Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/1/22 Shireen Al-Adeimi: The Ceasefire in Yemen is Not Enough

Episode Date: July 3, 2022

Scott is joined by Shireen Al-Adeimi to discuss the war in Yemen. They talk about the War Powers Resolution in Congress and the Ramadan ceasefire, which is holding for now. Al-Adeimi points out that the Saudis dropping their support for former President Hadi was not actually a step towards peace. Instead, they turned to a “council” made up of rival warlords who appear destined to use violence in their disputes rather than diplomacy. But, she points out, the Saudis cannot exert any real control over Yemen without full military support from the United States. That defines a clear path for bringing this bloody period of foreign intervention in Yemen to an end.  Discussed on the show: “Truce or Not, Congress Must Urgently Bring About a Real End to the War on Yemen” (In These Times) 833-STOPWAR Use this script if you are not sure what to say Shireen Al-Adeimi is an assistant professor of Education at Michigan State. She conducts research on language and literacy and writes frequently about Yemen. Follow her on Twitter @shireen818. 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys and welcoming shirene al ademi back to the show she is an assistant professor at wait i forgot which university it's uh michigan state and she's got this piece at In These Times called Truce or Not, Congress must urgently bring about a real end to the war on Yemen. Great peace. Again, In These Times, that's In These Times.com.

Welcome back to the show, Shereen. How are you doing? I'm good. It's good to be back. Very happy to have you here. So let's start with the business first, which is there's a war powers resolution, H.J.87, in the U.S. House. in regards to Yemen, what can he tell us about it? Yeah, so this is the combination, again, of years of effort to try to get Congress to demand accountability from the president. And it was, it's essentially the War Powers bill.

So the War Powers Act of 1973 puts the authority of warmaking into Congress's hand and not the president's hand. But as we know, you know, U.S. presidents tend to ignore this particular law. But they were challenged for the very first time using this law in 2019 when Congress passed a bipartisan bill to direct Trump to end his war in Yemen. And, of course, he vetoed it at the time. But here we are again with members of Congress now directing President Biden to end his war in Yemen. Although it hasn't gone to a vote yet, this is where we're still getting co-sponsors and trying to get support for the bill before it goes up for a vote in Congress. Mm-hmm. All right. Now, so I guess let's go ahead and start at the beginning. What's this war on Yemen that people need to be opposed to anyway? I know you know that most people have never even heard of this war. Don't even know we're at war in Yemen at all.

And this is the unfortunate part. I think we've seen over the last few months that it's not that people don't care about, you know, terrible things that are happening around the world. It's that, you know, they're just not very well informed. Unlike the war in Ukraine, where we hear about it 24-7, right? Every time you listen to the radio or hear the news, the focus in the spotlight, rightfully so, is on this war and the egregious acts that are being committed against the Ukrainian people. And yet people don't quite know what's going on in Yemen, even though it's the world's still the world's worst humanitarian crisis and has been ongoing now for over seven years since March of 2015. And I think the key difference is that we are the perpetrators, our government here. is the perpetrator in Yemen. The coalition that was put together by Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2015 began bombing Yemen essentially to try to impose their own puppet government into Yemen, and they didn't expect

a pushback from the rebel group, the Houthis. And here we are all these years later, and essentially the country has been destroyed, but the coalition with full support from the United States, under three presidents now, has not been able to take over the country. They have control over some parts of the country where about 20% of the population lives. 70% is still living under this rebel group, which by now is a de facto government in Yemen and northern Yemen.

And more recently, in the last few months, there has been a truth. So that's a big update, is that warring parties have finally sat together and are trying to put an end to this protracted war. Right now, so what can you tell us about this ceasefire? I know it's not perfect, but I'm also under the impression that it's really a much more meaningful type of a ceasefire, you know, than anything in the past. And it's clearly meant to be a bridge toward a real peace here. What do you think of that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for the very first time since March of 2015, starting in April, Yemenis were not bombed. There were no airstrikes in Yemen. This is coming from January of 2022 early this year where there were about 600 civilians who were bombed. So the attacks had been increasing for a while. And the Houthis managed to also successfully launch attacks into Saudi Arabia and the UAE, you know, key kind of positions not civilians, but oil refinery in the UAE and Aramco, which is, you know, another oil refinery in Jeddah inside Arabia. And Nassah pushed the Saudis to the negotiating tables because they realized for the first time that the Houthis are able to strike back at strategic

