Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by that we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, everybody, introducing Rajon Menon.
He is a professor of international relations at the Powell School at the City College of New York and senior research fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
He's the author most recently of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.
I'll have to add that one to my pile of books to read.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thank you, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And, of course, happy to see you again, writing at TomDispatch.com.
And we republish, well, almost all the foreign policy stuff, anyway, from TomDispatch at Antiwar.com as well.
This one is called The American War in Yemen.
And thank you for speaking, frankly, whoever wrote that headline.
You know, I interview from time to time Yemeni reporter named Nasser Araby from Sana'a.
And he said for years now that it's the American war to them, that the people of Yemen aren't confused, that this is the Saudi-led coalition in any way.
To them, it's American planes, American bombs.
America is the world empire or the world superpower, whichever euphemism people prefer.
And so they're not confused.
And to them, it is the American war.
That's exactly what they call it.
So I don't think Americans really have a handle on that because of the way it's presented to us.
But I don't think there's much confusion there.
Certainly, Nasser says there's not much confusion there about who's responsible for this.
So I don't know.
I guess, first of all, can you talk about that?
What all exactly does America have to do with this Saudi-led coalition war against Yemen?
The long and short of it is that we're not for American support.
And I'll get into what kinds of support I'm talking about.
The Saudis and the Emiratis, that is to say the United Arab Emirates, who are the two Arab states most directly involved in the war in Yemen, could simply not wage this war.
So just about every single armament and bomb and artillery piece, or in the case of blockade, ships that the Saudis and the Emiratis have used are of U.S. manufacture.
It's important to understand this because there's often a parallel made between the war in Yemen and the war in Syria.
And the argument goes, well, why is everybody outraged about the war in Yemen?
First of all, I don't know that that many people are outraged, but let's leave that aside.
When there's much more killing going on in Syria.
And the distinction, Scott, as you well know, is this.
We are not funding the war that Assad is waging, whereas in this war, we are directly involved in a way that's irrefutable.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, in Syria, it's the other way around.
America has been on the side of the jihadists for the past six years and has caused this war in which Assad has really killed more than anyone else, but still.
Correct.
But we're not supplying the weapons that Assad is using.
But in the case of Yemen, there's no way that they could do it.
Now, aside from the blockade and the armaments, there are other back end support, as it were.
Intelligence sharing, advising on targeting, aerial refueling.
So there is a panoply of activities that we provide in addition to the armaments that sustains the war.
All right.
And now, so can you talk a little bit more about that?
I know one recent development in terms of the American kind of oversight in the operations room and that kind of thing.
It actually turned out that interviewee, The Intercept's Iona Craig, she had this story about an American after action report of a Saudi strike that luckily was a near miss, but it almost wiped out this family of nine.
And that article apparently directly put the lie to what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had testified to the Senate and to, I guess, Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, that the Americans did not have that level of involvement and oversight in the strikes that this reporting seemed to show.
And so I don't know if anything ever came of that.
Elizabeth Warren, I guess, should have been mad.
I don't know if she ever did anything about it.
Right, right.
You know, but let's assume just for the sake of argument, something that's actually not true, that there isn't, as you put it, oversight.
But nobody in the Pentagon denies that the vast majority of the weapons that are being used are American supplied weapons.
And I don't think anybody seriously would take issue with the fact that were the United States to pull the plug on the war and make publicly known its opposition to the war, it would be much more difficult for the Saudis to wage it.
So I think that goes without question.
Yeah.
Well, and in fact, I think as far as that goes, we ought to test it and see, like, what's the most extreme way to put that and measure whether, you know, what's the truth compared to that?
So how about Donald Trump could turn the war off with one spoken command?
He wouldn't even have to write it down.
He would just have to say cancel this war immediately and have his people make it so.
And the Saudis really couldn't wage this war without the U.S. at all, could they?
Yeah.
No, I should, in the interest of balance and fairness, add that the support for the war began under President Obama, as did the airstrikes in Yemen, although the airstrikes have been ramped up by Trump.
But to give you an example of why I think there is not going to be any effort to stop it cold.
So the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act contained a provision asking the Secretary of Defense to certify that Saudi Arabia and the UAE, United Arab Emirates, are taking steps to reduce civilian casualties.
