Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/21/22 Annelle Sheline on Why Yemen Matters

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Scott is joined by Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute to discuss Yemen. Sheline wrote an article recently about the shifting balance of the war. One year after Biden announced an end to U.S. support for offensive Saudi operations, the bombing campaign remains as brutal as ever. Sheline argues that, while all sides have committed atrocities, the scale of the Saudi coalition’s brutality has outshone all others. Further, the war can only happen with continued U.S. support, which puts it on Americans themselves to stop this tragedy.   Discussed on the show: “Did Biden help the Saudis turn the tide in their favor in Yemen?” (Responsible Statecraft) “In Strategic Shift, U.S. Draws Closer to Yemeni Rebels” (Wall Street Journal)  Annelle Sheline is a Research Fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute and an expert on religious and political authority in the Middle East and North Africa. Follow her on Twitter @AnnelleSheline. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, I'm giving speeches. I'll be at the Connecticut Libertarian Party State Convention on January the 29th and then February the 26th at the state convention in Utah in Salt Lake City there. So I don't know. Look it up. For Pacifica Radio, January the 23rd, 2022, I'm Scott Horton. This is anti-war radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is anti-war radio.

I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, an author of Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And you can find my full interview archive for the 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show.

You can find me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show. All right, introducing Anel Sheeline. She is a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and she's got this really important piece here. Did Biden help the Saudis turn the tide in their favor in Yemen? Welcome back to the show, Anel. How are you doing? Doing well.

Thanks so much for having me. Really happy to have you here. Great writing, as always. And I guess basically the news is that for the last, year, Ansarala, or the Houthis, have been making severe advances to the east and the south, and now you're reporting that those advances are being reversed, including that they're being pushed out of the region surrounding the city of Merib. Is that correct? Yes. Well, you know, it can be hard to know what exactly is the latest on the front lines in Yemen. But, right,

What I had written about was the fact that Ansed al-La forces had consolidated control over certain territories in Yemen throughout the fall, and it seemed like maybe they were going to successfully take MADIB, which is a strategically significant city with oil resources. But then we saw over just sort of the past few weeks, the UAE-backed forces and Saudi-backed forces sort of working together more effectively and pushing the Houthis or Ansala Allah out of these specific territories. And so now it seems essentially that the war is escalating. And unfortunately, we see the role of the U.S. contributing to that. Okay, well, the headlines on anti-war.com on Friday morning as we are recording this are that the Saudis bombed the port city of Hodata and including took the entire country's internet offline, at least temporarily there, with some of the buildings they hit. And there have been reports all week long of civilians killed in Sana'a and all over the country under these airstrikes. Exactly. It's really, well, it's important to keep in mind. that all parties to this conflict have done horrific things. The Houthis have engaged in

atrocious human rights violations. But it is really a question of scale of who are the actors on the ground that are really devastating Yemen. And when we're talking about something like the Saudi Air Force, which is, you know, three quarters of whose planes were manufactured by the United States, the other, the remainder manufactured by the UK. I mean, the level of devastation reeked by the Saudi-led coalition, you just really can't compare that to what the Houthis have done, although, again, the Houthis also do horrible things. They use child soldiers. But I think in general, we see a media narrative that tends to portray the Houthis as the spoilers, that they're the ones that won't accept peace, when in fact it is the Saudi-led coalition that is blockading Yemen,

not allowing fuel ships to land, which then drives the price of fuel and food and electricity up. And then, as you just said, not only are they not allowing in fuel, they're actively destroying civilian infrastructure, and they have been doing so throughout the course of the past seven years since the initial invasion in March of 2015. Now, let's talk about that for a minute here. You and I are talking about the Saudis versus Ansarala and this and that. And why is this any of America's business? You mentioned that America supplies the Saudi Arabian Air Force with planes.

