Posted 3 years ago
The war in Yemen, has left more than 200,000 Yemenis dead, and left millions starving. The Saudi-led strikes against civilians (mostly with US made weapons) has been a long standing black eye on US foreign policy and inflamed tensions all across the Middle East. New President Biden has indicated he wishes to end that war, a far cry from the Obama/Biden administration who greenlit the Saudi-led plans to intervene in Yemen.
Rob Malley, a national security adviser to former President Barack Obama who just joined the Biden administration, recently laid bare that sense of complicity.
“The United States has had a major hand in Yemen from the beginning and thus must answer for its part in the tragedy,” Malley wrote in a searing op-ed published last week in Foreign Affairs magazine and co-authored by Stephen Pomper, who worked as a special adviser to Obama for human rights and other issues.
“We knew we might be getting into a car with a drunk driver,” Malley and Pomper recall being told by another Obama official. “And yet the United States climbed in anyway.”
Biden used his first foreign policy speech as president to announce the U.S. would end its support for Saudi Arabia’s operations in Yemen, saying "This war has to end" and he went further by pausing certain weapons sales to the kingdom and appointing a special, Timothy Lenderking, whose primary job will be ending the war.
“There's this idea among some people that the U.S. can kind of ride on this white horse, snap its fingers, and the war's over,” said Elana DeLozier, a Yemen expert with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“It’s going to be a hard slog,” she said.
The Trump administration made the situation in Yemen even more fraught, lawmakers and experts believe, particularly with its 11th-hour decision to designate the Houthis, Iranian-backed rebels, as a terrorist group. The Houthis helped drive Yemen’s internationally recognized government out of power in 2014, turning Yemen into a battleground between Iran and the Saudis, bitter rivals vying for influence in the region.
Topic: World News
Tags: Timothy Lenderking War Yemen Biden Foreign Policy