Right off the bat, Donald Trump opposed it and in a signing statement, that's a reservation that the president can add to legislation, said that he didn't think he would be bound by that at all.
And then came the bus attack, the attack on the school bus that killed 40 some children and injured 50 more on, I believe, August 7th.
And Mattis came out and he said, you know, our support for this is not unqualified and we want the Saudis to take more care.
But not long after that, the Secretary of State Pompeo came out and certified that the war is being waged in a way that comports with the rules of warfare, which it manifestly is not.
If you look at the statistics of the number of people who've been killed and the number of civilian targets that have been hit, not once, but hundreds of times.
Right.
Well, and then the Wall Street Journal came out and said that it was the judgment of the professionals, quote unquote, I guess, at the State Department, that he should not certify that the Saudis are obeying the law because it just wasn't so.
And then he was reminded by the Legislative Affairs Division of the State Department, that is the congressional liaisons, basically, that some of our guys are going to be really mad because this could jeopardize a measly $2 billion arms sale.
And now the Wall Street Journal ain't gospel, but they claim that they had a document that said this and a source that explained what it all meant, too.
So I don't know.
Right.
Well, there's another thing.
Take Mattis's statement that, you know, we are going to hold them to higher standards and we expect them to be more careful.
This war has been going on now for about four years and there's ample evidence to show that they're doing no such thing.
That is that the Saudis are not taking minimal precautions.
I mean, either they're not taking precautions or their artillerymen and their pilots are completely incompetent.
It doesn't matter either way.
It's quite clear what the pattern is.
And it's not just reportage in the United States.
There was, as you know, a committee of experts appointed by the UN.
Now, these folks have nothing, no reason to tarnish the Saudis or the UAE.
And they came out with a devastating report that amply documents in great detail what's going on.
Ditto for Amnesty International, ditto for Human Rights Watch, ditto for Doctors Without Borders.
So there are just a multiplicity of sources on the ground and from the outside that make this clear.
So to get into an argument about, well, is this really as serious as it is?
Are we involved?
It's preposterous.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I really appreciate, too, how you highlight at the beginning of your article here about the war profiteers and the American military industrial complex.
You know, I think one of the perverse lessons of Iraq War II is that anything less than that is really no big deal compared to marching the entire 3rd Infantry Division of Marine Corps in from Kuwait into Iraq the way Bush Jr. did.
They're like, well, Obama does some surgical strikes here and there.
Maybe we back up proxy war, send in some special operations forces.
And all this kind of gets considered to be so much smaller, at least, than Iraq War II that it's not as big of a deal.
And maybe even then it's not big enough to be its own self-licking ice cream cone when, in fact, the amount of money being spent on arming the Saudis for this war is in at least tens of billions of dollars and is, you know, major amounts of liquid money for these arms manufacturers.
Yeah.
A point on the parallel that you draw between Iraq and Yemen, it's an instructive parallel because in both instances, I don't see the strategic purpose behind it.
But the one difference is that in the case of the Iraq War, it became very, very controversial because it became hugely expensive alongside the Afghan campaign for us.
Right.
Out your costs reckoned to be about four or five trillion.
And of course, many American servicemen and women who died in both wars in Yemen.
We can do it on the cheap in the sense that we're selling arms.
We get paid by the Saudis and we don't have any troops on the ground and we're not directly involved in the war.
So no one gets riled up about American casualties.
So that's what makes it unlikely that anytime soon the Pentagon or the State Department will say enough is enough.
We cannot support this war anymore.
And I will say this.
I mean, apart from your radio show and others, there hasn't been much public attention given to this or no sign that this has become a major public relations problem for the administration.
So there are no under no pressure to stop it anytime soon.
Yeah.
All right.
So you have a great history of how this thing happened.
And in fact, even linked to this other great article, The Failure of the Transition, where I learned so much.
I want to talk about that in a second.
But first, I want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit more about the humanitarian situation in the country three and a half years into Operation Decisive Storm here.
Right.
So just some numbers to put in perspective what you would be living through if you were an average Yemeni man, woman or child.
So the Saudis have launched about 17000 airstrikes.
This is just the Saudis right since the war began in March 2015, their war, not the Yemeni civil war.
