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What the Hell Are We Doing in Yemen?
It’s easy to forget the ongoing war in Yemen. But a pair of news stories this week serves not only of a reminder of American involvement there but the foolishness in involving ourselves in yet another civil war.
The first story is the bombing of a school bus by Saudi warplanes that killed 29 children under the age of 15 in Saada Province. For what it’s worth (which isn’t much), the Saudis claim they didn’t intentionally target a bus full of children and that this was a “legitimate military operation.” Civil wars are usually full of atrocities, but this particular horror and the 29 dead children (and many others in this war) was made possible by generous assistance from the United States government and American taxpayers.
Yes, these were Saudi pilots flying Saudi planes (probably — this particular atrocity is credited to the “Saudi-led coalition”), but those planes and the bombs they dropped were sold to them by the United States. Now, you can argue that a seller has no moral responsibility for the atrocities committed when they provide weapons to a bestial regime. So be it, but American involvement doesn’t end when the check is cashed.
Not only does America provide the warplanes, but we provide the Saudi government targeting information and aerial refueling. The Saudis would not be able to fight their air war in Yemen without the support of the American government. And it’s long been communicated to the Saudis that they can bomb civilians and still receive that absolutely essential logistical support. Why? The Saudis are aligned with the “government” of Yemen against the Houthi rebels, which are nominally supported by Iran. The Yemen Civil War is a proxy war of sorts between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
By backing the Saudis to blow up school buses full of children, the US is able to poke a finger in the eye of Iran … or something. (It’s worth noting that the amount of support by the Iranians to the Houthis is a subject of much debate. It appears to me to be wildly overblown.) And we have to fight Iran, don’t ya know, because they support international terrorist groups … or something.
The second story was less widely reported: The Associated Press found that for the last two years the “Saudi-led coalition” has been winning battles on the ground in Yemen by making common cause with Al Qaeda, specifically the local branch, AQAP. They’ve made secret deals, letting them go free if they leave certain cities and towns. It’s a good deal for the AQAP fighters because they usually get to walk away with their guns, their gear, and the cash they looted.
How could our dear allies, the Saudis, betray America like this? Oh, Uncle Sam knows what’s going on and we’ve canceled airstrikes on certain AQAP forces after they’ve cut deals with the Saudis. The US not droning AQAP forces when they retreat with their weapons is a central requirement for these agreements to happen.
Look, I can make a case for negotiating with horrific groups. There’s academic research on how civil wars conclude and it often involves bringing parties (even horrifically violent ones) into the political process. The above is also obviously an oversimplification of the situation. For example, I haven’t even mentioned ISIS or Al-Islah. By my count, there are at least five different warring factions in Yemen (not counting the Saudi-led coalition, Iran, the Emiratis, or the US).
Lines in civil wars are both blurry and constantly shifting, and we’re talking about a part of the world where they were playing power politics 2,000 years before Christ was born. A country as young as America cannot hope to compete with the internal dynamics of a five-way civil war in a country most Americans probably still can’t find on a map.
The real folly, of course, was getting involved in someone else’s civil war in the first place. Whatever case was to be made is weaker than it ever was. But you have to wonder what we’re doing if we’re cutting deals with Al Qaeda while our “allies” bomb school buses full of children.
Published in Foreign Policy, Islamist Terrorism, Military
Fully concur.
They’re a UK thing.
The Gipper’s talking about you, Fred.
No it’s not. If you read further they have several thousand US families.
“The US hosting programme is still in development. We have around 2,000 hosts registered in the US and are initially looking to partner with refugee organisations in New York City who can help us to screen guests.”
The moment you show you are donating enough money to support one refugee I’ll start to listen to you on how America should take them in.
Around the world, everyone’s description of our country, USA (“We”), is that We are the world’s the police. Good or bad for us (good), We are indeed the police. Military, finance, even culture, We are the police.
There are local precincts that wander their own way, but where it matters the most, We go and do what good police should do : walk the streets where there’s trouble.
The Arabian Peninsula is one of those places. Others have been there before us, and we work with them.
Like it or not, that’s what We do. With great power comes great responsibility.
As inconsistent as it may appear, We keep the balance of world prosperity and freedom tilted in that direction.
Clean and easy not always it is, but circumstances sometimes make it so.
That is what the hell we are doing in Yemen, and in other places too.
Are you talking about hell or Yeman? Is there a difference?
If Yemen doesn’t want school buses blown up then a really good solution to their problem is to stop letting fanatical Islam to operate there. The more of them we kill, the better. Their source of strength is in their ideology and they will never change their ideology. The only way to stop the ideology is to destroy the minds of those who hold it. We don’t have to kill all of the fanatical terrorists. Just most of them.
We can kid ourselves that holding hands and singing cumbuyah will save the day, or we can protect ourselves and cause fewer deaths in the long run by fighting ruthlessly.
