The Unspeakable Things We're Doing to Yemen

The U.S. should end arms sales to Saudi Arabia

Amal Hussein was seven years old, a little girl in Yemen, the same age as my daughter—she posed a threat to no one, and yet there she was, that harrowing photo in the New York Times last November, her emaciated body, her stick-like arms. Within a week of that report she was dead, literally starved to death. We in the West saw her picture, we saw her haunting eyes, and yet we did nothing to help her. We've done nothing to help the other 1.8 million severely malnourished children in Yemen who are suffering from a famine and a cholera crisis caused by a Saudi imposed blockade

—Mehdi Hasan

America has blood on our hands. This is not news—it seems that the U.S. is always arming some horrifying state carrying out unspeakable atrocities; arming the Contras, arming the Salvadoran army, and more. But Yemen is perhaps the most acute example. It is our fault that the nation of Yemen is utterly destroyed, for the bombs that have blown Yemen apart have been made in America. America has chosen to arm a country that is a leading funder of terrorism, allied with Al Qaeda, funding Isis, and responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. We may as well arm Iran, Isis, Al Qaeda, and North Korea if we’re arming the Saudis.

In Yemen, there are 23.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, 17 million who are food insecure, and 3.5 million pregnant women and children suffering from severe malnutrition. The cause of this is two-fold—Saudi blockades, which some have argued amount to torture and the vicious airstrikes on Yemen carried out by Saudis. Both of these are enabled by U.S. arms—as of 2021, 73% of Saudi arms come from the U.S.. As Brookings notes “every 10 minutes a Yemeni child under the age of five dies due to the blockade.”

The Saudi coalition has carried out upwards of 25,000 airstrikes, many on innocent civilians; some are, for example, carried out on colleges, warehouses, and factories making water pumps. The benevolent Saudi coalition—true lovers of freedom and Democracy—employs child soldiers to carry out their vicious war, allies with Al Qaeda, and has transferred U.S. arms to Al Qaeda. As Butt notes, in Saudi Arabia “Exact numbers are not known, but it is thought that more than $100 billion have been spent on exporting fanatical Wahhabism to various much poorer Muslim nations worldwide over the past three decades.”

A third of Saudi airstrikes hit civilians. The Saudis have both killed and tortured innocent civilians. They indiscriminately bomb schools, weddings, and buses. The bombs that destroy civilian infrastructure and decimate Yemen and violate international law are manufactured in the United States. Chomsky accurately sums up the situation calling Saudi Arabia the “the center of radical Islamic extremism.” He points out that, among other things, Saudi Arabia is one of the only countries to have regular beheadings. Human rights watch notes “Saudi authorities in 2021 routinely repressed dissidents, human rights activists, and independent clerics.” Abdulrahman al-Sadhan was sentenced to twenty years in prison for peaceful expression. Saudi courts imprison journalists for criticizing their grisly actions in Yemen. Saudi prison guards described “torture and ill-treatment they witnessed by Saudi interrogators against high-profile detainees in mid to late 2018, including Loujain al-Hathloul and Mohammed al-Rabia.” Saudi Arabia has no semblance of a functioning justice system given that “Prominent royal family members remained detained without any apparent legal basis in 2021.”

Saudi Arabia should not be our ally. Human rights watch highlights various horrifying atrocities being carried out by the Saudis including rampant murder of their citizens, “the routine practice of long-term arbitrary detention and sporadic incommunicado detention of prominent detainees.” Kamel Daoud referred to Saudi Arabia as an “Isis that made it.” Human rights watch furthers “Over a dozen prominent activists convicted on charges arising from their peaceful activities were serving long prison sentences.”

Bandow claims that “Washington has intervened on the wrong side.” The Houthis—who the Saudis are fighting—oppose Al Qaeda and support a United Yemen, unlike Saudi Arabia, carrying out a savage war on another country and allying with Al Qaeda. We should arm the Houthis before we arm the Saudis given that “coalition forces have committed the vast majority of atrocities. Humanitarian groups figure that the Saudis and Emiratis are responsible for two‐​thirds to three‐​quarters of the casualties and destruction.” This was confirmed by Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In Yemen, children are starving and dying from a lack of medicine. And the bombs that were dropped on their houses and the blockade starving them are caused by the U.S.. It is a crime of unimaginable proportions and if the U.S. saw Yemeni children as people that mattered at all, rather than pawns in a geopolitical conflict, we’d stop the bombing immediately. Even with the Saudi lead coalition, the Houthis were always going to win—and history has borne this out. Thus, just like Afghanistan, we have another case of the U.S. trying to prop up a proxy government that would never succeed—ripping a desperately poor country apart, turning it into one of the worst places to live in the world.

