Demonstrations against the Saudi regime continued for several years after the Arab Spring began in 2011. Here, Saudis in the mostly Shia area of eastern Saudi Arabia, demand freedom for political prisoners.
A very important Senate vote took place recently, and few people know about it.
On March 20, Senators voted on whether to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s vicious war in Yemen by invoking the War Powers Act. The final vote was 55-44 against taking up the resolution, which killed it for now. The War Powers Act is intended to check the president's power to commit the United States to an armed conflict without the consent of the Congress, and the closeness of the Senate vote indicates increasing discomfort with the U.S. support for war in the Middle East.
The vote coincided with a meeting between President Trump and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, during which Trump celebrated an arms deal worth $1 billion.
News reports indicate that bin Salman has particularly close ties with Jared Kushner, a strong supporter of the war.
More than 5,000 Yemenis have died and tens of thousands have been injured since the war began three years ago. The Saudis have engaged in a horrific bombing campaign aimed at civilian infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. Their air, sea, and land blockade has cut off supplies of food and medicine. The country has suffered a massive outbreak of cholera, and health experts are predicting another soon. A U.N. Security Council report indicates that 22.2 million people out of a total Yemeni population of 27.5 million need humanitarian assistance, a 3.4 million jump over last year.
The United States has played a major role in this devastating campaign. The Obama Administration gave a green light to Saudi Arabia to bomb and send troops to Yemen in 2015. The Trump Administration has continued the war, providing intelligence, and selling the Saudis sophisticated weapons, ammunition, and aircraft parts. The U.S. Air Force refuels Saudi planes in mid-air.
The United States has played a major role in the devastating campaign in Yemen.
Saudi leaders argue that they are fighting Iranian proxies in Yemen, and that Iran seeks to destroy their country. The Pentagon insists the United States only plays an advisory role and provides “non-combat assistance” and thus isn’t violating the War Powers Act.
Back in 2015, Saudi leaders proudly proclaimed they would win the war in three weeks.
“They underestimated their enemy,” says Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Harvard University doctoral candidate who was born and raised in Yemen. The Saudis and their coalition partners from the United Arab Emirates “don’t have the ground soldiers. So they launched a massive bombing campaign. The war has U.S. fingerprints all over it.”
It’s not widely known but Washington could shut down the Yemen war overnight. U.S. contractors are the only technicians loading bombs and maintaining Saudi warplanes, and they operate with the the OK of the U.S. government.
“If the U.S. didn’t give permission” to the contractors, a former U.S. diplomat told me, “it would shut down the Saudi Air Force.”
Senate Democrats Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy were joined by Republican Mike Lee to introduce the resolution to stop U.S. support for the bloodshed in Yemen. “This is one of the great humanitarian disasters of our time,” Sanders told Vox. The Senate resolution would have, under the War Powers Act, required that the president seek Congressional approval for any military activity abroad lasting more than sixty days.
Washington could shut down the Yemen war overnight.
Five Republicans also voted for the bill, motivated in part by concern for the constitutional issue, according to Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, executive editor of The American Conservative magazine.
“They are fed up with successive presidential administrations that say they can wage war without Congressional approval,” Vlahos told me in an interview.
The current Yemen catastrophe has roots in the Arab Spring when a pro-U.S. dictator was removed from power only to be replaced by a weaker, pro-U.S. dictator. By 2014, Ansar Allah, a rebel movement based in northern Yemen, seized the capital of Sanaa and all of northern Yemen as part of an effort to overthrow the corrupt, pro-U.S. Yemeni dictator Ali Saleh.
Ansar Allah, commonly known as the Houthis, is a conservative political Islamist group based mostly among Shia Muslims. Human rights groups have documented Houthi human rights violations such as illegal use of landmines, and indiscriminate shelling of civilians in both Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
The group receives political and financial support from Iran, and several U.N. reports indicate Iran provides weapons as well. Iranian officials I spoke with deny that Tehran provides military support to the Houthis, and state that Iran considers Yemen a very low priority compared to their activities in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The Houthis are an independent political and military movement not under Iran’s control, they insist.
Washington argues it must keep U.S. troops in Yemen, to support continued drone warfare against Al Qaeda. In addition, Saudi Arabia is key in the geopolitical battle for hegemony in the region, which remains an important source of U.S. oil company profits.
The Senate failed to invoke the War Powers Act, but the relatively close vote indicates the level of discontent with the Yemen War. The United States is currently at war in five other Middle Eastern countries as well: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia.
“Forcing the vote was a big deal,” said editor Vlahos.
Reese Erlich’s syndicated column, Foreign Correspondent, appears regularly on Progressive.org. The revised and updated edition of his book, The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis, will be published in September. Follow him on Twitter and visit his webpage.