For Pacifica Radio, September 15th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, this is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the editorial director of Anti-War.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
Alright, our guest on the show today is the great Robert Naaman from Just Foreign Policy.
That's at justforeignpolicy.org.
Welcome back to the show, Robert.
How are you doing, sir?
Good.
Good to be with you.
Very happy to have you on the show, because you do such important work.
Not only do you write constantly about all of the worst abuses of our government in its foreign policy, but you really do the work with the shoe leather and the networking and the real lobbying that it takes and organizing on the grassroots level to force Congress to do something to at least make these policies less worse on the margin wherever you can, and constantly and tirelessly, and it's heroic work, and especially right now on the story of the war in Yemen, which has the distinction of being absolutely the worst thing America's doing right now, I think, probably beyond dispute from anybody who knows about it, as bad as Iraq War II, or, you know, the support for al Qaeda in Syria, but it continues to go on with a small proportion of the attention paid to it.
And perhaps that is because of the bipartisan nature of the war, as it was launched by Obama and has been continued by Donald Trump, in almost into the 2020s now, four and a half years of war.
So let me give you a chance, first of all, Robert, to get the people of LA and the rest of our listeners up to date about what really is this Yemen war, just how American is the Saudi led war on Yemen, and why should it matter to them in the first place?
Well, there's lots of reasons that it should matter.
First of all, it's the war and the Saudi blockade has created the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
Secondly, this war was never—U.S. participation in this war was never authorized by Congress, in violation of Article One of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
As you said, this is a bipartisan war in the sense that it began under the Obama-Biden administration in March 2015.
So the violation of the Constitution, the opposite of Obama's promise to end the mindset that got us into war—remember, he said he was not just going to end the Iraq war, he was going to end the mindset that got us into war—also opposite of his promise.
In December 2007, Boston Globe asked him, you know, when can the president use military force?
He said, when it's authorized by Congress, unless the U.S. has been attacked, exactly as it says in Section 2C of the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
Then he did Libya, 2011, violated the Constitution, tried to do Syria in 2013.
Fortunately, bipartisan coalition pushed back and he backed down.
Nonetheless, he intervened in Syria using the CIA on the theory that if you use the CIA, it doesn't count, which, you know, where that's in the Constitution, I don't know.
And then did Yemen in 2015, March 2015, without any authorization by Congress, without any story that this war has anything to do with protecting Americans.
This was a favor to the Saudi regime, justified by the Obama administration at the time as like a side payment to the Saudi regime to appease them for acquiescing in the Iran nuclear deal.
That was the story that the Obama administration told in Washington at the time.
So now, four and a half years later, with the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with millions of Yemenis on the brink of famine, UN and aid groups say that more than 85,000 Yemeni children have been starved to death by the Saudi war and blockade.
And this is not a good war that went bad.
The Saudi war crime started immediately in 2015.
The Saudis bombed the sewage treatment plants.
That's why Yemenis had reason why Yemenis had the worst cholera outbreak in recorded history, in addition to the Saudi blockade blocking food, fuel and medicine from reaching northern Yemen.
So this is really a perfect storm in terms of a U.S. government crime.
And as you say, it began in a bipartisan way.
Now we can say, four and a half years later, that every Democrat in the House and Senate has voted against it, and a number of Republicans, when Congress passed the Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee, Chris Murphy, Yemen War Powers Resolution, demanding the end of unconstitutional U.S. participation.
That was historic.
First time since 1973 that the War Powers Resolution has been used in this way.
Trump vetoed that resolution.
It was a joint resolution.
Congress also passed the Robert Menendez Resolutions of Disapproval against Trump-Saudi UAE arms deals.
That was supported by every Democrat in Congress and a bunch of Republicans, anti-war, pro-constitutional Republicans.
Trump vetoed that, too.
Now there's a historic opportunity for Congress to enforce its will on the bill that funds the Pentagon and its contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, the National Defense Authorization Act.
When the House passed its version of the NDAA, it passed a slew of amendments to end U.S. participation in the war, including the Adam Smith, Ro Khanna, Adam Schiff, Pramila Jayapal amendment to cut off U.S. intelligence for Saudi airstrikes and to cut off U.S. spare parts for Saudi airstrikes.
That was supported by all Democrats in the House, except for five, the so-called Famine Five, and again, a bunch of Republicans.
Senate never voted on that because Mitch McConnell wouldn't allow it.
But it's in the House passed version of the bill, and now the House and the Senate are going to conference.
This is hanging fire.
This bill is considered in Washington a can't veto, must pass bill because it's the bill that funds the Pentagon.
If Trump vetoes the bill, then Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin wouldn't get our tax dollars.
Obviously, that's not going to happen.
Trump's not going to do that.