The Saudi coalition has no chance of delivering power back into the hands of the “legitimate government”—a weak proxy government that impotently sits in hotels in Riyadh, doing nothing approaching governing, so impotent that it’s been effectively sidelined in the negotiations. Yemen’s government was described as “impotent and largely discredited,” as early as 2017.

There was no way the Saudis would beat the Houthis—and this has a relatively long history. Brookings reports

After 2003, Saleh launched a series of military campaigns to destroy the Houthis. In 2004, Saleh’s forces killed Hussein al Houthi. The Yemeni army and air force was used to suppress the rebellion in the far north of Yemen, especially in Saada province. The Saudis joined with Saleh in these campaigns. The Houthis won against both Saleh and the Saudi army, besting them both again and again. For the Saudis, who have spent tens of billions of dollars on their military, it was deeply humiliating.

It’s clear that the Houthis will take over a largely fragmented country—and this will be the case whether or not the U.S. keeps selling the Saudis arms. There was no way the Saudis would win the war, especially given that they “did not have a strategy or an exit plan.” But because we’ve sold them arms, the country the Houthis will preside over will have been completely destroyed—desperately poor, facing famine, starvation, disease, devastated infrastructure, and a mountain of corpses. The Quincy Institute claims “the Saudi-led airwar has proven largely futile.” As early as 2020, Al-Dawsari described the Saudi efforts as completely unable to succeed in an article titled “Running around in circles: How Saudi Arabia is losing its war in Yemen to Iran.”

Bandow notes “the Kingdom’s military turned out to be a vanity force, of little value other than to strike civilian targets — weddings, funerals, school buses, hospitals, apartment buildings, and markets.”

One can get a sense of the extreme level of disfunction and disarray from Major General Mohsin Khosroof who said “We don’t know who is the decision-maker anymore. The Yemeni army has become paralyzed. No unified leadership. The command-and-control concept is absent. There are different heads with different allegiances inside the Yemeni army.”

The former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan claimed in 2019 that the Saudis “produced no progress in Saudi Arabia’s fight against Houthi rebels, though fighting has killed tens of thousands of civilians and threatened millions more with starvation and disease.” Jordan notes “Khashoggi’s final newspaper column published before he was murdered warned that Saudi Arabia could not win militarily in Yemen, and he urged an end to the war before it further damaged Saudi Arabia’s reputation.” Khashoggi was murdered by the Saudi government and dismembered with a bone saw, shortly after publishing that column. He wrote for the Washington Post.

Of course, the Houthis have a horrifying record of their own. As a report from UN Security Council experts notes

The parties to the conflict, in particular the Houthis, continued to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, including conducting military attacks that were indiscriminate or directed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Houthis also continued to subject civilians to arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance and other serious violations, with no mechanisms for accountability or support for survivors or remedies for victims’ families

But in many ways, the excessive airstrikes help the Houthis. Al-Dawsari cites a local who claimed “Instead of helping the tribes, the coalition is pushing them toward the Houthis with these airstrikes.” The Quincy Institute notes “U.S. involvement in the war against them has had the opposite of its intended effect: the Houthis have only grown stronger.” In fact, ending arms sales could undermine the Houthi’s legitimacy, as the Quincy Institute explains further

These experts also acknowledged that the coalition’s ongoing presence has contributed to the Houthis’ consolidation of power. The group portrays itself as defending Yemen, therefore ending foreign aggression would undermine the Houthis’ legitimating narrative, as well as the support of key tribes. As Helen Lackner pointed out: “The tribes that are with [the Houthis] against the invaders will turn against them when the external enemy is gone.”⁴² Alkhatab al–Rawhani, a Yemeni journalist, concurred, “Yemeni tribes are pragmatists, they acquiesce to force, but they are waiting for their moment [to resist the Houthis].”⁴³ The end of foreign military action would also leave the group unable to blame Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or the United States for their own failures of governance. 