Is that all there is to it, Ann, Al? Well, it's the UN recently released statistics on sort of the worst humanitarian crises in the world right now. And Yemen still outstrips all. of these other crises, whether it's Tigray conflict in Ethiopia. I mean, the scale of the devastation of the starvation that is ongoing in Yemen just really outstrips these other conflicts. So from a humanitarian perspective, it's important to focus on Yemen just in terms of what it would take to try to rebuild this important part of the world, which historically we have seen terrorist acts directed at the United States that originated in Yemen. I mean, historically,

this is why the United States has been involved in Yemen since 9-11 is just knowing that Yemen has presented a potential threat to the U.S. in the past. I don't want to overblow the threat of terrorism, which I think has characterized our foreign policy for the past 20 years. I do think it's, it is important, though, to keep in mind that given the scale of what's going on in Yemen, this could be destabilizing more broadly for Saudi Arabia, for this part of the world. There have been concerns raised about the Babelmandab Strait, which is the southern entrance to the Red Sea, which then leads up to the Suez Canal. It's right down by the Horn of Africa, where historically there have been concerns about piracy. So whether you're motivated

by human suffering, or if you're more motivated by trade and economic concerns, Yemen really does matter. And this is why we've seen the U.S. involved historically, but the point I have made repeatedly is that the nature of U.S. involvement is not actually helping, where what the U.S. is doing by continuing to support just the Saudi side, we're actually prolonging the war. We've heard from various Saudi officials. The Saudis are wasting huge amounts of money in Yemen. They're spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And the problem is only getting worse.

Initially, the Saudis intervened because they worried that Ansala was getting support from Iran. This was back in 2015. And ironically, what's happened since then is Iran has expanded its support to the Ansala government in Sana'a. So the original motivation that brought the Saudis in, they've not only failed to address that, but that problem has gotten worse. And so instead, what we've seen is Yemen is continuing to break down, as I said, further destruction of civilian infrastructure, further erosion of sort of social structures that once held Yemen together as a single state.

Yemen observers will know that north and south Yemen were different countries until they unified in 1990. There was a brief civil war in 94 where the South tried to break off again and the North forced them to stay. But we do have a pretty strong secessionist movement in the South of Southern Yemenis who are fed up with the fact that resources tended to be concentrated in the North. And this is part of why we also see the UAE being involved here. The UAE said that they had pulled out militarily at the end of 2019. But they had... have remained quite involved. As I mentioned, the UAE is funding certain militant groups in Yemen.

And this is what we saw with the recent territorial advances by the Saudi-led coalition. Most of those were made by a UAE-backed group called in English the Giants Brigade. Well, all right, I want to go back to seven years ago when this war started. But actually seven years ago, the war hadn't quite started yet, or this part of it, the war started in March of 2015. But in January of 2015, in fact, on January the 29th, the Wall Street Journal ran a story called, In Strategic Shift, U.S. draws closer to Yemeni rebels.

And that was that CENTCOM, then under the control of our current Secretary of Defense, then General Lloyd Austin, was passing intelligence to the Houthis to use to kill AQU. You mentioned that America had a terrorism problem coming out of Yemen. It wasn't the Houthis. It was AQAP that attacked the coal, that tried to blow up the plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. And seven years ago today, we had allied, our government had allied to a degree with the Houthis to fight against them. Then two months later, Barack Obama stabbed the Houthis in the back and took the other side in the war. which has included al-Qaeda in the Saudi UAE coalition from the very beginning.

So we could have a war against AQAP once they switch sides in the war back again. This could go on for decades still. Right, no, exactly. So the Houthis, or Ansala, just to clarify a little bit there, Ansala is the more accurate term to describe this group. The Houthi name refers to a specific family. and so the notion of the followers of the Houthi family. The point being these are Zaydi Shia.

But so these are enemies of the extremists Salafi jihadi al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, many of whom, so AQAP, many of those individuals were originally Saudis who were driven out of Saudi Arabia by the Saudi government and took up refuge in Yemen and Yemenis as well. But originally, Ansala Allah or the Houthis had been a useful partner because they are not in any way ideologically aligned with AQAP. They are Shia. And so proved to be a useful partner for the U.S. against the AQAP in Yemen. However, what we've seen starting in March of 2015 when the U.S. approved the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, that the U.S. essentially switched sides there.