The conservative estimate is close to 7000 civilians dead, another 10,000 who've been wounded.
Now, wounded can mean anything from slightly hurt to hurt in a way that it affects your life trajectory.
And until you die, the targets, farms, homes, marketplaces, schools, mosques, historic sites in Yemen's capital, Sanaa.
And just to give you a sense of the repeated nature of the attacks, farms and schools again, 380 farms have been struck, 212 schools have been hit.
Now, these statistics are not really up to date as of today, so the number is probably greater.
Then we have, because of the naval blockade on the ports of Hadida and Salif, a humanitarian crisis caused by insufficient food and medicine.
And because of the bombing, for reasons that I can explain if you want the link between the bombing and disease, a cholera epidemic that has, as of last count, numbered about 1.1 million cases and killed about 2500 people.
So all of this in a country that is the world's, that is the Arab world's poorest one, has a per capita income of about $2,800.
So the effect in terms of the average person's life has been catastrophic and the effect in terms of the out year trajectory of this poor country is substantial as well.
Yeah, well, now a couple of points there.
I think, and I don't know if anybody really knows, we're kind of stuck with these lowball estimates of 10,000 killed or something like that, but that's like a year and a half, two years old and was probably even a lowball estimate then.
Well, at the same time, though, I think the million cases of cholera, in fact, I forget now, I'm sorry, forgive me, please.
If it was Jamie McGoldrick from the UN or if it was Scott Paul from Oxfam or one of these, the guy from, may have been the guy from Doctors Without Borders.
Anyway, I'm sorry, I forget his name, but it came out basically in the interviews last year or early this year that basically there's a million cases of people trying to get treatment for diarrhea and that they didn't really have a way to test for it.
So they just considered anybody with diarrhea to have cholera.
So it was actually quite a bit lower than that.
At the same time, though, of course, any kind of disease that's causing a massive amount of diarrhea can still kill you.
So it's not like it's nothing or anything like that, but it seemed like they were kind of saying, yeah, maybe a million is a bit overblown, but we just had to categorize it that way for our own effort's sake of what to do about it, of course, which is just give them liquids.
So, Scott, let's just play with the numbers.
Let's say it's not 1.1 million, but 500,000.
Right.
So the largest cholera epidemic recorded since data has been kept was Hades, and they reached a number of 800,000 in about six years.
Yemen reached this number of 1.1 million or reduced number of 500,000 in seven months.
And you are quite correct to point out that even if it's not cholera, diarrhea left untreated, that is, children who have diarrhea because of contaminated water, die.
It is one of the largest killers of children under the age of five.
So to say, well, it's not cholera, it's just diarrhea is kind of neither here nor there.
Right.
I mean, it's worth bringing up, I think, just to show, you know, just to be careful and make sure to parse the information as carefully as possible.
So it's not to leave a opening for an apologist to try to argue from the other way that somehow this is tolerable.
As you're saying, oh, yeah, no, only 500,000.
How about that?
You know, half a million.
And again, as you say, children, that's who we're talking about are dying of this.
I should add that in tracking these statistics, it is devilishly hard to do.
And they're not a year out of date, but there are several months out of date because collection of this information and trolling various sites to reconcile the numbers is very hard.
But I've tried very hard to take the lower end of the estimates and not to go for the higher end of the estimates, except in the case of the drone strikes, where because of two very good organizations, we have pretty good data on how many drone strikes there were.
There have been under President George W. Bush, then Obama, who's a weapon of choice became and then under Trump.
So the other numbers are, if anything, conservative numbers.
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Yeah, I mentioned Iona Craig, a reporter who's been to Yemen, you know, during the time of the war, not just before it, but since then, too, I think numerous times.
And she talked about how, oh, yeah, believe it about the level of deprivation that the people of this country are going through in this incredibly poor country in the best of times.
And she said, I think, you know, she made, I think, a direct comparison to 1980s footage of Ethiopia.
Remember Michael Jackson and Hands Across America and all that, where those children, you know, with the flies all over their face and this and that, and the extended bellies and all that swollen, that, well, they were kind of all very photogenic, herded together in these camps.
That's why they were starving in the first place, really.
Right.
But in Yemen, it's not really like that.
It's much more difficult to find the people.