Aggressive intervention generating blowback has been relatively well-documented. This has been noted by none other than the neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz. The well-respected Chicago professor Pape notes “overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.” Senator Chris Murphy notes that the crisis caused by the horrifying war in Yemen “provides the fuel to recruit young men into terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS, which have been able to thrive in the power vacuum created by the war.”

The Carnegie Endowment For International Peace reported “The Saudi-led coalition is weakening the recognized Yemeni government by bombing the civilian population. Every time an airstrike hits a market, school, or house, that hurts the recognized government’s position and boosts the Houthis, who are able to recruit fighters as a reaction to the targeting of civilians.”

These factors make Houthi repression far more likely. Hanania notes

Scholars have investigated why governments engage in atrocities against civilians and reached more nuanced conclusions than those put forth by American officials. Among the most basic scholarly findings is that governments engage in widespread violations of human rights, including the murder of civilians, because they are seeking to achieve certain political goals, most notably self-preservation. In 2004, a landmark study showed that the key predictor of mass killing – defined as the deliberate killing of at least 50,000 civilians over five years – was civil war, and guerrilla warfare in particular.¹² The authors looked at 42 instances of mass killing between 1945 and the time of their paper, of which 30 (71%) occurred during civil wars. Mass killings, they found, are most common during guerrilla warfare, when states may lack the ability to differentiate between combatants and civilians, thus leading them to target broad swaths of the population. Other studies show that countries are also more likely to engage in mass killing when they are poor,¹³ when regime elites are personally threatened¹⁴ and when foreign states arm their enemies.¹⁵

Thus, by arming coalitions that are tearing countries apart, we dramatically increase the odds of repression and mass killings. All as one would expect. And cutting their GDP in half also dramatically increases the odds of horrifying government repression. Yemen is likely to remain fragmented for a while, but the unprecedented scale of murder, terror, destruction, and devastation would never have existed if the United States did not fund every foreign terrorist state willing to buy our arms.

The thing that radicalized the Houthis in the first place was, in large part, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Their radicalization “is compounded by seven years of support for a war led by a neighbor most Yemenis hate and characterized by air strikes, blockade, and intentional mass starvation.” And we’re furthering their radicalization, as the Quincy institute has claimed, “Having alienated key groups necessary to consolidate support in northern Yemen, especially powerful tribes like the Hashid federation, the Houthis are likely to rely even more heavily on repression.” They further note “The longer the war drags on, the more fundamentalist and repressive the Houthis are likely to become. In the absence of Saudi, Emirati, and U.S. involvement, Houthi repression may increasingly incite the population under their rule.” Even the state department admits that the Houthis have grown more radical over time.

The Saudi’s official rationale for the war is that the Houthis are Iranian proxies who must not have a foothold in the region. But the Houthis and Iran are not natural allies. Brookings notes

Zaydi do not believe in ayatollahs like the Twelver Shiites—who are the Shiite sect in Iran and most of the Muslim world—nor do they practice the other Twelver doctrine of taqqiyah (dissimulation), which permits one to disguise his or her faith for self-protection.

In short, they are a very different sect than the Iranian version of Shiism that Americans have come to know since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The Zaydi are the sect of Islam that the Houthis are. Bandow notes “internal conflict turned into a sectarian proxy war as Tehran, which never had a close relationship with the Houthis (theologically a different Shia variant), offered modest backing for the rebels.”

Talking about the threat posed by the Houthis to the region broadly is a bit absurd—it is, to paraphrase Chomsky, like talking about the threat Luxembourg posed to the Soviet Union. As Bazzi notes “beyond recent missile attacks on Saudi Arabia—in retaliation for Saudi air strikes—the Houthis have displayed little regional ambition.” Bandow furthers

This indigenous religious/​political movement is far less radical than Wahhabism, the variant of Islamic fundamentalism lavishly promoted by Riyadh across the globe, including in Yemen. The Houthis spent years battling Saleh before joining with him against a common enemy, Hadi (and then the coalition). They never waged war on the United States, KSA, or anyone else. Missile attacks were retaliation for military aggression by the Kingdom, following years of ravaging air attacks on Yemen.