locations. And so the truce comes about as a result of those negotiations that were taking place in Oman and they were they agreed to a two-month truce which for the most part lasted and held and then they extended the truce for another two months so we're now in that second extension till August 2nd and hopefully it'll just be permanent in the meantime and this is the part that concerns me outside of the negotiations the Saudis essentially went and dismissed the government that they told us was the legitimate government of Yemen, that they were trying to impose back into power onto the Yemeni people. This is what gave them, quote, unquote, legitimacy over the last seven years. They just told the president who had been based in Riyadh this

whole time, President Hadi, to step down, step aside. He's no longer the president of Yemen. And they appointed a council of eight individuals in his stead. And these are the people who are now supposed to do, continue negotiating with the Houthis and bring about some kind of lasting change and lasting peace deal in Yemen. My concern is who these people are and what their allegiances are. And we can talk about that some more, but that's where we are right now. Yeah. Well, okay, so there's kind of two issues there. One of them is it's a huge climb down on the Saudis part that they're no longer insisting on putting Hadi in there. Then the question is, I guess, if they've appointed this council instead, you know, how much does that seem to lend itself toward future compromise with the Houthis as compared to dealing with Hadi, for example?

Right. Right. So four of the people in the council are basically have allegiance to the Saudis and have been funded by the Saudis. And the other four have allegiance and have been funded by the Emirates. And so it's this equal split, and all of them, almost all of them, have had armed conflict with the Houthis. So in southern provinces and northern provinces, these are people who had been leading kind of the UAE-funded or the Saudi-funded attacks and, you know, resistance to the Houthis. And in some cases, some of these members in the council have fought one another, vying for power. For example, one of the members of the council is a UAE-backed separatist whose organization, the STC, has been calling for separatism, you know, separation of secession of South Yemen from North Yemen and have fought against the Haiti government to vie for power in the South.

And ever since the appointment of this council, there's been still lack of security in South Yemen, which this coalition supposedly controls. There have been attacks by Al-Qaeda. there have been attacks by presumably some of these people themselves because it's another power struggle. So I worry about that because, to me, just looks like a war council and not a diplomatic approach to solving the solution. All right. Well, never mind Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula and so forth for the moment. Let me ask you this. Isn't it right that back when this, who these really ceased power at the end of 2014, 2015,

that they really recognize the fact that they were going to have to deal with the Southern Transitional Council and or they're going to have to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Isla, and these different factions. It's not an entire country of Zadishites who are just dying to do with the Houthis say. And so they were going to have to share power. But before they could work out any kind of deal, the Saudis started dropping bombs on everybody's head. Obama did. And so I wonder then, is it possible that, aside from the fact that yeah we are talking about factions backed by these outside countries assuming that they're looking for a way to back out of the war isn't it actually somewhat reasonable that you'd have four guys from the muslim brotherhood and four guys from the socialist transitional council from the south and then you have four guys from the huthy faction and everybody comes together they're the council of 12 and come together and be the new sort of pseudo democratic consensus kind of state for the country without

killing each other anymore. What do you think? Yeah, I think that would have been great if these were diplomats and they're not. They're warring parties. So they're warlords, right? And so, you know, there's one among them who's not just in the Muslim Brotherhood, you know, the Slash Party of Yemen, which has ties to al-Qaeda, but he's a Salafist, which is an even more, you know, fundamentalist group in Yemen. And he has led the Giants Brigade, which is the UAE-funded group that, you know, fought the Houthis and defeated the Houthis in the oil-rich province of Shabu in the south. These are not diplomats who are used to reaching solutions by talking. You know, they have been on the ground fighting for the most part, and that's what concerns me. And they've not

been, they're not representative of the Yemeni people. But I, you know, this is it. This is what we've got to work with right now. I still think, you know, I've always said that if foreign intervention in Yemen ends. Yemenis will still probably have civil war, but they will solve their own problems eventually because you cannot just live in constant state of war. It doesn't help anyone. But I worry that these particular individuals are going to continue to have foreign funding and foreign allegiances, either through the UAE or through the Saudis. It'll just look like it's a bunch of Yemeni faces, but with foreign backing. The other issue here is that the Saudis still are in a Mahra province in the south, and the UAE is occupying two islands, two strategic islands,

Sohattra and Parim, also in the south, and have taken over oil fields in the south. So the Emirates are still stealing resources and occupying Yemeni land. These have not been handed over to even this council that they've appointed. Yeah. And now, I mean, I know you're saying they're warlords and not diplomats, but if the Saudis and UAE weren't involved, would these be sort of the more or less, leaders and top dogs within the Muslim Brotherhood and the STC and so forth, or it would be entirely different groups of people, probably?

