Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/19/22 Shireen Al-Adeimi on the Fragile Houthi-Saudi Truce and the Myth of Iranian Intervention in Yemen

Episode Date: August 21, 2022

Scott was joined by Shireen Al-Adeimi on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the fragile truce in Yemen. In this interview, she updates us on the state of the ceasefire and the issues facing its continuation. She also explains the historical context behind Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen. Lastly, Scott and Al-Adeimi puncture the myths of Iranian involvement in the current war.  Discussed on the show: “How long will the fragile truce in Yemen last?” (Responsible Statecraft) “Yemeni Civil War Unleashes a Plague of Locusts” (Antiwar.com) “The Houthis Are Not Hezbollah” (Foreign Policy) Shireen Al-Adeimi is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and 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; and Thc Hemp Spot. 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 Pacifica Radio, August the 21st, 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 editor of the new book, Hotter Than the Sun. Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show.

And you can sign it for the podcast feed on all the different podcatchers there. And introducing today's guest, it's Shereen Al-Ademi, and here she is writing at the Quincy Institute for, responsible state craft and it's this great piece. How long will the fragile truce in Yemen last? Which is the most pertinent of questions for us. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Shereen? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me back. Really appreciate you joining us here today. So that is the big question. Well, you're presuming everyone knows in the title here in the piece. We have a truce in Yemen for months now. It was only a two-month

truce and now we're in month four of it so that's pretty good but just how shaky is this thing well um as with all things yemen things are very complicated and it's not as straightforward and i think part of that complexity is because there's just so much international backing of various factions within the ground on the ground and so if this were a civil war with two or three groups things would be much easier but i guess the big question is how long are our foreign backers going to continue backing their different forces in Yemen. And that's what we're seeing now as a transition from just outward bombing of Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Yemen to more, you know, funding of different factions who are allegiant to them. And, you know, this kind of was legitimized through this presidential council that they put together after they pushed Heidi aside, who was the president they supposedly wanted to reinstate back into Yemen.

So, in other words, well, is it right that the council, that that was really the kind of the purpose of the council was to legitimize sort of a change in strategy and fighting and just backing new and different militias kind of a thing? Or was it ever really the point of throwing Hadi under the bus that this new group, whoever they are, they at least will have the object of negotiating a piece with the Houthis here, right? Wasn't that the point of that? Yeah, but think about who's doing the appointing even. So the council is not a result of negotiations and dialogues that have been happening in our mind with the Houthis and the Saudis. So while those dialogues were happening, Saudi Arabia, who again is the aggressor here, right, is this foreign occupier, they get to decide, hey, President Heidi, who's been sitting in there in Riyadh this whole entire time, they're like, you're going to step aside and we're going to put this group of people instead of you. and now they're going to be in charge of Yemen, essentially. So they just get to decide what's happening in Yemen,

and that doesn't bode well for the sovereignty that Yemeni people have been fighting for over the last seven years or so. And members of this council were hand-selected for their connections with either Saturday before them, allegiance to Saturday before four of them with backing and funding for years now from the UAE. And so there's infighting between them as we speak.

I didn't include this part in my piece, but members of the council like people that they represent are fighting and the battles are ferocious in the southern province of Shabwa, which is oil and grass rich. So it doesn't bode well for the future of Yemen. It's just that things are going to look a little bit differently from now on. Yeah. Well, I mean, I totally think that's right. And that's sort of the premise of my question was that this new council are basically the sock puppets of the Saudis and or the UAE. I don't know who's really dominant i guess the saudi's uh rule mostly but that the purpose of that was so that this new group as opposed to the old haughty pretended government sitting in a hotel

in rehab somewhere yeah that these guys that their purpose would be to negotiate a piece but i guess you're saying that i don't i guess i don't really understand because the saudi's um i mean not only did they do that, but they actually, not only did they appoint this council, but they also were negotiating through the UN with the Houthis to negotiate this ceasefire, right? But then I guess you're saying they're not using this new presidential council to legitimize negotiations, but instead to legitimize more violence. Right. And so you have members of this council. So the UAE has poured a lot of finances and effort into propping up this. separatist government in the south so the entire time they were saying that they wanted

