The Saudis pay us.
And then he greatly exaggerates the amount of money when this is a $20 trillion economy or something, GDP nationwide.
And he goes, oh, we're making $400 billion off of this.
Well, we're probably lucky if it's $100 billion.
And what percentage of our GDP is that?
Essentially nothing, right?
It would cost us, our economy as a whole, our national interests as a whole, it would cost us nothing to cut this money off.
You know, and really it's a moral question and a national security question.
If we know Saudi Arabia is funding and supporting sales of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, well, isn't the US government supposed to protect American citizens?
I didn't realize that included supporting Al-Qaeda.
Yeah.
Well, so you're going to have to take a second look at America's war in Libya and Syria then too, Hassan.
As I know, you already know.
And listen, I'm sorry we're out of time, but I want to also point out this one last thing here.
You are the lead lobbyist on Middle East policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the heroic Quaker lobby in the interest of peace in Washington, D.C.
So please tell us what people can do to help you, Hassan.
Yeah, well, one, I think folks should go to fcnl.org and just kind of stay plugged in to all of our action alerts and what we are doing on the Hill.
And folks should call their representatives and just let them know that they want an end to US military participation in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that is Hassan El-Tayyab.
He is the Friends Committee on National Legislation's lead lobbyist on Middle East policy and affairs.
And he wrote this very important piece in the Hill.
After five years of war in Yemen, American complicity must end.
Thank you so much for your time, Hassan.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys, and that is Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
And you can find me here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
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