But the most important reason why the Iran rationale is idiotic is that attacking the Houthis is the best way to drive them into the hands of Iran. It was when Saudi Arabia started attacking Yemen that the Houthis grew closer to Iran. Bazzi again notes

While the Saudis are quick to blame Iran for the war, several researchers, including Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa and a former analyst at Canada’s Department of National Defense, have shown that the Houthis did not receive significant support from Tehran before the Saudi intervention in 2015. Iran has stepped up military assistance to the Houthis since the war, and Hezbollah has begun sending military advisers to train the Yemeni rebels. But the costs of this assistance fall far short of those incurred by Saudi Arabia and its allies. For Iran, the Yemen conflict is a low-cost way to bleed its regional rival.

This would be like attacking some group because we think they’re allied with the mafia. We attack them so severely that they turn to the Mafia for protection—because, while not natural allies, they’re the only people they can turn to. Then, we declare our vicious attack a great success because we’re fighting mafia allies.

There’s about as strong a case for allying with Iran as there is for allying with Saudi Arabia. Both are states sponsoring terrorism and domestic repression.

Bazzi’s piece, written in 2018, has stood up to history well. Despite constant predictions that the war was about to end, the war rages on. Fortunately, it seems possible that China will be able to broker a peace deal—though given frequent predictions of peace in the past, I’ll believe it when I see it. The U.S. was, of course, never a remotely credible peace broker for the same reason that the best friend of an abusive husband who took part in giving the husband broken beer bottles with which to beat their wife would not be a credible broker in a marriage dispute. Arming the Saudis to the hilt, we gave them the reassurance that they could keep fighting until they win the war—something they were never going to do. This lead to unparalleled destruction—something that U.S. policy-makers are ambivalent to.

Right now, there’s a peace deal, though if the Saudis resume the bombing, it will be, once again, with U.S. arms.

Of course, the murderous Saudi regime is perhaps even more reasonable than their patrons in Washington who supply their arms and want to violently bomb countries as much as possible to prop up various weapons firms. Grim reports

U.S. POLICY TOWARD the Yemen conflict has been so hostile to peace it managed to do the impossible: make Saudi Arabia appear reasonable in comparison. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the U.S. is deeply frustrated at how reasonably various parties are behaving:

In an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this week, CIA Director William Burns expressed frustration with the Saudis, according to people familiar with the matter. He told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that the U.S. has felt blindsided by Riyadh’s rapprochement with Iran and Syria—countries that remain heavily sanctioned by the West—under the auspices of Washington’s global rivals.

It’s often argued that we should arm the Saudis because they’re vital counterterror allies. This is a little ridiculous when, as Hillary Clinton has noted, Saudi Arabia is a “critical source of terrorist funding.” Clifford notes “The immense wealth of Saudi Arabia has been leveraged globally to fund all manner of Sunni extremism, most disconcerting of which includes links to 9/11 and the growing threat posed by ISIS.” That’s right, “reports have shown that ISIS has received extensive funding from Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia.” Butt calls Saudi Arabia “the Fountainhead of Islamist Terrorism.” Most of the Iraq suicide bombers were Saudis. Incidentally, the scale and evidence for Saudi-sponsored terrorism is far more extensive than the evidence for Iran-sponsored terrorism. Thus, asking for Saudi Arabia to root out terrorism is a bit like asking the factory farms to root out animal cruelty or Harvey Weinstein to lead the war against sexual assault, or John Bolton to lead the campaign against wars.

Additionally, as I’ve argued before, the war on terror which we carry out with Saudi intel has been wildly ineffective and increased terrorism dramatically. Teaming up with a world-leading sponsor of terrorism to continue the ineffective war on terror would be like teaming up with the cartels to implement the scared straight program. Ashford claims U.S. Saudi counterterror cooperation “has often been undermined by the Saudis’ continued spread of extreme forms of Islam, as well as the Kingdom’s unwillingness or inability to more effectively interdict its citizens’ financial support for terrorism.”