they were trying to support hadi back into power they were actually supporting his enemies right in the south um and the leader of that southern transitional group is one of the members of the council and his group right now which is uae funded and backed has been clashing with members of the um islamist party that are um funded and and backed by the uae again there are other council who are part of representing that group. And they've been, you know, fighting for this province Shabwa because the UAE realizes that, well, what were they in this war for? You know, what was all of this financial investment, so to speak, in Yemen for if not to seize, you know, Yemen's resources, whether it's the ports in the south or, you know, oil and gas in the south. Meanwhile, the Saudis

just were kind of done with this and wanted to end this war while saving face because they never really had a strategy in Yemen. It was just violence for the sake of it and for the sake of trying to control Yemen back into a puppet government. And so the Saudis and the UAE have always had conflicting goals and now we're seeing the different factions that they've backed continue to fight in this very violent way. Meanwhile, the Houthis are trying to negotiate with the Saudis and with this council supposedly and they haven't really received many concessions. So they, as part of the truce, they allowed two commercial flights. a week into Sana'a airport from, you know, Amman and Jordan and Kairan in Egypt.

They've allowed more fuel ships into the country in the last four months than they have throughout the entirety of 2021. But, you know, millions of people who are salary, who were supposed to receive their salaries from the central bank, civil servants have not gotten paid yet. The blockade has not been fully lifted. The government in Sana'a cannot go back to commercial trade like they used to. you know, that's a lifeline of Yemen. And so there are a lot of things that are just on hold. And meanwhile, there are all these clashes in the south. So it's just looking more chaotic than ever before.

Oh, man. What a mess. And why is it exactly? Is it just because they share the southern coast is why the UAE has backed the Southern Transitional Council who are essentially, you know, a socialist kind of remnant of Soviet days? And then to their east, these Islamist bin Laden night suicide bomber types? I mean, unfortunately, the socialist kind of movement is long dead in South Yemen. And what we see now with the Southern Transitional Council, there's not really that socialist ideology that's driving it. I guess I was conflating those two things. One became the other. Is that right? Kind of, I guess.

So throughout the 90s, this is maybe a little more history than your audience wants. But throughout the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and after South Yemen went back into the fold of unity with the north, there was a lot of Wahhabi influence. So Wahhabi is the extreme ideology that Saudi Arabia invented, basically, and they call Islam. And there was a lot of that infiltration of that ideology into Yemen, and it really took hold in South Yemen. And so, you know, because, you know, people were vulnerable to something like this, infiltrating them without like, you know, know, having gone through a history of colonialism and whatnot, that eroded a lot of their own history. And so what we see today is not really any kind of socialist government, but yeah, they do share a coast, and the UAE does understand the importance of the port of Aidan for trade,

and they're probably thinking of reviving it. They understand the value of province of Shabwa for its oil, and they've been exploiting it for the last several years. And they also understand the importance of the island of Saqatra in South Yemen, which is just one of the most amazing places you'll see. And the UAE has all but annexed and occupied it, basically. So for tourism purposes, I mean, they're even operating tourism, you know, tourist flights from Abu Dhabi to Saqatra. There was a report that the U.S. Marines opened up a base there, too. Do you know if that's still there? I'm not actually quite sure, but I wouldn't be surprised because there's just, I mean, you have these countries like the UAE in the US thinking to themselves, like, why were we involved?