People live way out in the countryside in these very rural areas and whatever.
And, yeah, they're laying down and dying, all right, of hunger and of and of otherwise easily treatable diseases and this kind of thing.
But it doesn't we don't have as as ready made public relations photographs to share, you know, in the media, but that it's for real going on.
But one point, if I might, about the link between the war and the cholera epidemic, because it may not be self-evident to listeners, and it became clear to me in the course of doing research for this article.
So the the link is twofold.
One is that the antidote for cholera is well known and easily administered.
But if you have a blockade going on in a country that imports 90 percent of pretty much whatever it needs, then you can't get clean water and the antidote through.
The second is that the lack of garbage pickup, the hit on water filtration systems, the damaging of sewage lines, all of this has caused the contamination of of the water.
So the war and the cholera epidemic are not two separate things.
It's not as if, oh, there's a war going on.
And independently, there's cholera epidemic going on.
One is related to the other quite, quite directly.
Well, and at the beginning, the central bank stayed neutral and paid salaries to the civil service employees, North and South.
But then that changed.
And the Saudi backed regime moved the central bank down to Aden and stopped paying all the garbage workers in the north.
And so.
Correct.
Correct.
One other thing, by the way, that that puts an even more complicated twist on this.
There appears to be some parting of the ways between the Saudis and their partners, the Emiratis, that is, the United Arab Republic, United Arab Emirates again.
So the Emiratis, for complicated reasons, I don't have time to go into, seem to now be fostering a secessionist state in the south.
You may recall that Yemen was a divided country until it unified in 1990.
Now, if you have the Houthis and the Saudis, various private armies and warlords, and now secession in this war-torn country, things are going to get a whole lot worse.
I mean, the long and short of it is, you know, it's kind of easy at some level to start these things, but to unwind them and then to clean up afterwards and to right the ship to put the country back in order.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing, too, is getting the real death count is going to be a generational process, too.
It's going to take at least a decade or something until we get any kind of real reliable estimate of the excess death rate during this time.
But we're going to find out.
It's really bad.
What do you call it when one country or group of countries that deliberately inflicts a famine on another country?
Well, it's a war crime.
I mean, the thing with blockades is that they cannot make any discrimination or distinction between combatants and non-combatants, which is why blockading an entire country and depriving it of essential foodstuffs under international humanitarian law is considered a war crime.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, let's talk about in your article here again, it's the American war in Yemen at Tom Dispatch and Antiwar.com.
And you have a section here, the roots of war.
And I want to mention this article that you linked to here that is just great.
And I think I'm going to read it again.
It's by Marieke Transfeld.
It's called the failure of the transitional process in Yemen.
And it's just a very detailed and particular blow by blow about how the Arab Spring, such as it was, took root in Sana'a in Yemen in 2011.
And the transition from Saleh to Hadi and how it all fell apart and the rise of the Houthi movement and their conquering of Sana'a and all that.
So could you take us back in time and give us a little bit of a history lesson there?
Right.
So I'll take you back even just a little bit before, but not too much before the Arab Spring of 2011.
So the Houthis didn't come out of nowhere.
They have been their bastion is the province of Sada, S-A-A-D-A, which is in kind of southern Yemen, the north central part.
It abuts Saudi Arabia.
And they have been in various states of conflict with the central government for a very, very long time.
The Houthis, as you mentioned, are Shia, but they're not Shia who are identical to the Twelver Shiites in Iran.
There are some substantial differences.
And in some instances, the Zaidis, the Houthis, that is, have more in common with Sunni Muslims.
I say this because the war has also been portrayed as this kind of partnership of faith between the Iranians and the Houthis.
So the Houthis didn't show up from nowhere.
They have been in Yemen for a very, very long time.
They've battled the central government.
Now we flash forward to 2011, and there is a grassroots uprising.
President Saleh, the long-ruling president of Yemen, is eased out.
And then a kind of free-for-all breaks out because there is no viable central government.
The caretaker government led by Abdur-Rabbu Mansur Hadi is not gaining any traction.
His attempt to create a national reconciliation process fails.
And the match that was thrown into the gasoline can was as part of the reconciliation process.
He blessed a plan that would have redrawn the borders of Yemen and fenced in the Houthis' government, that is, Saddaqa, in a way that cut it off from access to the sea.