I think it would probably be a more a mix of people, maybe not these particular individuals. Some of them make sense, like the guy from the SDC, for example. Others don't. But I, you know, it is, the way forward is a coalition approach to this because, like you mentioned, Yemenis were already in this position once, where they were able to sign. a deal, a UN-mediated deal among themselves, and the Saudis just happened not to like that and began bombing instead. I had forgotten that the UN had brokered that.

Thank you for reminding me of that important point. Yeah, it was a UN-brokered deal, and the UN informed the Saudis that the deal was reached, and they were looking for a place to sign the agreement, and the Saudis were saying that they wanted the agreement signed in Riyadh, inside Arabia, I guess, to make it look like they had a hand in, you know, playing peacemaker. And instead, they began bombing two days later. Yeah. What a disaster.

Operation Decisive Storm, they called it seven years ago. I don't think they know what decisive means. Or storm. Yeah, or storm, yeah, either. Those should pass by morning, right? Right. So now, the Giants Brigade, is that just a fancy name for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula? It's just a fancy name for a bunch of mercenaries willing to fight the host.

these while being paid by the UAE and so including al-Qaeda and the Arabian including al-Qaeda yeah yeah okay so not exclusively though I wonder if anyone has you know a good ballpark estimate of the percent of the Giants Brigade that really comes from the AQAP forces yeah that would be interesting to look at but you know it's just shown how I mean in a way they're just this doesn't affect the UAE in any way, right? Like, they can come and find terrorists, essentially, to help them be their ground soldiers after they pulled their soldiers from the ground in Yemen in 2019 and called it a, you know, pull out from Yemen. It doesn't really affect them. It doesn't really

matter to them who they pay and who, what kind of chaos they support as long as the work that they want done is done, which is in this case getting rid of the Houthis. And similarly, you know, the U.S. has supported, continued to support the Saudi coalition while knowing for, you know, 100% certainty that they were working with al-Qaeda groups. And so everybody's just looking for their own interest and it didn't matter who they had to fund in order to get rid of the Houthis. And in the end, it wasn't successful anyway. But they've strengthened these groups in Yemen, you know, and Yemeni civilians are paying the price for that. 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

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real economics, real education. And now, refresh my memory, isn't it the case during that the reason that the UAE

pulled their forces out at that time or the bulk of their main army out, was in reaction to public pressure on the U.S.

Congress to pass this war powers resolution in order, you know, which Trump vetoed, but still made it clear that the, not just the House,

but the U.S. Senate was sick and tired of this and wanted to see an end to it, and the UAE seemed to kind of react right to that, isn't it? Yeah, and every time Congress made major moves to even threaten pulling support, either weapons or logistical support or intelligence or otherwise, there's been a reaction on the ground. So pulling out, the UAE pulling out their ground troops in Yemen was one consequence. The other was in late 2018, November 2018.

Trump stopped the mid-air refueling, which was literally keeping those Saudi jets in the air as they were bombing. So they wouldn't have to stop and refuel outside Yemen and come back up. The U.S. Army or Air Force had been providing mid-air support until late 2018. And those are all consequences of bad PR and more kind of press attention. And as well as Congress's threats to invoke war powers or their move toward pushing war powers through Congress. right and then you know when uh biden lied but claimed that he was going to end the war back a year and a half ago the uh saudi sent ambassadors to bagdad to meet with the iranians right away yeah it also goes to show that their intelligence about what goes on in america is not very good if you know they

react so strongly to these sort of tiny little half-hearted measures by american politicians they go Oh, no. But anyway, that's good. At least they overreact instead of underreacting. Well, it's because they can't afford to underreact. I mean, this is probably the most incompetent military in history. I mean, they rely 100% on foreign support to train their soldiers and personnel, to provide logistics, to provide fueling, to, you know, acquire all of the weapons in the spare parts and the maintenance, even contracts. they do nothing but put pilots on a plane who have been trained by the U.S. by the way, and the targets have already been chosen for them by U.S. intelligence, and they just hit a button, essentially. And so the Saudis are funding this operation, but they have no idea how to actually run it. That's why they react in this way.