Why did we spend so much money and time in Yemen if we weren't going to get something out of it? And they see this Southern Transitional Council as being open enough as a puppet government for them to be controlled and direct as they see wish. Because, I mean, they are getting funded by the UAE. The Southern Transition Council would not exist without the UAE's funding. Okay. Yeah, I wasn't sure, you know, how dependent they were. I know that they've been backed by them.

certainly the whole war long, just as the suicide bomber types have. Now, do I have this story, right? Yeah, I know I do, but isn't it right? That correct me, help me remember which year it was that the al-Qaeda guys became such an embarrassment that America demanded that the UAE integrate them into their militia force and give them a new name. 2018? Something like that, three years into the war, something like that, after al-Qaeda been

kind of run a while in Maca and other towns. Yeah, yeah. And so you have these, are you talking about the Giants Brigade? Right. Yeah, exactly. And they even had like an American former military officers and mercenaries from all over the world all embedded with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Exactly. And one of the, and the leader of the brigade, the Giants Brigade, is one of the members of the council. And so you can see why this does not vote very well for Yemenis, because you have a mercenary, essentially, al-Qaeda mercenary on that council. Yeah. Look, people, first of all, we're talking with Shereen Aladimi, writing for responsible statecraft here. And I admit probably like if people are tuning in on Sunday morning here on KPFK, they might be wondering, come on, how could America and our allies be on the side of the guys that knocked down the towers? But the answer is that the guys that took over the capital city are Shiites and friends with Iran. And it's about as simple as that, isn't it? I would say it's more complicated than that because going back into Yemeni history, about 100 years ago, actually, the same, you know, not the same, not the Houthis, but also a Shiazadi government, a monarchy, began to rule Yemen after the Ottomans left. So this is 1918. And they ruled from about 1918 until the 60s. And then in the 60s, revolutionary, military revolutionaries kept on trying to, you know, deposed them from power. And who were they supported by?

Who was this monarchy supported by? The Saudis and the British, right? And even Israel, because they had an investment in having a monarchy at their southern border. So Saudi Arabia is going to do what Saudi Arabia, what is best for Saudi Arabia. And so, you know, in the 1960s, it was best for Saudi Arabia to have another monarchy at its border because Yemen, till this day, remains the only republic in that region, in the entire Arabian Gulf region. They're all monarchies and we're the only republic. And so that was not going to be good news for Saudi Arabia.

And so they did everything they can for eight years back the monarchists who happened to also be Shia Zadhi, right? And so I think for them it's more an issue of power and who gets to control Babel Mandab straight. Well, that was my emphasis really there should have been and friends with Iran. Yeah, friends with Iran, but not even to that extent. I mean, the Houthis are very independent. They don't have that many ideological similarities with Iran, but they do control Baben Mendeb. They would control Bavin Mendeb Strait, which is the strait through which international shipping goes through, essentially. Anything that goes through Suez Canal has gone through Yemen first.

Anything coming back from Suez Canal needs to go through Yemen to exit, right? Yeah, this is the southern gate of the Red Sea. Southern Gate of the Red Sea is extremely important. And even though the Houthis didn't really threaten stopping any shipping or anything like that, they just understood the Saudis and the U.S. have always understood that that's an important point. And so we need to have a government in Yemen that is favorable to the U.S. is favorable to Saudi Arabia. Yeah. I can't remember who it was that years ago, said, look, the Saudis always just paid the Houthis to behave.

Whether they're back in them trying to take over the whole country or not. But either way, they just always gave them money, which the Saudis have unlimited amounts of. So why can't we just go back to that, figure out a way to get along here, you know? Yeah, I mean, you have a crown prince who is in over his head, didn't really understand the politics, thought he could just enter a country like Yemen with a long history of resistance to occupation and just win it in two weeks, you know, called it Operation Decisive Storm. And so you have hubris and power and money that ended up directing this and causing the world's worst humanitarian crisis. At the end of the day, the Saudis have lost money. The U.S. gained a lot of that money because the Saudis were purchasing all of these equipment and weapons and training and services and logistics and all of that.