And then the Houthis took up arms and they started marching toward further south.
When you say redrawing the borders, you're talking about basically creating a strong federal system, as you call it in the article, inside the state of Yemen.
Right.
So the idea was, well, Yemen is a very diverse place and we need to have more self-determination for localities.
And so let's create a new federal system that's more decentralized, or at least that was the intent, and have seven, I think it was, new provinces.
So the province that the Houthis were kind of shoehorned into was one that they didn't like very much because it had two effects.
It cut them off from some important sources of raw materials in the east and it cut them off from access to the sea.
And they saw that as part of a longstanding effort by the central government to, in a sense, fence them in.
Which sounds like it was, right?
They called it a federal plan or whatever, that we're really trying to screw the Houthis.
It sounds like.
Yes.
And it went over with them like a lead balloon.
And I think at that point they decided that they could help.
They could expect no good fate from the government.
Now, when they began their march, and as they've continued, the argument has been, well, it's the Iranians that have given them everything they're fighting with.
You know, they captured armory after armory belonging to the Yemeni state armed forces.
And so they are not lacking for weaponry.
Plus, if you look at the map, it beggars belief that the Iranians are able to pump in a huge amount of weaponry, especially given the blockade and the distance between Tehran and Yemen.
So this is a complicated civil war, but in a stylized kind of way to serve it up in nice soundbites, it's the Saudis are fighting terrorism and Iranian expansionism.
And the Houthis are the playthings, or the cat's paws, I put it, of the Saudis.
Now that goes over in a soundbite very well.
And it also gets everybody on board because, oh, if the Iranians are involved and Al Qaeda is involved, then it must be that the Saudis are doing God's work.
Yeah, the God's work helping Al Qaeda fight the Houthis who are tied to Iran, who weren't the ones that hit the towers.
It was the other guys.
But anyway, yeah, that's well, you know, Michael Horton, no relation to me, but the serious, you know, expert on all this stuff from the Jamestown Foundation.
He told Mark Perry back in 2015, when this war broke out, he said, you know, John McCain complains that we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq, which was true, right?
And because all because of John McCain, by the way, that we're fighting with the Shiite-backed militias and the Iranian-backed militias again, against their Sunni enemies, this time the Islamic State.
And he said, yeah, but in Yemen, we're flying as Al Qaeda's air force.
So which is worse?
And so that's a part of this that we haven't really talked about yet that much.
And that's really part of leading up to the Arab Spring, right, is Obama's support for Saleh in terms of guns and money.
Another question, I guess, when they seize these armories, the Houthis, how many of those weapons actually were gifts from Barack Obama as Saleh's bribe to let the CIA wage the drone war there for two years before the Arab Spring ever broke out?
Correct.
You know, as in other places, an example is Pakistan, it comes to mind immediately.
The drone campaign has been very, very controversial and much disliked in Yemen for two reasons.
One, it's seen as a violation of the country's sovereignty.
And secondly, there are repeated civilian strikes.
There may be apologies and all of this, but imagine a situation where we had drone strikes on our territory from an outside state.
And every once in a while, it apologized and the body count began to mount.
I don't think we would take that very kindly.
So when Saleh, and then after him Hadi, blessed the airstrikes and said they were necessary and that they were accurate, that undermined their position even further.
The other thing is that if you roll the drone strikes into the other disasters that have happened, because the air strike, the Saudi air campaign and the blockade, it's very hard to make the argument that you're winning hearts and minds of Yemenis.
And if you're not, are you not playing into the hands of groups like al Qaeda?
So even as an anti-terrorism operation, this just makes no sense to me.
Right.
Yeah, the whole anti-terrorism operation was counterproductive in the first place.
It was only helping grow them.
Now we're fighting outright on their side, or at least fighting for and against both sides at the same time in a way that clearly has benefited al Qaeda big time, you know, in the last few years here.
And by the way, let me ask you about this.
Nasser Arabi, that journalist I mentioned, he calls it al Qaeda ISIS, al Qaeda ISIS with just a hyphen.
He says that there's not that much of a split here.
And in fact, part of it, he chalks up to the drone war.