It’s sometimes claimed that we should arm the Saudis for economic reasons. This was claimed by none other than our former president, who stated “I don't like the concept of stopping an investment of $110 billion into the United States,” explaining why he’d like to keep arming the Saudis after they hacked up a journalist with a bone saw. Of course, Hartung notes that even by wildly liberal estimates, fewer than 20,000 jobs are tied to the grisly sale of arms to Saudi Arabia. Perhaps many in the foreign policy establishment have had their conscience decay long ago, but any program that would starve million of people and devastate a country for the sake of 20,000 jobs is so horrifyingly psychopathic that the fact that any leader was willing to entertain it should be instantly disqualifying—it should be roughly as disqualifying as proposing legalizing murder to help the gun industry. This violent imbecility is what passes as sophisticated analysis.

Sometimes people claim that the Saudis would turn to Russia and China. But “China’s arms exports to Saudi Arabia lag far behind those of the US and its European allies. Beijing exported only around US$20 million in arms last year compared to US$3.4 billion from Washington.” This is why “it cannot supplant US arms sales as President Donald Trump believes, analysts say.” Guay notes

once a country is “locked in” to a specific kind of weapons system, such as planes, tanks or naval vessels, the cost to switch to a different supplier can be huge. Military personnel must be retrained on new equipment, spare parts need to be replaced, and operational changes may be necessary.

After being so reliant on U.S. weapons systems for decades, the transition costs to buy from another country could be prohibitive even for oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

The second problem with Trump’s argument is that armaments from Russia, China or elsewhere are simply not as sophisticated as U.S. weapons

Russia is also an ally of Iran and China is an ally of Iran. Thus, they wouldn’t sell to Saudi Arabia, for that would complicate relations with Iran. Additionally, this would send an important signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. is not okay with horrifying human rights abuses. This would be especially important given that “Congress has never successfully blocked an arms sale and rarely tries.” Thus, even if they moved to Russia or China—which they would not—the harms of this would be swamped by the benefits of the signal.

People worry the Saudis would stop selling oil to us. Of course, even putting aside the question of whether we should be buying tons of oil in the first place this wouldn’t be a disaster when only about 7% of U.S. oil comes from Saudi Arabia. This is why “petroleum and defense experts have largely discounted such possibilities.” Krauss and Gladstone describe in detail the relationship between us, concluding that “They depend more on us than we depend on them.” This quote also comes from Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington. If the Saudis cut off oil

“It would have a severe negative impact on the global economy,” he said. “It also would be very self-defeating. It would undermine the reputation they built as a reliable supplier for 45 years.”

This is why in the days after the Khashoggi murder, oil prices “remained stable.” Thus, investors were not scared about Saudi retaliation. Michael Lynch, the president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, said “People know that the Saudis don’t want to chase away customers by suggesting their oil supplies are not secure.”

China in total sells only an average of 1.5 billion arms per year. Contrary to the cold war fever dreams of various neocons, they are not trying to take over the global arms trade. Sadly we don’t have a test case of the U.S. stopping selling arms to a country over humanitarian concerns, because the U.S. hasn’t stopped selling arms to a country over humanitarian concerns. Russia sells a bit more arms, but has been in decline.

People worry that the Houthis will block oil straits—including the vital Bab el-Mandeb strait. But the reason the Houthis are attacking oil tankers is because the Saudis are bombing them. The Houthis weren’t attacking Saudi Arabia prior to the war. Alexandre notes “The rivalry for control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is part of a regional conflict between Iran and its Shiite allies on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies on the other.” The Houthis have no reason to block the Bab el-Mandeb strait beyond the fact that it is a way to retaliate against the Saudis who are attacking them.

There are more points that the people who supporting arming those who bomb Yemen make, but none are remotely convincing. Likewise, there are lots of other reasons to not arm the Saudis—they have a long history of destabilizing the middle east. But this is more than enough—we should not be teaming up with the world’s lead sponsor of radical Islamic terror, who bombs and starves children in Yemen. The fact that we allow them to destroy Yemen with impunity because they have oil and money is a horrifying indictment of our foreign policy. Saudi Arabia is unbelievably repressive, and it’s about time we stopped selling them our arms.

Saudi Arabia should have a mark next to their name, the way North Korea and Iran do. We sure as hell should not be arming them. When five-year-old Yemeni children are starving to death, when kids are getting cholera—a disease virtually never seen except in desperately poor countries with bad sanitation—it’s time we stand up to the murderous dictator who is calling the shots. Let’s take a bonesaw to the U.S. Saudi relationship.