Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/15/22 Annelle Sheline on the Delayed Yemen Vote

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute joined Antiwar Radio to discuss Senator Bernie Sanders’s Tuesday night decision to delay the vote on the Yemen War Powers Resolution. Scott and Sheline talk about why the Biden Administration moved against it and how this delay impacts the likelihood of it passing.  Discussed on the show: “Delayed war powers vote risks further suffering in Yemen” (Responsible Statecraft)  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: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. 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

For Pacific Radio, December 15th, 2022, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, Shell, welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com and editor of the new book, Hotter Than the Sun. Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. You can find my full interview archive more than 5,800 of them now. Going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. Okay, you guys, it is Anti-War Radio. I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Annel Sheeline

from the Quincy Institute, Responsiblestakecraft.org. And she's got this very important piece, delayed war powers vote risks further suffering in Yemen. Welcome back to the show. Anel, how are you doing? Doing well, Scott. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate you joining us on the show here. And, you know, to start here, I really appreciate all your efforts for the last year and more in trying to support this war powers resolution. Of course, the big news is Joe Biden came to Capitol Hill on Tuesday and killed it, or he sent his men over there to kill the thing. And Bernie Sanders ended up not even hosting a debate and a vote, but just caving right away and undermine the entire thing. But he said that, I don't know, the Biden administration promised to work with him or something,

which, what do you make of that? Does it sound like there's actually anything in the offing there, or they're really just kicking this can down the road to the Republicans control the House and they can blame their failure all on them? Yeah, I mean, it is, it is really unfortunate the fact that this isn't, we're not going to see any action on this until the next conference. Congress, where it is even less likely to succeed. But, you know, the reality of this, unfortunately, was that Bernie really didn't have the votes. You know, in the past,

when the war powers resolution successfully passed, all Democratic senators voted for it. This was back in 2019. And this was partly because it was a vote against Trump. You know, Jamal Hashoggi had been murdered in October of 2018. And there was all of this public outcry that, you know, why is Trump so buddy-buddy with the Saudis? And so this vote on ending U.S. support for the Saudi war on Yemen was seen as a way to, you know, really, really show Trump that Congress wasn't going to stand for it anymore. Whereas now it required Democrats to vote against a member of their own party, to vote against their president, to vote against, you know, the head of the Democratic Party.

And so unfortunately, you know, I think Bernie, when he announced that he was going to, introduce or he's going to bring the war powers resolution to the floor may not have quite understood that the votes just weren't going to be there in the way that they were before. And so to a certain extent, I understand why he decided to withdraw it before losing the vote really badly would have perhaps been worse for this whole effort. Yeah, possibly. And although, I mean, I think I believe him when he said that he had the votes on, you know, a few days before. But then I think what happened was the Biden administration came and made it clear that they don't want this pass, that he'll veto it, et cetera. And so that cost them 10, 20 votes right there. That was their margin. And then, of course, it just goes without saying, but it shouldn't. He had virtually no Republicans, right? He had Rand Paul on the record told Politico he was going to vote for it. Even Mike Lee, who was heroic on this three years ago, didn't have a word to say about it. And as far as America first, that clearly doesn't mean a. thing to Mitch McConnell or any other member of the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate, period.

They're still George W. Bush's men. It's, yeah, no, it's really unfortunate that we didn't see more Republicans, you know, because to a certain extent, this could have been a way for the Republicans to show Joe Biden, like, hey, you know, we're we don't like what you're doing on Yemen. We're going to, you know, try and come out against the position your administration is taking. But as you said, I think the Republican, I mean, both parties, the Democrats and Republicans, remain fully committed to sort of the American War Machine and the military industrial complex,

which does fund members of both parties pretty equally. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny because I saw someone on Twitter mention this, and I think maybe this is true, you know, in a certain way anyway, that unlike Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria where we're just pouring money in, just destroying wealth, that this one is actually a net plus, at least, for American companies and the U.S. government in that the Saudis are willing to pay full price for every bit of the help that they get. And so they look at this like a win, win, win, as long as you don't care about human lives in Yemen from the point of view of their royal family