He says Obama killed so many of the old leaders of al Qaeda that the real links between the Yemeni al Qaeda guys and Zawahiri hiding out in Pakistan somewhere became quite severed.
And Baghdadi and his guys, at least for a few years there, had more, you know, I guess, advertising cachet or whatever.
But he said that they never really were enemies in Yemen.
They're kind of more or less the same group and sort of claim a relation to both sides, this kind of thing.
Can you parse that for us?
Yes, to this extent.
I mean, there have been tensions between ISIS and al Qaeda in places like Iraq and in Syria, in Yemen, not entirely clear.
But it is true that they share a common script about what the problem is, who the enemy is, what needs to be done, how to put Islam back on track and all of this.
But even if you were to take the point, just for argument's sake, that your journalist friend from Yemen is not correct, and that they're operating separately, nonetheless, right, it, it, I think, increases support for them or potential recruits for them, even if they're acting separately.
Now, so al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is not only not out of business, it's actually fighting and surviving quite well as a result of the war.
These kinds of organizations thrive in times of war.
Right.
Well, and these are the guys, they've actually tried to attack us before, I guess, they haven't succeeded, but they attacked in France, and succeeded in killing people in the Charlie Hebdo attack.
And I think one of the other French massacres was chalked up to the influence of AQAP as well.
They tried to blow up a plane over Detroit, and almost got away with it, too.
If it hadn't been for the shoddy nature of the bomb construction, you know, they might have gotten away with that one.
And, and in fact, I guess I have to mention in parentheses here, that Patrick Kennedy of the State Department admitted under oath in front of Congress on C-SPAN, that they deliberately let that kid get on the plane in the Netherlands, because they were trying to track him and see who he was talking to, and what have you, when they could have stopped them from ever even getting on a plane to the US in the first place.
But anyway, but just to say, though, that, hey, you know, the Houthis, they actually never did anything to us, but AQAP did.
And really, we're helping them much more than we're hurting them in fighting this war against their enemies.
So there's another side of this, and that is to say, what is the picture of this war that the American public, to the extent that it's covered well in our press, which it isn't, gets?
And the advantage on the PR front, and the advantage when it comes to framing the nature of the war, lies wholly with the Saudis, because the last I checked, the Houthis don't have a multimillion dollar lobbying operation in Washington.
But you can bet your bottom dollar that the Saudis and the Emiratis do.
They have a very slick, well-organized, longstanding influence operation in Washington, and they've got a way to get their message across to the powers that be.
It doesn't really, in the end, matter that much what mainstream thinks, if you've got Congress in your pocket, so to speak, and the White House paying attention to you.
Yeah.
Well, now, okay, so you talked about how the UAE seems like they're more content to break off the South again, and maintain their influence that way.
But what about the Saudis?
Do they have a plan anymore?
It can't be to put Hadi back on the throne.
No.
Do you have any kind of prediction for what the medium term, at least, is supposed to look like from the Saudi point of view, or what you think is going to happen?
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
There's a person at the Brookings Institution, I think a former CIA officer named Bruce Rydell, who's very well respected as a Middle East expert.
And he wrote a piece today, I think for Brookings.
No, it's in a publication called Al-Monitor, A-L-monitor.
And what he says is that he's worried that because of all the other things that are happening in Saudi Arabia, that this war could contribute to the unraveling of Saudi Arabia.
Now, even if he's exaggerating, for someone who's well known, as well known as he is, to even raise this question is very telling.
By his calculations, the war's costing them about $5 billion a day.
Now, let's concede that the Saudis have a lot of money to burn.
The question is, what is the endgame here?
Are you going to be more secure if you have on your southern doorstep, because they can't escape geography, a place that is coming apart, that is disease ridden, in which there is complete anarchy because there's no central government?
Is that going to make you more secure?
And if that's not going to make you more secure, aren't you contributing to that very outcome by the campaign that you're waging?
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty stupid to get yourself involved in a Vietnam War, right on your own border.
You know, somewhere way over there where it's going to be hard for them to hit back at you.
That's bad enough.
But yeah, this is a pretty self-destructive course.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons, by the way, that for the most part, they've been waging an air campaign.
I mean, they want to make sure that this doesn't become a domestic issue in Saudi Arabia, because dead Saudis start turning up back home.
