The risks and wrongheadedness of U.S. strikes on Yemen

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

The risks and wrongheadedness of U.S. strikes on Yemen

(via)

This is a photo of Yemen, very possibly Shibam, a remarkable, centuries-old city of mud-built proto-skyscrapers nicknamed the “Manhattan of the desert.” My crop doesn’t do it justice—click here to look at more pictures from National Geographic. It would be swarming with tourists were Yemen not one of the poorest countries on earth, until recently the global capital of cholera, and the site of nearly a decade of brutal civil war, foreign military intervention, and humanitarian crisis.

The U.S. role in all this, through the Obama and Trump administrations, was twofold. First there were direct counterterror operations against the local branch of al Qaeda (AQAP). Second and marginally better-known were varying degrees of support for the Saudi-led coalition intervention against the Iran-linked Houthi rebels. This U.S. role began under the Obama administration and wasn’t authorized by Congress.

The counterterror stuff never happened on a scale comparable to e.g. Iraq or Afghanistan, nor has it received significant attention from the American public, with the exception of a 2019 CNN investigation that found U.S. weapons sent to regional partners were ending up—surprise, surprise!—in the hands of AQAP-linked fighters.

We did muster some outrage after the school bus bombing, the 2018 incident in which a coalition strike killed dozens of children in a school bus with an American bomb.

That was not the only time the U.S. was implicated in indefensible civilian deaths in Yemen, as I noted in perhaps my angriest-ever article for The Week.