Right. Well, you know what? It's, I know it's kind of difficult to convince people because I even feel it myself, you know, when somebody's telling me, call your congressman. Yeah. Jeez. What good is that going to do? But the thing of it here is you have all of us doing this at once and all different political factions and

organizations and people kind of trying to whip their group members together. And then as I've been trying to beg people, because I really think this does matter. Boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, coworkers, and friends and next-door neighbors and cousins that listen you know everybody has a good dozen people in their circle something of people that they can talk to and that's a huge force multiplier if everybody does that everybody who really cares about this not only calls but gets five or six people to call to then we're talking tens and tens and tens of thousands of calls flooding congress where they just cannot help the fact that wow regardless of whether

TV brought this up or not, for whatever reason, the American people really care about this and are determined to see it through. And then, you know, as you said, presidents do what they want. But if the Congress passes this, especially by large majorities in both houses, be much more difficult for Biden to veto it than Trump, especially while the Congress is still in Democratic hands right now. And then that could be what it takes. That could really be what it takes. And don't you, in it, your read, too, that bin Salman and bin Zayed, they want out of this, too.

The Houthis have blown up their refineries a few too many times. Some elders in their royal courts or somebody are mad as hell at them, and they have to find a way to wind this thing up. They need our help to wind up the end of this war.

Isn't that right, Shereen? Absolutely. This has been, you know, I remember reading years ago, Jamal Khashoggi, the guy, you know, the journalist that Muhammad bin Salman had killed, ordered his killing, ordered his killing.

Khashoggi wrote in one of his articles for the Washington Post that the Saudis are spending something like $200 million a day on Yemen. And this has been ongoing for seven years. And so they're losing a lot of money and they're not seeing anything in return except for a tarnishing of their reputation. It's really hard to justify. It's impossible to justify what they're doing in Yemen, and starving children and blockading and dropping bombs and destroying an entire country essentially so that they can supposedly install a legitimate government who they've just gone ahead and dismissed right now

and appointed somebody else in his place. So they want out of this and the U.S. should want out of this. The problem is controlled. These people really want to control Yemen because of its strategic location. They didn't want to just hand up. off Yemen's Babin Mandab Strait, which is, you know, a really important strategic location for shipping, for oil shipments and just international shipping in general.

They didn't want to hand that off to the Houthis to a government that was clearly anti-Saudi and anti-U.S. But they didn't realize that it's not up to them who gets to rule Yemen, and it shouldn't be up to them, and it shouldn't be up to us to decide what happens in other people's lands. As we've seen in Ukraine, like people are appalled that Russia is trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation. And we should be just as appalled that the Saudis and the Marathis and the U.S. has been trying to oppose its will on the Yemeni people. And we should just let sovereign countries behave in sovereign ways. And so the ask here is simple. We're not asking for aid.

We're not asking for intervention. We're asking to stop intervening in Yemen, to stop bombing civilians, to stop blockading food and medicine and lift all, you know, blockades and whatnot so that the Yemenis can finally begin to rebuild, rebuild their lives. Yeah, and look, I mean, there's no reason to think. I can't vouch for the Houthi tribe or whatever, but I just can't imagine, or this political faction. I can't imagine that once they get peace, what they're going to try to do is prevent the U.S. Navy and their commercial allies from sailing through the Red Sea, because now's their chance to get themselves nuked or something, you know, come on. Exactly. They've never threatened it.

They have not, you know, it'll be, they'll be working against themselves if they do that. They can't afford to isolate themselves like that, you know, on the global front. It's just a matter of control because the Saudis have long intervened in Yemen. Anybody following Yemeni-Saudi relations, we know that it goes 100 years back. They've always intervened in Yemen's issues. They've always wanted to control whoever's in power to make sure that they were their allies. And they panicked when the Houthis began to take power. And by bombing Yemen, they've just actually made the Houthis even stronger than before

because they weren't really a big deal before all of this. They were just known as a small group of fighters from the north. Now they are the de facto government in Yemen that controls, you know, where 80% of the people live. And they've managed to have large numbers of people join their movement and, you know, in defense of the country's lands, right? And so they've driven them, they've made them stronger. driven them closer to Iran. And so they've not achieved any of their goals. It's just time for them to just let go. Yeah. I think that's true. They've got to admit it and, well, I don't know,

maybe we shouldn't rub their nose on it too much, but it's just true that war is the health of the state. And in this case, they just proved it, you know, my friend and regular interviewee Nasser Arabi from Sana'a told me years ago that it doesn't matter that the people of the country aren't all Zadis Shiites and Houthis? It's just like if the Texans are in charge of the White House for a little while. It doesn't mean that Bush isn't all of our president on September 11th or whatever. We saw what happened. His approval rating went to 90%.