So it's essentially been a long range air campaign.
And I think they're aware that, I mean, Saudi Arabia is by no stretch of the imagination a democracy, but I think they want to keep the war from becoming a domestic issue.
But they now have gotten themselves in very deep.
There's no clear way out.
And the main supporter, their main external support of the United States is not putting any pressure on them.
So there's no immediate reason for them to go forward.
And the guy who's calling the shots in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, is absolutely committed to this war, because for him, it's all about Iran.
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Yeah, well, and all about his own hide too.
Yeah, there's that.
Yeah.
And that comes first.
Right?
Public choice theory of foreign policy is, this is all about me, me, me for every one of these people involved.
So, okay, but now somebody, one of his ministers has got to be brave enough to tell him, you know, hey, boss, what are we going to do?
And they have to have some kind of plan.
Do you think you have an idea of what their plan is?
Because, I mean, are they brave enough to admit to themselves that this is not working?
They're not about to sack SANA.
As you said, they're not willing to commit the ground troops, which maybe that wouldn't even work anyway.
And so what are they going to do?
I can't answer the question for two reasons.
First of all, I'm not an expert on the inner workings of the Saudi monarchy.
But from what we know about MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, he's not a guy who likes to be challenged or told that he's wrong.
So the question is, who's the first minister who's going to stand up and deliver this message?
And once he delivers it, is he going to be the only one?
And how does that make him look?
And so I don't see from where I sit, and again, I emphasize my limited understanding of the internal workings of the Saudi monarchy, any pressure from within.
But Rydell's point is that it's financially bleeding them and there's no way out.
And given the other things that are happening, that are a true rule to MBS, who's a kind of guy who shoots from the hip, whether this war could really prove to be a tipping point.
I have no way of knowing whether he's true, but the fact that he's raising it and that he's a knowledgeable person is very telling.
And what is the price of oil right now?
It's just gone up.
What is the exact price?
I don't know.
But today's paper says it's just gone up.
And incidentally, should the war get worse and get bloodier and spread, you can expect that it'll have an effect on oil markets.
Yeah.
By the way, one more thing, as long as I got you here.
Can you talk a little bit more about what you know, what you think about the relationship between Iran and the Houthis?
As you said, that's the whole narrative here is that's why we have to do this.
It's because Iran, Iran, Iran.
But what do you think's the real reality there?
Right.
So there's no question that the Saudis and the Iranians are not friends.
And the recent assassination in Iran at the military parade makes that enmity likely to grow even further.
So in a sense, the Saudis being stuck in a war from which there is no exit, works the advantage of Iran.
And there's no question that the Iranians, while the degree to which they can supply the Houthis has been overblown, that they're broadly sympathetic to them in this war.
It's also true that this has been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the more the Houthis have their back against the wall, the more they are liable to turn to the Iranians as their only savior.
So, so all that is true.
The point that I tried to make on the piece is that the presentation of it is that what's going on in Yemen has to do with Iran's effort to capture Yemen.
And in that effort, the Houthis are their plaything, their tool, their instrument.
And I'm saying that if you read any book on the history of Yemen and understand its complex history, that is a gross oversimplification.
But it's not that people don't know this and are just presenting facts in a irresponsible way.
Presenting it that way has more appeal, because the more you can make Iran the front and center of the Yemen war, along with Al-Qaeda, the more you can make the case for continuing to back the Saudis.
And the more the Saudis can say, well, you know, we're fighting this war in the common interest.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as I guess Nasser Arabi and others have said, too, though, that actually the greatest benefit to Iran here has been in the public relations that they've gotten for free from the Saudis and the Americans, chalking all of the Houthis victories up to Iranian support.
And they didn't even have to do anything.
Unlike, you know, in Iraq and Syria, where they actually had to put some work in.
Yeah.
Look, in Syria and Iraq, especially Syria, there's no question that the Russians and the Iranians turned the tide.
Right.
But the same is just not true here.
Because, again, if you look at the map and look at the lay of the land in terms of where Syria is and where Yemen is in relation to Iran, you can see immediately why that's the case.
Yeah.
But I don't think you can see you can read a piece in one of our main newspapers without on on the Yemen war without very quickly encountering the word Iran.
And shortly after that, the word Houthi.