And the reason for this, given subsequently by Obama administration officials, was because the JCPOA was in the offing, and Obama knew that the Saudis were not going to be thrilled with the Iran nuclear deal. They saw this as a way to signal U.S. support for what the Saudis saw is very important. And, you know, MBS, who at the time was defense minister, he wasn't yet crown prince, but he thought that this was going to be. a great feather in his cap just a few weeks to defeat this rag-tag group of Houthi rebels. And that would be, you know, a great point on his resume for why he should be crown prince. And yet here we are almost seven years later. The war is dragging on. We see Saudi Arabia, unfortunately, exposed to many more missiles and drones and projectiles

than they were originally. And so this is what we saw recently when the Biden administration justified its sale of missiles to Saudi Arabia right before Christmas, even though the Biden administration had said they were going to end U.S. involvement in the war and specifically end support for offensive munitions. And so they tried to characterize this most recent sale as defensive. But as any IR student should be able to tell you, it's really hard to distinguish offensive from defensive weapons. I mean, it's a weapon. It depends. who you're pointing it at. And furthermore, as I argue in a few different pieces, simply the

signal of U.S. support of deciding to sell these weapons, again, regardless of how you characterize them. But the point being that, look, the U.S. is still behind you Saudi Arabia. We want you to keep bombarding Yemen. We want you to keep going after the Houthis. Again, despite the fact that U.S. interests would arguably be best served by having a government in Yemen that would be more effective at combating AQAP. Right. Well, yeah, Operation Decisive Storm. You knew right then, as soon as they named it that, it was going to last forever, right? Yeah. Now, so here's the thing of it, right? It's such a great loophole. It's a really important phenomenon. And some young kid ought to be doing their PhD on this right now is the idea of leading from behind and the diffusion of

responsibility that comes with that. Well, it's the Saudi-led coalition. And if they're violating the Geneva Conventions on a daily basis, and if they're deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and masking innocent civilians, then, well, what do you expect? They cut people's hands off for stealing. You know how those Saudis are. And it's everybody else's fault except ours. Is that how that works? Yeah, I mean, it really is a question here because, you know, interestingly, what we've seen subsequently, and especially since the U.S. pull-up from Afghanistan, is actually, finally, this realization by the Saudis, by other U.S. partners in the Arabian Peninsula, also by the Iranians, that they need to work out a modus vivendi between them because they don't

want to actually fight these wars themselves. They were fine when the U.S. was there to back them up or, you know, it was going to be American lives on the line. But now that it, you know, this is the third administration in a row that has signaled the America's intention to really spend less resources on the Middle East, I think they're finally getting the message and they're starting to work out better diplomatic relations between them. But then interestingly, that freaks out a lot of American policymakers who are accustomed to the U.S. being the preeminent force in the region. They see this as crucial to U.S. interests. And so in the face of this enhanced diplomacy that we saw sort of emerging over the summer and the fall, then instead we see a doubling down

and messages from folks like Jake Sullivan trying to make clear that, no, the U.S. isn't going anywhere, we're not pulling our troops out. We saw that with the force posture of you, that essentially no, there were no changes in the U.S. troop presence in the Middle East. The difference, I do think I was able to do some field work sort of in between COVID surges. I was in Jordan and Qatar. And I do think a crucial difference is even if there remain a large, you know, tens of thousands of American soldiers remain stationed in the Persian Gulf, in especially places like Kuwait and the UAE, Qatar.

But the difference is that people, these rulers don't think the U.S. is actually going to fight a war. for them that, sure, we may keep thousands of Americans sitting on the ground in Kuwait, but we're not actually going to go to war. And I think that is a crucial distinction here, and I think it's good. I think that the American public has expressed very clearly that they are tired of these very costly and not particularly effective wars that the U.S. has been fighting in this region. And my hope is that this perception will persist, and Arab and Iranian rulers will continue to realize that they need to take responsibility for their own security, and the way to best

pursue that security is to have functioning diplomatic relationships with each other and that they themselves avoid going to war. I think the trouble is then when you have the U.S., when you have actors like the UAE, for example. Recently, we saw them calling for the redesignation of the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, which was one of the last things that the Trump administration did just in the 11th hour of his presidency a year ago. And admirably, the Biden administration lifted that designation. But now we're seeing, you know, the UAE saying, no, you should redesignate them as terrorists because of these recent attacks on Abu Dhabi. And it might happen. Like,

despite the fact that the Biden administration demonstrated, I think, real clarity there that it didn't make sense to designate the Houthis as terrorists. They have not been responsible for any American deaths. But now we're seeing the U.S. potentially doing the bidding of the UAE, continuing to do the bidding of the Saudis. And so it's just, it's problematic because it sends very mixed messages that, you know, is the U.S. just going to continue to do what our Arab security partners want. And I should add Israel, so Israel and our Arab security partners.