If he did do it, then he can go on TV and explain why he's vetoing the Pentagon bill so the U.S. can continue to unconstitutionally help the Saudi regime starve Yemeni children to death.
I don't think he wants to do that.
This is really up now to Democrats in Congress.
This House and Senate conference is a notoriously opaque process where the leadership on both sides is in the room.
Most people are not in the room.
There aren't any TV cameras.
It's very hard to subject these people to the kind of scrutiny that we have when there's a floor vote and you get to see who did what.
We don't get to see necessarily what happened inside the conference room.
Activists have been pressuring, particularly the House and Senate Democratic leadership, to say that they're going to make this a priority in the negotiations.
Fox reported in the past few days that Ro Khanna said that he has commitments from Chuck Schumer and Adam Smith—Chuck Schumer being the leader of Senate Democrats, Adam Smith is the chair of the House Armed Services Committee from Seattle, so he's the nominal leader of the House side of the negotiations—that they would make this a priority.
But Nancy Pelosi has not yet said that she will make this a priority.
The inside word among House Democrats is that Nancy Pelosi will have huge sway in what the real priorities of House Democrats are in their negotiations.
This is a moment that really isolates the responsibility of Nancy Pelosi, who positions herself as a progressive, often when it's not in the spotlight, acts in a way that puts the Pentagon industrial complex, the contractors, and the Saudi regime as a higher priority than the interests of the majority of voters and the majority of Democrats.
This is hanging fire right now.
That's why activists around the country are putting scrutiny on the House and Senate Democratic leadership, particularly Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah.
Well, and it's such an obvious argument, too, that, listen, the fact that one or two or a dozen Republicans are good on this means that you can't be worse than them.
You have to stop this.
That's exactly right.
And particularly because the excuse, the sort of fog excuse that is often put out is like, oh, well, you know, we'd love to help you.
We'd love to do this.
But the mean Republicans, you know, won't go for this.
Well, you know, the Senate already passed the Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee, Chris Murphy, Yemen War Powers Resolution with a bunch of Republicans supporting it.
The Senate passed the Menendez Resolutions of Disapproval on the Saudi UAE arms deals with a bunch of Republicans supporting that.
As I said before, the only reason that the Senate hasn't passed this particular amendment is that Mitch McConnell wouldn't allow a vote on it.
But the Senate is already on record on the same ideas when they had an opportunity to vote.
And the reason the Senate had the opportunity to vote before is that both the War Powers Resolution and the Arms Export Control Act have these important forcing mechanisms that allow a single member of the Senate to force a vote.
It's no accident that these provisions were passed by Congress in 1973 and 1976, respectively.
This was the height of the anti-war activism around the Vietnam War and the wake of the church committee hearings, when Congress is under pressure from public opinion not to allow what happened in Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, not to let that happen again.
Take your constitutional responsibility.
Don't let the president lead us to war without an affirmative congressional vote.
And if he does it, we need mechanisms for Congress to stop that.
So that's why the Senate has voted on the Sanders-Lee-Murphy bill and the Menendez Resolutions of Disapproval on the Saudi-UAE arms deals, because there's a mechanism to force a vote there with or without Mitch McConnell.
And that proves that this argument that we can't do this because of the mean Republicans, that's bogus, because there's enough Republicans in the Senate to vote to sustain these provisions if they're in the bill.
This is a question of priorities now.
Every Democrat has voted against this war.
So this isn't a question of how Democrats should vote.
We already won that argument.
This isn't a question of whether the war is unconstitutional or not.
We already won that our Congress already voted to say that it's unconstitutional.
In fact, even the stated position of the Trump administration is that they're trying to end the war.
They said they wanted to talk to the Houthis to end the war.
We've just seen today there was this drone strike on the Saudi oil facility that reportedly is a big disruption to Saudi oil production.
So this is having a real consequence for things that the State Department says that it cares about, a world oil supply.
So you already said that you want to end the war.
Congress already said it's unconstitutional.
Why isn't it happening?
It's a question of priorities.
Trump might veto the bill.
Republicans might go along with this.
If this was something that Nancy Pelosi really cared about, that's not how she would be talking about it.
It's something that they care about.
They force the vote.
They force the veto.
They call the bluff.
Of course, Trump makes all kinds of threats.
It's not just Trump.
Other presidents threaten to veto, and then they don't.
That's certainly true of Trump.
So if you care about this, then you don't run and hide under the bed because Trump might veto the bill.
Republicans might.
Some Republicans might be against it.
You fight.
You stand and fight.
You come back and say, I did my best, and people will believe you because you really fought.
Remember here, we've got this opaque process.
But here's something we can see.
We can see that Chuck Schumer and Adam Smith made this commitment.
We're going to fight for this.