I’m re-reading T. R. Fehrenbach’s “Comanches: The History of a People” which I read while overseas. The historical war most like the war against fanatical Islam was the wars with the plains Indians, most notably the Comanches in Texas. In the 1840’s the Texas Rangers succeeded in attacking the Comanches in their homes and this was the only thing the Comanches respected. The Comanches hated the Tejanos but knew to stay away. Once the Rangers were stopped from bringing death to the Comanches, they horse Indians started right back up again, murdering and taking captives.
After the Civil War, the federal government in a bizarre act of tragicomedy contracted with the Quakers to run the reservations for the Comanches and paid handsomely for the return of captured whites. Of course this, combined with a policy forbidding any military action at all, only caused the Comanches to capture more whites – and treat them brutally – in order to get the ransom. This policy only served to encourage the Comanches who perceived weakness, not mercy, and caused them to eventually be exterminated as a people, rather than joining modern civilization. The Comanches no longer exist because we weren’t forceful.
Fanatical Islam is much the same. The parallels to our battalion’s operations in Iraq are uncanny.
GW Bush, like his father, knew how to start a war, but doesn’t know how to win one. The only moral war is total war, and pussy footing in war only leads to more people dying in the long run – or worse, defeat.
So, I don’t give a rat’s behind about a bus of school kids that was in the wrong spot. War is hell, and efforts to not make it hell only prolong it.
Never been to hell. Have not abandoned hope to stay away.
Though don’t know if doing my best not to.
Kyrie, eleison !
(but that sounds like it should be a separate post)
The Iranians are bit overextended in Syria right now. The Israelis are pounding them from the air, and their Russian buddies can’t do anything to help them. That doesn’t mean Iran isn’t pouring weapons into Yemen, and a tour in Yemen might start looking pretty attractive to the Iranians because Israel flies over Syria with impunity. The Russians know better than to light up their anti-aircraft radar when Israeli aircraft are in the air. The Iranians tried it one night, and they found out the hard way it wasn’t a good idea. All Ivan the Syrian can do is to advise them to dig a bit deeper hole.
If I may add–and put more in it.
@fredcole, I’ll allow others to attack your arguments. I will suggest a narrow area for you to concentrate on.
Wikipedia lists the Royal Saudi Air Force as having 22 aerial refueling aircraft. This includes both the KC 135 that we use and the much larger and more modern Airbus A330 MRTT.
Why do they need us to do their aerial refueling?
One possibility is that the Saudi military is so penetrated by Islamists of dubious loyalty that Saudi Arabia only trusts a few of its fighter pilots to engage in operations against other Muslims.
We saw a similar dynamic back during the in Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Despite the very contentious prior sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia, we had to rush our own there to handle the actual monitoring of Iraq. When push came to shove, many in Saudi Arabia and the other gulf nations apparently regarded the weapons we had sold them as only being intended for the jihad against Israel.
They’re incompetent? They tend to hire Pakistanis to do their fighting for them, so…??
Everybody knows that the Saudis buy things from the US (like expensive defense stuff) to keep the US on side, not necessarily because the Saudis actually need any of it.
(I also truly doubt that the Saudis etc. have any intention of jihad against Israel. They really don’t care, (if anything dealing with Israel gets them brownie points in Congress, which is important) they just pretend they do in order to not look like complete poodles.
It’s not easy being the House of Saud. They want to be the “guardians of the holy places” but then they’re also totally into the corruption of unlimited wealth but they also have this yearning to be leaders of the Islamic world (and enough money to buy at least a simulcrum of deference from “rice wahabbis”) but then they also need Congress to stay pals with them because they’re a monarchy that utterly lacks any democratic authority (I think this is actually what freaks them about the Islamic Republic, whose position is that monarchy is by its nature tyrranical and therefore unislamic!) and they need help to keep their stuff, and some of their people are sick of the whole thing but there are others who are into it, and The Kingdom wouldn’t run a day without all those foreign workers, etc etc etc.
@fredcole – are you kidding me? The US (for a number of reasons) deals the Saudis some “product” – and the Saudis use said “product” in ways that benefit it and also that corrupt and destroy it and the general Middle East – but the salient point is: they buy the product. They pay money for it, and everything else is justification for that. imho. Think: Opium Wars.
To quote Sherman, “War is hell, and the more hellish it is the sooner it will be over.”
Let’s pound our enemies into submission.
Fred, I think that this is an overly simplistic view. The proposition that the US and USSR were “fueling wars” is not the only explanation for that graph.
Another explanation, at least equally plausible, is that Communism was seen as a viable system before the fall of the USSR. This view, in turn, inspired Communist insurgencies and civil wars. In addition, there were some civil wars involving efforts to overthrow Communist governments. Thus, the practical undermining of the ideology behind the USSR would be expected to lead to a significant decline in civil wars, which is what your graph shows.