Or are we actually going to pursue U.S. interests, which would mean a much smaller role for the United States in the Middle East. Yeah, hang on just one second. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does. turn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com

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winterization or leaving their competitors in the key. That's greenmill supercritical.com. man i wish i was in school so i could drop out and sign up for tom woods's liberty classroom instead tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level and it's all very reasonably priced just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at scott horton dot org tom woods this liberty classroom real history real economics real education well i think we already know the answer of that. And as you said, you mentioned this true posture review. That's not the same thing as the review that Sullivan supposedly headed up about reviewing the war on terrorism itself. Is it? Right, right. So the forced posture review, right, is different than a review of the war on terror.

And this initially, there was some hope that we might see just a recognition that it doesn't actually make sense for us to keep lots and lots of Americans stationed in the Middle East. You know, we don't, we don't, the reason we continue to see this has to do with sort of lingering concerns about things like Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the notion that, you know, something like that might happen again. But even that, you know, we think about American fossil fuel independence now that we're one of the major exporters of fossil fuel. We're no longer dependent on the Middle East for oil. And so we just, we don't need to expend so many resources and, and just sort of spread our military thin by having so many Americans just sitting in the

Middle East. Furthermore, in the longer term, the Middle East, unfortunately, is going to be increasingly uninhabitable, just the realities of climate change. It is not going to be possible. for humans to live in that part of the world. And so I think it would behoove the U.S. military to rethink our posture now and to rethink where it is that we want Americans to be sitting 20, 30 years from now and to start those adjustments in a responsible manner now. So we're not having to scramble and take action that would be more destabilizing in the future. All right. Now, you mentioned Biden's promise there. A year ago, he said he was going to call off all support for the offensive side of the war. And then, I think at the beginning of May, so two months later, he said, yeah, now we were lying about that. So in other words, it's been a year. And somebody canceled Biden's order, maybe Biden. But I guess it's because of the situation on the ground, right? The Houthis have been winning for the last year. So they don't want to quit. And the Saudis have been losing. But on Yemen, any soil. So they don't want to quit either, right, because of the humiliation of leaving the

Houthis in a stronger position than ever. And so unless Biden forces them to stop, which he's not doing, the thing just keeps going. It really is kind of remarkable, though, the way that they announced. Oh, yeah, we're stopping it all right, just like in the promise. And then they just didn't. Yeah. I mean, it's not surprising that an old politician like Biden, who is accustomed to the fact that for decades, Saudi Arabia has been a crucial U.S. partner in the Middle East. I mean, you know, even after 9-11, when the majority of the hijackers were Saudi, you know, like, Americans have long been very suspicious of why do we have such a close relationship with Saudi Arabia? And for a long time, it was about oil. But that has all changed. The U.S.

doesn't have to bend to Saudi preferences the way we once did. And certainly, there's a lot of there are people who say, well, you know, the Saudis are the producer of last resort and the U.S. does remain dependent on fossil fuel. So we have to continue to have our policies be guided by the fact that we continue that our whole, you know, the global economy still runs on oil. But the point is we, Biden really did shift his position here, that on the campaign trail, he said he was going to make Saudi Arabia pariah. And then those initial decisions he made, as you said, really seemed to be signaling quite clearly that he wasn't going to maintain this super close relationship that the Trump administration had had with the Saudis. But again,

as I said, it's not so surprising that then he just shifted back into that sort of comfortable old, well, you know, the Saudis are an old partner here. I think the reason we need to criticize this is it's not actually serving Saudi or American interests that, as I said, the Saudis have only been subjected to more missiles and projectiles over the course of the war. And, you know, in general, there are not many casualties from these projectiles. So I do think it's important to keep in mind that while that number has been increasing, the Saudis do have the Patriot anti-missile systems. They do have other defense systems that have prevented these Houthi missiles from actually doing all that much damage.

But as we saw with these recent attacks on Abu Dhabi, the Houthi's capacity for damage is growing, and we could increasingly see more casualties. And the only way for the Saudis and the Emirates to really protect themselves is to withdraw from Yemen, to say, look, this, which eventually they'll do. We know that foreign invaders eventually give up and go home. It's just a question of how many people, how many civilians do they kill on the ground in the meantime? and and how, you know, to what extent is the U.S. willing to be a party to this and to contribute to the devastation of Yemen. I can understand that Muhammad bin Salman, he's ostensibly going to

become king. He sees this as, you know, the Yemen war as something that he does, he very much does not want to lose face over this. And so our understanding at the Quincy Institute, based on conversations with folks in the administration was, their thinking was, look, we provide the Saudis with these missiles, we provide the attack helicopters. That was the earlier sale that went through last year. And we helped them be in a position where they're not losing so much face, and then they're going to be able to withdraw with some dignity. And unfortunately, as you said, that's not how wars usually work.