Nancy Pelosi didn't make that commitment, even though House Democrats are saying that Nancy Pelosi has huge sway over this.
Then people went to Pelosi's office and said, what about this?
Her staffers were like, oh, go talk to the Republicans.
Go talk to the committee.
This has nothing to do with them.
Well, that's horse feathers.
The buck stops there in Nancy Pelosi's office in terms of House Democrats.
They just need 10 times as much pressure as they've already received in order to, first of all, commit to do the right thing and then follow through and do the right thing.
From the point of view of partisan politics, what a great victory that the Democrats, the opposite party in the Congress, could have against this president that they're so opposed to.
What could possibly be better than stopping him from doing the very worst thing he's doing?
You would think Democrats got elected, took the House, and the problem is we're going to do oversight of Trump.
We're going to hold Trump accountable.
We're going to stop Trump.
Well, here's your opportunity.
Here's your golden opportunity.
In other things, which are more partisan, you could say, well, Republicans control the Senate.
But here, you have an opportunity to do something despite the fact that Republicans control the Senate.
Why wouldn't you take this opportunity?
This National Defense Authorization Act is something that happens once a year.
So this is a really unique opportunity for Democrats to check the administration on this worst humanitarian crisis in the world, unconstitutional war, and an opportunity for Democrats.
Many people believe, well, there's nothing you can do about this because Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin are giving money to both parties.
Well, that's true.
They are giving money to both parties.
But sometimes, if there's enough public outcry, we can make Congress do something different.
So here's something.
This isn't obscure now.
It was.
It's not obscure now in public opinion.
You look online.
You look on Twitter.
You look in local press.
People know about this.
It's been reported in the press now, largely thanks to the congressional opposition has put this in the press.
So Americans do know that this is happening.
And so, as you said, this is a golden opportunity for Nancy Pelosi to show that she is responsive to these concerns and isn't just going to keep supporting the Saudis because that's what Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin want.
Hang on just one second.
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You know, in any other time, this would be the accusation that, you know, this is all about simply just making money, selling bombs in the military industrial complex.
But in our current era, this is our president's avowed defense of the policy.
Hey, we need that money.
USA is essentially a mercenary force.
And if these guys are going to pay us to help them kill people, then that's exactly what we're going to do.
You're right that there is a new blatancy with Trump.
You know, Trump went on 60 Minutes after the murder of Khashoggi by the Saudis.
And he explicitly gave this defense that, you know, we can't cut off the weapons because of Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
So that's kind of astonishing, breathtaking that we live in this area where, just as you said, you know, the thing that we used to accuse them of now is being said openly.
But I think it's important to distinguish between what's important for the U.S. economy and what's important for, you know, the profits of a handful of Pentagon contractors.
That's right.
And the politicians that they bought.
The U.S. economy will survive whether we sell weapons to the Saudis or not.
And in fact, a lot of this is just recycled petrodollars, right?
You know, we buy or others buy oil from the Saudis and the Saudis have all this money and they got to do something with it.
So they buy these fancy U.S. weapons.
They're recycling the money from the world oil economy.
Recall that for years, you know, this is a big focus of Obama.
You know, we're going to wean.
In fact, before, you know, after the September 11th attacks, a lot of people in the U.S. government were like, wow, these Saudis are really crazy.
We need to disentangle ourselves from them.
And that was one of the reasons for the push for energy independence of the United States.
And now we are much more independent than we were.
The U.S. is a net energy exporter.
So why are we still so entangled with the Saudis?
This is less about our economic dependence on the Saudis than the dependence of the national security state on the Saudis.
The CIA has a decades long relationship with the Saudi regime, which is well documented in an expose in the New York Times.
It talks about how, you know, everything that the CIA wants to do, that they don't want to, you know, run through Congress.
They just get the Saudis to write a check like they did with aid to the Contras.
And a lot of the war in Syria was a similar game.
OK, so there are interests in Washington that are served by the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
But that's not the interest of the majority of Americans.
I mean, it's certainly not the interest of the 9-11 families still being stonewalled today.
And they're pressing the U.S. government for information about the role of the Saudi government in the 9-11 attacks.
Right.
We have a huge economy in the United States.
We can do other things besides make weapons for the Saudi regime to use to starve Yemeni children to death.
We'll be fine.
This isn't about the interest of the majority of Americans.
This is about the special interests of a narrow lobby in Washington.
And we've shown that we can get Congress to vote against this.
As I said, every Democrat and a bunch of Republicans.
And so now we just need to go to this next level of making the Democratic leadership, you know, put their money where their mouth is or sort of take their money away and cut off the funding.
This is the bill that funds the Pentagon.
Remember, this is how Congress ended the Vietnam War.
They cut off the money.