All of that was for, you know, they were purchasing it from the United States. But, you know, the Saudis didn't really lose any civilians here. Yemen, you know, Riyadh is standing. Nothing's been destroyed in Saudi Arabia. And Yemen was completely destroyed and abandoned by the international community who literally ganged up to support the Saudi monarchy because it was just a great business deal for everybody

who the Saudis and the Marathis were purchasing weapons from. Yeah. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group. And I'm going to start posting stuff over there more. That's patreon.com

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He's been working on this thing for years. And I admit, I haven't read it yet. I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to be. me to it. It's called Why the Vietnam War? Nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61. And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974. But how do we get there? Why is this all Harry Truman's fault? Find out

in why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson, available now. Well, it's been seven years of this, and seven and a half almost now, I guess. Can you tell us, you know, describe with people, help them to imagine in their mind's eye, a real picture of what is the humanitarian situation in Yemen for the people of the north, the middle, and the south, and the east and the west, and whoever. Even now, I know you, as you said, I think the ports have been more open than before, but they're not still, they're still not completely open. But, you know, people here, it's the worst humanitarian crisis in the world that's far away and TV doesn't show it. So what does that really mean?

I mean, you know, a child is still dying every 75 seconds because they get sick and they don't have clean drinking water and they don't have medicine. They don't have access to hospital. so even a small, you know, fever could kill a child whose parents can't get a hold of some time and all. The hunger is still an issue. The UN is not able to fulfill much of its needs to operate in Yemen. So I read something like, you know, only 23% or so of its needs in Yemen to operate have been, you know, established. And so they're operating at a shortage and they're having to decide which families go hungry and which families at least have. a meal coming up.

And people are just, you know, like these are ordinary people like you and me living their lives and all of a sudden Saudi Arabia decides to, you know, I mean, Arab Spring and all of that, of course, in years of tumult. But the war really didn't begin until the bombing began, this international coalition began. And so people's lives have been torn apart. Their families have been torn apart. People displaced internally because even when, you know, like you see the Ukraine crisis,

immediately the borders were open and all of these countries welcomed Ukrainians all around the world. And in the case of Yemenis, all they saw were just, you know, shut doors and they couldn't even get out of their own country, let alone seek asylum in other places. So it's really dire. I think it's just a probably the worst, I mean, it is the worst humanitarian crisis. It's just, you know, in this 21st century, the worst we've seen humans do to one another at the scale to have over 80% of this population of 30 million people dependent on aid and then not receiving that aid because the very same people pledging to give aid are the ones who have bombed them and caused them to even need this aid, right? And then they don't fulfill these pledges.

And I'm talking about rich countries like the U.S. and the UAE and Saudi Arabia. So it's really sad. It's heartbreaking. You know, kids out of school, people's entire futures have just been destroyed for something they just didn't do for for no reason at all. Like no civilians should ever be punished for any of this. And yet, you know, international community just looked at Saudi Arabia and said, how can we support you instead of, you know, sanctioning them instead of doing whatever they could to protect civilians in Yemen, which is why the whole narrative around Ukraine is really hypocritical because we know that that's not what they did when it came to Yemen.

They just ganged up alongside the Saudis. Yeah. All right, it's Shireen Aladimi. She's writing at Responsible Statecraft, and I beg your pardon for just a minute here. I've got to try to rate some money for KPFK. It's the most powerful FM transmitter west of the Mississippi River, Los Angeles, and the rest of Southern California,

which it's repeated in San Diego and Ridgecrest, China Lake, and up in Santa Barbara, and everywhere. All Southern California, it's an essential part of the community, and what in the world would you guys do without it? So, KPFK, it's KPFK.org to pledge or call 818985-5735. That's 818985-5735 to keep anti-war radio on the air and to keep KPFK Pacifica in Los Angeles and in the rest of Southern California on the air so that we can preach peace. And in fact, we're going to be talking about this more next week and after that too.

But right after Labor Day, we're going to start. start another brand new push once Congress is back to support this war powers resolution. We're going to use the power of this FM transmitter to help to really get it done if we can. And in fact, now that I'm rambling about that, I think I need to talk with some of the other people at KPFK about a coordinated effort there. But anyway, just think about the power of this transmitter blasting from the top of Mount Wilson and what we can do with it if we use it right. but we don't have corporate sponsors at all.

We're supported by you, the listener. So that's it. It's kpfk.org.org to pledge. You know that you got to do your part. KPFK.org 818985-5735. And thank you very much for that. And now, when we're talking about the humanitarian situation in Yemen here, I have to bring this up every time.