Yeah.
But just like you said, too, if you actually read a book about it, in other words, something by any real expert and including many different studies and papers by these think tankers and what have you to at different places.
I don't want to name names.
I forget if Brookings or whatever.
Some of these very centrist and establishment think tanks even have published things saying that, well, come on, guys, that's just really not true.
Yes, that's correct.
I mean, I've read that quite a few times.
I mean, as you say, it's it's a great narrative for at the elementary level CNN reporting or New York Times reporting.
But if you look at any actual experts, they'll tell you that.
No, not really.
Right.
But the advantage of a narrative like that is that it's not preposterous in the sense that anyone who looks at this would concede, yes, there is an Iranian angle to this.
Right.
So what makes the narrative very, very useful is that it's built on some facts that are then made to be the overriding facts.
Right.
And you know what, though?
What even are those facts?
Because I know, like, for example, Gareth Porter completely debunked the two major accusations about Iranian ships being busted, sending guns to Yemen.
One of those, it was a Yemeni export to Somalia.
It wasn't even going to Yemen.
It was going from Yemen.
And then the other one, it wasn't proven that it was on its way to Yemen at all or that it even come from Iran.
And I forget exactly.
So and then you had Nikki Haley did her big press conference with the missile.
But then Jane's Defense Weekly said that's not an Iranian missile.
That's a North Korean missile that Yemen and Iran both bought from North Korea way back when early 90s or something like that.
Right.
But, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with the saying that the truth is the first casualty of war.
And often the facts are the second casualty of war.
And they're both related facts and truth.
Yeah.
And so but do you think there's really any truth to Iran back in the 80s?
As you say, it's not like they're contiguous territory.
We know that the airport in Sanaa is not open to Iranian air traffic.
So how are they supposed to get missiles or AK-47s or anything to Iran to Yemen anyway?
There's a U.S. Navy blockade off the coast there.
But but there's another way to look at this.
Let's suppose for argument's sake that some number of Iranian weapons are flowing in.
We'd have to concede that given the blockade, it's going to be very, very difficult.
But look at the balance of forces and ask yourself in this war, who has the overwhelming majority overwhelming advantage in the balance of power?
Well, the destruction that's taken place tells you who has it.
And it's not the Houthis.
Right.
They don't have an air force.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, no Iranian intervention whatsoever shouldn't have to be the standard here, especially the position we put their friends in.
Although, you know, it's interesting.
I like pointing this out, too, that Obama on film, you know, I guess digital, but yeah, on camera, Obama himself said that the Iranians, it's true, the Iranians warned the Houthis, please don't sack the capital city, because that's going to drive the Saudis mad.
They're going to start a war.
Correct.
And the Houthis said, forget you guys and did it anyway.
Right.
The, the Iranians cautioned them not to do it.
And they, they did it anyway.
So the, the Iranian Houthi relationship is a good bit more complicated than the popular narrative would have it.
But as I, as I mentioned, the popular narrative presented in that way is not an accident.
I think it's done quite deliberately because you want to amplify the Iranian element here.
If you want, if you're a supporter of the war.
Do you, do you know what, are there even any good facts to show that Iran is supporting the Houthis?
I mean, I guess they could just transfer the money electronically.
And I wouldn't know the first thing about that unless, but I haven't even seen any reporting claiming that specifically.
All I see are a bunch of very general claims that everyone knows Iran is doing something, this kind of thing.
But are there any facts, even a kernel of truth to work with?
Well, given the sanctions on Iran, it would be very difficult for them to wire lots of money.
And then the question is, how do the Houthis use that money to get weapons?
You still have to get them into the country.
And you do that through ports and the ports are, are blockaded.
So I don't think that that's, that's something that is, is going on to any substantial measure.
Look, can I tell you that there's no Iranians who are going to the Houthis?
No, my point is that in terms of the balance of forces, it's quite clear which side supported by whom has the advantage here.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your great journalism and your time again on the show on this extremely important issue here, Rajan.
Thanks, Scott.
Be well.
Thank you again.
You too.
All right, you guys, that's Rajan Menon.
And here he is at TomDispatch.com and at Antiwar.com.
The article is called The American War in Yemen.
And also he wrote a book called The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, which sounds pretty good.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