and our royal family and our military industrial firms, this thing is perfect. Yeah, and we're likely to see more of this dynamic, unfortunately. You know, if Washington has learned anything from the forever wars, it's that you do need to outsource your war fighting. So, you know, not that there was huge public opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but, you know, eventually 20 years in, people finally were sort of wondering, you know, why are our service members still over there in Afghanistan dying? And so increasingly we are going to see, especially, you know, wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia or the Emirates, they'll buy American weapons and they'll buy the security

commitment that that entails. And they will fight these wars on their own, using their own money and their own service members, although often they do then bring in foreign mercenaries, especially from places like Sudan, for example. That was definitely the dynamic in Yemen. Including child soldiers, aka slaves. Right. Yeah. It's, you know, and to a certain extent, you know, we've heard the U.S. saying this for a long time that we want our Middle East ally or partners, security, partners to take on their own security, which on the one hand is good. We don't want the U.S. being dragged into these conflicts to fight wars on their behalf. But unfortunately, thus far,

we're still seeing the U.S. being dragged in. We're seeing the U.S. continuing to provide this assistance to Saudi Arabia. It's seen as this is crucial for preventing the Saudis from going over to China. But, you know, President Xi was just in Riyadh for several days last week. you know, they've signed mountains of investment agreements. And, you know, China is the Saudi's biggest consumer of oil. It's their most important customer. So this notion that we can't lose the Saudis to China is, it's kind of too late. I mean, the Saudis see China as the future, as is the case for much of the world. And I think what needs to happen now is the, you know, the American foreign policy establishment just has to adjust to this new reality where we live

in a multipolar world, and we just have to ask to what extent do other countries' interests still align with our own? And I would argue U.S. and Saudi interests are no longer so aligned, and we need to reconsider some of the support that we provide them. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the hempspot.com. The hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydro-cannabinol instead of Delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America. Recently, a friend moved and didn't have a guy in his new town. But then he heard about the Hempspot.com on my show and was saved, figuratively, and literally.

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proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. All right, I'm talking with Annell Sheeline from ResponsibleStatecraft.com. And now, so back to this vote here, what difference does it really make on this particular vote? when the Biden government says, hey, come on, the war is pretty much over, and we're trying to negotiate here. And your resolution would have mucked up our negotiations. And now, what do you think? Well, I mean, the whole premise of this, you know, that the U.S. needs to continue to enable

Saudi air strikes is what's really so sort of alarming about it. Because, you know, the Biden administration is saying there's these negotiations ongoing. We're trying to get the Saudis and Houthis to sign an ongoing agreement, but the underlying argument of that is that we need to keep the possibility of Saudi airstrikes on the table. So we're holding the Yemeni population hostage to this threat of ongoing airstrikes, which have killed, you know, just tens of thousands of people in Yemen just, you know, from the directly being hit by air strikes. But then, you know, so many millions more whose lives are on the brink. right now because Yemen's infrastructure has been so destroyed by the seven year, seven and a half

year campaign of Saudi air strikes such that people have no food, they have no clean water, they have no medical resources. Yemen is completely destroyed. And so this notion that for the sake of negotiations, we don't want to rock the boat, I mean, I just fully reject that. The most important thing right now is the U.S. needs to withdraw any sort of support for. for this horrific war. You know, it's so funny, just it sounds perfectly typical, right? Where anyone who cares about this knows anything about it thinks of it, like, yeah, Biden needs to be able to say to the Saudis, hey, the U.S. Senate's really breathing down my neck here.

I got all this pressure on me. You guys got a deal. But to the Democrats in power, they don't think of it that way at all. They think of it like, if you guys pass this resolution, then you're going to take away our ability to threaten the who. that they better give in or else we're going to start carpet bombing them and their little children again. Right, right. And I do think that there's a big contingent of folks who focus on Yemen who, you know, say the Houthis are the bad guys here. They refuse to extend the truce. And, you know, I think the important thing to keep in mind here is it's not for Americans to say, really. You know, the Houthis have engaged in horrific acts of violence.

