Liberals and leftists were divided on this intervention, as they had been with Bosnia and Herzegovina. But Susan Sontag made the case for military action in the New York Times Magazine. In the American Prospect, Paul Starr called the Kosovo intervention a "humanitarian war" and thought a land invasion would be more effective than airstrikes, but concluded:
"Those of us who believe that the United States ought to use its power to prevent genocide and other high crimes against human decency are going to have to work a lot harder to convince our neighbors."
Notice the phrasing: "the United States ought to use its power ..."
What happens when the best way to prevent a genocide is by ending the use of American power? That seems to be a harder case to make in American political culture.
The Forgotten CatastropheYemen, a nation long renowned for its beauty, has become a place of almost unimaginable horror. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently declared i t "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," and cited statistics that, once heard, should never be forgotten.
Here's one such statistic: Every 10 minutes, a child under five dies of preventable causes. (Based on the average reading speed, it should take 10 minutes to read these words. That means a child is statistically likely to die while it is being read.)
Here are some more:
18 million people are food insecure, and 8.4 million Yemenis don't know how they will obtain their next meal.
3 million acutely malnourished Yemenis are either children under 5, pregnant women, or nursing mothers.
Nearly half of all children aged between six months and 5 years old are chronically malnourished and stunted, conditions that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
Children are being forced to fight, or to work at very young ages. Many young girls are being forced into marriage before they are 18, or even 15, as a response to family debt and poverty.
Women and girls are at heightened risk of sexual and gender-based violence.
Millions have no access to safe drinking water.
1 million people suffered from watery diarrhea and cholera last year. There is a high risk of another cholera epidemic.
More than ten thousand civilians -- perhaps many more -- have been killed in the fighting.
Our ComplicityThe problem isn't that the US is standing by and doing nothing while this horror unfolds. It's much worse than that. The US is actively working to cause these atrocities, by helping the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia in its relentless attack on Yemen.
Marjorie Ransom, a former diplomat in Yemen, writes of "direct U.S. military complicity in this long and pointless campaign," adding:
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