So in other words, you know, to put words in his mouth a little bit, but to paraphrase, we're all Houthis now. If they happen to be in charge of our security forces at the moment that we're being attacked by foreign powers, of course that increases support for their, you know, the same way Jimmy Carter's Iraqi, you know, sponsored Iraqi invasion of Iran helped solidify support for the Ayatollah after the revolution there. Exactly. And then people can sort out their own issues later, but right now they're in crisis mode. And if they're looking at the currency, for example, the currency is much stronger in Houthi-controlled areas than they are in supposedly liberated lands, right? We're talking 550 rials to a dollar in North Yemen.

where the Houthis control versus 1,100 reels in the south where, you know, this coalition controls. Right. If we're looking at security, there is no Al-Qaeda in northern Yemen anymore. The Houthis were very successful or driving them out. There are no bomb attacks. There's no internal instability in areas that are controlled by the Houthis. And so people in the south are even looking to the north and saying, well, at least the Houthis know how to control, you know, their own security. And whereas people in these liberated areas right now, and I say liberated as quote-unquote, because it's a mishmash of Saudi UAE, Al-Qa, the southern transitional council, and now this war council and had these government and whatnot.

But people have been protesting the last month or so because there was this injection of $3 billion into the economy by the Saudis and the Emirates, but people still don't have access to fuel. they still can't afford food, they still can't afford to have, you know, basic needs, like electricity, for example, because of shortages, it's always getting cut off, and these are the hottest months in Yemen. So people are very frustrated, and they don't understand why they can't have just basic services. Whereas in northern Yemen, the big problem had been air strikes by the Saudi coalition, and, of course, the blockade and starvation. So with those lifted, presumably, People will, you know, they don't have a reason to revolt against the Houthis because security-wise, things seem to be fine in northern Yemen. Yeah.

All right. Well, yeah, so for the bombs falling out of the sky when we don't have a ceasefire. So, three cheers for the ceasefire. And now here's my call to action real quick. It's just 833 stop war. It's a group called Demand Progress, their progressive group, but nonpartisan group. And essentially, they'll just forward you. the robot just forwards you right onto your

congressman you just put in your zip code they'll forge you right on call during business hours i'd like to try to emphasize to people if you have a democratic congressman tell him Biden needs our support that's why we have to pass this thing he said he wants to end this war and this is going to

help him end it right and if you live in a republican district emphasize america first and obama started it and joe biden sucks at it and we don't believe in all this policing the world anymore in other words don't come at the right from the left and the left from the right come at them from where they are and just ask them to be good at being a Democrat or Republican just like they already are

but just let them know you really care about this make it easy for them oh and one more thing I wanted to emphasize when you and I were on that conference call on Zoom with the other activists earlier last week or this week one of the I forgot who it was but one of the activist, it might have been you, said that they had been talking to one of the staffers on Capitol Hill and the staffer for the congressman was saying, please, more phone calls, whatever you guys can do to get us more phone calls because it really helps them, the staffers who are already convinced, they need to be able to tell their boss, the phones ringing off the hook, the people, they won't leave us alone. We can't get our other work done because of all the

Yemen, this and that. That's what is so important for their, you know, the setting that they exist in, in that office, they need the phone ringing. They said so. Believe them when they say that, right? So it's 833 stop war. And if you need any talking points at all, there's essentially left-leaning talking points especially, they're at 1-833 stopwar.com. Good idea, right? One-833 stopwar.com. And now you go ahead with whatever all call to action and however people can get involved that you'd like them to know about, Shereen. This is it really. We just have to end this war.

And this is one of the very few ways we can end it because, like I said, we don't control what's happening in Arabia. We can't control what's happening in Yemen. We can control what our own lawmakers are doing and not doing. And yes, I know that there are lots of issues in the U.S. right now and people are upset about various things. but we can't neglect this issue any further. We can't let President Biden lie his way through saying he's going to end this war and just either escalating it or not doing anything about it.

And we can't let him claim credit for the truth either, to be honest. The truth is a culmination of talks between warring parties. And we need it to stay that way. We need it to turn into a permanent truth, but we can't have, even if it, whether it holds or not, we need to codify this so that we make it clear. that this is unconstitutional. And we cannot be intervening in this conflict.

It's not to anybody's benefit. And this is just a simple way to do it. Just call. And writing letters is good. But phone calls, like you mentioned, are so much more important to these staffers because they really understand that people care about this issue and they can highlight it to the congressperson and make it top priority. Right on.

Okay. So that is Shereen Al-Ademi. She is assistant professor at Michigan State University. She's got this excellent piece for you to share with your friends, especially left-leaning ones here in These Times.com. Truths or not, Congress must urgently bring about a real end to the war on Yemen. Thank you so much again for your time, Shereen. Great talking to you, Scott. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com. Anti-war.com. Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org.