Reprinted from The Guardian
The humanitarian disaster there is, by some measures, greater than that in Syria. Why is Obama continuing to enable the Saudi bombing campaign?
Saudi Arabia resumed its appalling war in Yemen last week and has already killed dozens more civilians, destroyed a school full of children and leveled a hospital full of sick and injured people. The campaign of indiscriminate killing -- though let's call it what it is: a war crime -- has now been going on for almost a year and a half. And the United States bears a large part of the responsibility.
This US-backed war is not just a case of the Obama administration sitting idly by while its close ally goes on a destructive spree of historic proportions. The government is actively selling the Saudis billions of dollars of weaponry. They're re-supplying planes engaged in the bombing runs and providing "intelligence" for the targets that Saudi Arabia is hitting.
Put simply, the US is quite literally funding a humanitarian catastrophe that, by some measures, is larger than the crisis in Syria. As the New York Times editorial board wrote this week: "Experts say the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its support." Yet all we've heard is crickets.
High-ranking Obama administration officials are hardly ever asked about the crisis. Cable television news has almost universally ignored it. Both the Clinton and Trump presidential campaigns have been totally silent on this issue despite their constant arguing over who would be better at "stopping terrorism." Beyond the grotesque killing of civilians, it's clear at this point that the Saudis' bombing campaign has also boosted al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap) to a level which Reuters described as "stronger and richer" than any time in its 20-year history.
Jake Tapper commendably broke the television news blackout about Yemen on his CNN show on Wednesday. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the very few elected representatives talking about the crisis, told Tapper that "it's wild to me" that the Congress isn't debating the "unauthorized" war in Yemen. The Saudis "could not do it without the United States," he said. "We have made the decision to go to war in Yemen" -- against Saudi Arabia's enemies, not ours -- without any debate.