The Saudis have engaged in a far greater scale of horrific acts of violence because they have an air force and they are dropping bombs, whereas the Houthis do not have an air force and they're not able to to sort of engage in the same level of mass destruction that, you know, U.S. weapons provide. But again, the point here, it's not for Americans to decide the fate of Yemen. We need to help return control of the conflict to Yemenis, which means getting the Saudis out, getting the Amarati's out, probably getting Iran out as well, although Iran's support has been quite minimal just because there's a fully effective blockade in place to prevent any sort of Iranian weapons or support from getting smuggled in. Some does get through, but again, it's really minuscule compared to the scale of what the Saudis and Emirates are doing with the support of the international community. The ongoing position here is that the UN and the U.S. and the rest of the world are supporting what the Saudis and Emirates are doing, which is, again, preventing the Yemenis from regaining control of the conflict, being able to decide who it is that they want to have in charge. And this is just what we know about civil wars. If they're internationalized, they last much, much longer because new resources keep getting poured in. Whereas if, if

the Yemeni conflict or returned to the Yemenis themselves, we would likely see the conflict burn out much more quickly because they would just, you know, they'd run out of the resources and the people to keep throwing into the meat grinder. Right. And look, I mean, the civil war was over when America and Saudi and UAE and al-Qaeda all joined forces to attack the Houthis. And they had driven the former government out, but then they had announced talks with all the other factions. They knew that they couldn't just, you know, strong-arm rule over the whole country. They were going to write a new constitution and have an upper and lower house to represent the different tribes and the interests of youth and women and this and that. And then the Saudis, with America's Barack Obama's green light, started bombing the crap out of them and prevented any of that from shaking out.

Right. Just the same as their intervention, Hillary Clinton's intervention in 2011 and 12 is what led to the war in the first place. When they could have just let the Arab Spring take its course, where we had all factions, including the Houthis, come together in Sana'a and say, let's overthrow Abdullah Sala and let's write a new constitution and let's choose our own way forward here. But Hillary Clinton swooped in and said, nope, you're going to get stuck with Hadi, and that's your only option, which is what led to the war in the first place. Right. I mean, there's a lot that went on there. But you're absolutely right that at this point, you know, the Houthis had originally indicated much more.

willingness to power share and negotiate with sort of other groups within Yemen, but at this point, you know, they've really consolidated control. Also just years of conflict tends to empower sort of more extremist elements within any movement. And so, you know, at this point, more moderate actors have been sidelined. And those who keep saying, no, we, you know, we have to just keep fighting or we've got to take the hardest position. They keep being proven right because, you know, the Saudis keep bombing or had been up until this, you know, at this point, just to update everyone, you know, the truce has held for the most part. The official truce expired in October, but we haven't seen a massive resumption of trans-border violence at least. So Houthi's

firing at the Saudis or the Saudis dropping bombs in Yemen. So, you know, this is really good news, but the, like I was saying, you know, at this point, we do have a Houthi movement that is much more radicalized after so many years of war. And we're not as likely to see them sort of adopting the more conciliatory positions that they had taken seven years ago. Right. All right, well, listen, I'm sorry, we're almost out of time here, but I appreciate you joining us on the show. I wonder if you can pick back up the topic you mentioned previously about the humanitarian crisis here so that people understand why this is so important. A lot of people haven't even heard of the Yemen war at all eight years into the thing.

And yet, it really is the worst war in the world, isn't it? I mean, it has long been described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis. I mean, unfortunately, there are other crises, you know, the U.S. not allowing Afghanistan to have access to its foreign assets. I mean, that's also a huge crisis. But, yeah, Yemen really does remain one of the worst places in the world, especially for children. I think UNICEF had just released a report. 23 million people are in dire need of assistance, and this includes, I believe, 11 million children.

And just, you know, as we know when in circumstances of, you know, lack of adequate food, it is often the youngest that suffer the most. And this is why we do see those horrific images of little babies and children in Yemen, just dying of starvation. And, you know, this war has really had the greatest toll on them, on the children. All right, you guys, that's Annel Sheline. Sorry, we're all out of time, but please go and read her great article at responsiblestakecraft.org, delayed war powers vote, risks further suffering in Yemen. And it's the spotlight today on anti-war.com.

Thank you so much, Anel. Thanks for having me, Scott. All right, y'all, and that's it for Anti-War Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director of anti-war.com, an editor of the new book, Hotter Than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. Find my full interview archive, more than 5,800 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org,

and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. I'm here every Thursday from 230 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. I'm going to be.