Exactly. War is not always bad. Sometimes it is necessary and beneficial to wage a war. It is not wrong to overthrow oppression or end a threat to our safety.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
To answer the question in the OP.
We’re probably all woefully ignorant of Yemen, and of anything going on there. What I don’t know about Yemen would fill volumes. How many volumes? Probably all of the volumes ever written about Yemen, except about 2-3 pages.
Here’s what I do think.
Fred’s claim that we are foolishly involving ourselves in another civil war is remarkably inaccurate. From the description in the OP, we have no boots on the ground and are not even committing combat aircraft. We are acting in a purely support role, for an important ally, Saudi Arabia.
Fred’s claim that the tragic alleged death of 29 schoolchildren in a civil war should affect our view of the conflict is irrational and emotional. It is perfectly fine to have an emotional reaction to an alleged tragedy such as this. But Fred’s apparent suggestion is that any time, in a messy, multilateral conflict, the folks most allied to us are arguably (and probably unintentionally) responsible for civilian casualties, we must immediately pull out of the conflict. This principle, if applied consistently, will lead only to a position of complete isolationism.
Complete isolationism keeps our hands completely clean, if we accept the proposition that we can never bear any responsibility for inaction. But if we can bear responsibility for inaction, as I believe we can, then complete isolationism is a morally bankrupt position. This does not mean that isolationism or a policy of noninvolvement is always incorrect, but only that it must be justified and analyzed under a more sophisticated set of rules.
So what do we know, or suspect, about Yemen? Here are my thoughts:
(1) Yemen is a dreadful society and an awful mess, and always has been. It probably will be so for the foreseeable future.
(2) The most dangerous, anti-American power in the region, Iran, is supporting the insurgency in a Yemeni civil war seeking to expand its influence.
(3) The most important American ally in the region, or at least semi-ally, Saudi Arabia, is committed to blocking this Iranian expansionism and is bearing the bulk of the burden of that effort.
(4) It is a complicated, multilateral civil war, with no significant party that we would consider to be really “good guys.” Jeffersonian democracy is not one of the options at the moment.
(5) One or more Al Qaeda-affiliated groups are fighting principally against the Iran-backed group, and are therefore something like co-belligerents with the Saudis, and have received some accommodation from the Saudis such as releases when captured. Presumably, this allows them to resume the fight against the common, Iranian-backed enemy.
So what are we doing? Supporting an important ally in resisting Iranian aggression and expansion, at very little cost to us, in order to prevent a pretty bad Yemeni government from being replaced by an even worse, Iranian-allied Yemeni government.
This seems like a reasonable policy, to me.
Great stuff against the OP.
The Saudis are making deals with Al-Queada who are enemy. Just like the Pakistanis were actively (and still are) supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan while we fight them.
But we make no attempt to understand why, and are shocked when the locals dont want to fight for us, because we are supporting the Taliban.
Yeman as terrible as it is, is not really are problem.
However if Iran wants to get more extended into fighting a civil war, and the Saudis are willing to fight them, I am fine with that.
The Pakistanis have lost control of half their country.
Pakistan is an army with a country.
No. It’s a country without control of half their provinces. International law doesn’t require anyone to respect their sovereignty in the parts they no longer control. We should stop pretending that Pakistan is a country.
@skyler
The fact that they have nuclear weapons is a problem in ignoring them. I hope we have some sort of plan in place
That’s the kind of language that Putin uses when talking about Ukraine.
False equivalence.
We WillowSpring (View Comment): @skyler
“We should stop pretending that Pakistan is a country.
“The fact that they have nuclear weapons is a problem in ignoring them. I hope we have some sort of plan in place”
I don’t recall recall recommending they be ignored.
My usual response at this point is to say that it’s a comparison, not an equivalence. But this time it’s both, as i can’t think of a substantive point on which the two differ.
The Russians are taking over Ukraine for the purpose of taking something that they want and have no right to. We should treat Pakistan’s government with the contempt it deserves in areas it does not control so that fanatical Islamists can find succor and refuge across a border that is actually meaningless.
What does ‘treat with contempt’ mean, in practical terms?
Pakistan’s fuzzy border is mostly with Afghanistan. Who’s going make it mean something? The Afghan Govt?
The other neighbour with a less fuzzy but still difficult border: Iran?
It means we should not treat their border as though it denoted sovereignty. International law says that if a nation does not control its territory, then they cannot object to others coming and controlling it for them. That means, when al Qaeda seek refuge in Pakistan provinces that the Pakistan government no longer controls, that we can pursue and destroy them there.
This is similar to when Texas got tired of Comanches raiding them and the federal government refused to do anything about it, they reformed the Texas Rangers and raided into Oklahoma and other parts beyond the Texas border and killed the Comanches in their Tipis wherever they could find them. It’s a very effective tactic and we could learn a lot about battling fanatical Islam by studying how we had to fight with the plains horse indians, especially the Comanches.