That's what we're asking Congress to do now.
Cut off the money in the Pentagon bill, say there's no U.S. dollars are going to go towards helping with the Saudi airstrikes in Yemen.
And all of us believe that that's the thing that ends the war.
After all, we've already seen the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, that was the key Saudi partner in the war, pull back in significant measure in response to international pressure, including the pressure from Congress.
Okay, the UAE feels more exposed.
And maybe that's why they broke first.
And the Saudis feel more invulnerable in terms of, you know, caring less about their international reputation.
But Congress has a lever that it hasn't used.
It hasn't cut this off in the bill that funds the Pentagon.
And that's what's hanging fire right now.
Not only does this war have nothing to do with protecting Americans, the U.S., by backing Saudi Arabia, is on the Al-Qaeda side of the war in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia has supported Al-Qaeda in Yemen, which is considered the most dangerous branch of Al-Qaeda.
It's given U.S. weapons to Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
And the U.S. government itself admits that the war has strengthened Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
So whatever you think of the 2001 authorization for the use of military force, whatever you think about the war against Al-Qaeda, this has nothing to do with that.
In fact, it's the opposite.
Like exactly as I said, we're on the Al-Qaeda side of the war.
The Houthis that were helping the Saudis bomb are mortal enemies of Al-Qaeda.
They're Shia.
That's why Al-Qaeda hates them, because Al-Qaeda has this, you know, genocidal ideology against the Shia, just like the Saudi regime does.
That's why they get along so well, because they have very similar ideology.
So yeah, here we have this war.
It's totally unconstitutional, has nothing to do with protecting Americans, causing the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
And it's helping Al-Qaeda.
And the U.S. government knows it, and has known it for some time.
So it's hard to imagine how this could be any more scandalous.
And then on top of that, you have the recent development that now Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that were the coalition that the U.S. is backing, now they're fighting each other in southern Yemen, with the UAE backing these secessionists that want to restore the independence of South Yemen, and the Saudis backing their Hadi government and Islam.
These two forces are fighting each other.
The UAE actually bombed the forces of the Saudi-backed government.
And the U.S. is arming both of these countries.
They're arming Saudi Arabia, they're arming the UAE.
These countries may use U.S. bombs to bomb each other's proxy forces in southern Yemen, nothing to do with the Houthis.
So, you know, this war just gets more and more absurd.
It seemed like it was perfectly absurd before, and then it gets even more absurd.
And meanwhile, the Yemeni children are still dying.
Dying from bombing, dying from the blockade, dying from disease, preventable causes.
So this really should scandalize all Americans, that our government continues to do this after Congress voted against it.
And now here we have this opportunity to end it.
And this should be top priority for Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
And some Republicans have spoken up now and said, yes, you know, that Congress should do the House passed amendment on the NDAA.
So we really have unique opportunity now to end this biblical catastrophe in Yemen and set a very important precedent going forward.
Because of course, we don't just want to end this particular war.
We want to stop crimes like this from happening in the future, no matter who the president is, no matter what party is controlling the White House.
It should never happen again that the president of the United States can get us involved in something like this without Congress having voted to authorize it after a debate.
We've seen over and over that when they could do this without Congress, as you know, in Libya, as they did with the CIA in Syria, and as they did in Yemen, then they don't even have to tell a public story to justify what they're doing and have that story be vetted by the media and public opinion.
We saw that when they did have to do that in August 2013, when Obama wanted to bomb Syria, we were able to turn that around.
There was a huge bipartisan outcry around the country.
The phone calls in Congress were running 99 to 1 against, and that's why Congress didn't go for it.
We can do that if we follow the Constitution, Article 1 in the War Powers Resolution, that the president has to go to Congress for authorization to use force so we can have the public debate that we're supposed to have before the war.
They can't just make up any old story about why we have to do this.
Clearly, we've seen how hard it is to end these wars.
Four and a half years in Yemen, 18 years in Afghanistan, 16 years in Iran, depending on how you count.
We've got to vet these wars before they start because they're so hard to end.
So we want to set this precedent that Congress stopped the war, the first time since Vietnam, that they stopped the war by cutting off the money so that future presidents will be cowed and not think that they can violate the Constitution like this, the way that Obama and Biden did in March 2015.
That is very important.
Obviously, we've got to end this humanitarian catastrophe, but also we've got to set a precedent to make sure that this never happens again.
All right, you guys, that is Robert Naaman.
He's at JustForeignPolicy.org, and he organizes.
You can find out how you can join the campaign to end the war on Yemen, to pressure Congress to end the war on Yemen.
People always ask, what can we do?
This is something that you can do.
It's a nonprofit organization, JustForeignPolicy.org.
Thank you, Robert.
Thank you, Scott.
And that is Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