Like usually when one side is winning, they want to keep pushing. and consolidate their gains. Whereas the side that's losing also doesn't want to negotiate when they're in a position of weakness. And so thus far, the U.S. had sort of highlighted the fact that the Saudis were willing to negotiate. But the terms of that negotiation were very unfavorable to the Houthis, which is part of why we've never seen the Houthis express a willingness to negotiate.

The Houthi's position has been that the Saudis must lift the blockade on the ports and the airports before they're willing to engage in negotiations. There's been some question there of do they mean that, but we've never actually tested, you know, the Saudis have never lifted those blockades to say, all right, fine, here. We'll lift these blockades, even if it's just temporary to see if the Houthis are going to negotiate in good faith. Then if they don't, we can move on from there. But the point is the Houthis have had no reason to come to the negotiations.

negotiating table because the terms established by the UN Security Council are that the Houthis would have to give up all territory that they had acquired since 2014 and give up all of their weapons, which for Yemenis, I mean, all Yemenis are armed. I think the only country that has more weapons per capita than the United States, I believe, is Yemen. Now, yeah, that's what I'd read too. They're better armed even than Texans, which is pretty incredible. Average household has an AK-40. fully automatic rifle. So there you go. Now, which is probably due in large part to American and British intervention in there the past. But anyway. Well, and Soviet. Yeah, exactly. All right. Now, so last question here, I know, but Iran. But Iran, yeah. I mean, so this, this is part of, again,

why it's not so surprising that we see the U.S. continuing to support our traditional, albeit problematic partner, Saudi Arabia, because we're so concerned about Iran. And Iran is providing support to the Houthis, and we can't allow the Iranians to do that. But in general, it's important to not reduce Yemen to a proxy war, that the war in Yemen predated the Saudi invasion and predated the involvement of Iran in supporting the Houthis. And the war is, going to continue, unfortunately, even if Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Iran all pulled out, the Yemenis would still have to work it out between themselves. But the difference being that when you have foreign powers flooding a given conflict zone with more and more and more resources and more

weapons, those are the civil wars that drag on for years, if not decades. Whereas when it's really just limited to what these domestic actors can procure for themselves on the ground, eventually you do tend to see their resources start to dry up, people give up, they're tired of dying, there are no more people willing to go out on the battlefield, and that's when you see negotiations finally take hold. Unfortunately, the Iranians are involved, and but when people say like, well, you know, why are you, they'll ask me, you know, why are you focused so much on the Saudi involvement, the Iranians are also involved. Well, as an American, we don't have any influence over Iran, unfortunately. If Trump had stayed in the Iran nuclear deal, then we might have had a bit of

leverage there. But under our current circumstances, we don't. So the only thing that I as an American can do is to try to pressure Biden to push on our partners, the Saudis and the Emirates, to say, look, you have to stop prolonging this horrific humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen. You need to pull out your expending huge resources there that you cannot afford. We certainly don't want to be party to this anymore. And if the Houthis end up consolidating control, that's for the Yemenis to figure out. It's not for Saudi Arabia. It's not for the UAE.

And it's certainly not for America to dictate who's in charge in Yemen. Unfortunately, the longer the war drags on, the more legitimacy the Houthis tend to accumulate it, somewhat similar to the situation in Afghanistan, where you had the Taliban fighting against this foreign invader. And so even people who may have previously been brutalized by Taliban rule were willing to have the Taliban take charge because that was going to be the only power that stopped the violence that the American-led coalition kept perpetrating on the civilian population. Right.

all right i'm so sorry that we're out of time but we just are but thank you so much for coming back on the show annel really appreciate it of course thanks so much for drawing attention to yemen all right you guys that is annel she line she is a research fellow at the quincy institute for responsible state craft you can read her extremely important articles there including did biden help the Saudis to turn the tide in their favor in yemen and that's it for anti-war radio for this morning i'm scott horton find me at antiwar dot com and at scott Burton.org. Got 5,600 interviews for you there and also at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA. See you next week.