I forget if I've ever editorialized about this in one of your interviews before Shereen. I think I need to bring it up every time. And that is the story, it's written by Morgan Hunter at anti-war.com. As far as I know, it's the only real piece about this, but I need to dig further into it. But anyway, it's this incredible piece about how America and Saudi and UAE and Al-Qaeda's war in Yemen caused the locust plague that inundated, not just Yemen, but then crossed the Red Sea and inundated Eastern Africa in the last few years. That was all caused because there actually was a...

grasshopper eradication program at the University of Sana or in Sanah. I'm not sure exactly what the title, but they had the graduate students had this huge program where they would go out and eradicate the grasshoppers. Well, the war, our war, destroyed the university and the program. And the grasshoppers went wild and turned into locusts and then decimated crops and starved. I don't know how many people. The excess death rate in East Africa is in the hundreds of thousands or, God, I hope it ain't million. over the last few years because of that locusts, like decimating crops in Eritrea and Kenya and Ethiopia and Somalia and just causing an absolute catastrophe for those people of biblical proportions because of our war. And, you know, it's things like that, deliberately blockading and starving people and killing civilians. These are the reasons that Osama bin Laden was able to recruit suicide hijacks. to attack this country. That's what they were willing to do that over. It was things like this, and we just keep doing it.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians? How many hundreds of thousands of civilians? Well, let's see. It's somewhere between 300,000 and 8 or 9 or 10,000. We hope it's not. What? What are we doing? But this is what we're doing.

So, locus, plagues and all. That's American foreign policy in the Middle East. And now, I want to get back to your point about Iran, which is so important. As I mentioned, yeah, friendship there. I didn't really call it an alliance because I agree with you totally that that was all overblown. Like, this is just an excuse for war anyway. There was this great expert on the Houthis named Eustiltern from the Netherlands who wrote a piece called the Houthis are not Hezbollah for foreign policy. Way back years ago. where he said, yeah, Nasrallah and Hezbollah, they're kind of Iran's 51st state down there in Lebanon. I'm paraphrasing, something like that. But the Houthis just are not. They're friends. They're not really allies. They're not dependent. And as you said, they've been under Block A this whole time.

So whatever material support, Iran has ever been able to provide to the Houthis during this to help bleed their enemies, the Saudis dry, by the way, you know, that only really helps them. It has been limited by necessity anyway, even if they wanted to give them everything they had. Exactly. The country is under land, air, and sea blockade. Every ship that enters the port of Hodeo, which is controlled by the Houthis, gets, you know, inspected by the Saudis and certified by the UN verification system, UNVIM. And after it's received its certification, then the Saudis decide whether to clear it or not, you know, even that's how they impose their blockade, essentially. And the whole system is in place so that they would prevent Iranian weapons from entering the ports. So clearly they're not able to enter the port. even if they tried. They can't enter through land because you've got, you know, borders are basically with Saudi Arabia, like how are they supposed to enter through Saudi Arabia? And Amman's borders highly secure.

And even if they enter through Amman's border somehow, they'd have to go through ISIS and Al-Qaeda territory, which is there's no way it's going to survive, right? And all the airports are shut down. Airspace is controlled. Hothis can't even fly, you know, a drone inside of Yemen. And so, but we're supposed to imagine that this is, an equivalent war that whatever support that the Iranians are providing is equivalent to Saudi

and therefore are justifiable for Saudi Arabia. I mean, none of the, like, logically doesn't make sense if you follow that idea throughout. But there hasn't been much material support, if any. And even if there was, it doesn't rise to the level, of course, of all of the support that the so-called Haiti government as a puppet essentially has been receiving from the international community. Yeah, no question about that. And in fact, some Hawk might be listening to say, no-uh, remember Nikki Haley and the giant missile? Oh, yeah. But that was debunked by Jane's Defense Weekly, the premier industry trade magazine, said,

no, Iran and the previous Yemeni government both bought those missiles from North Korea. And all the modifications here are Yemeni modifications, not Iranian ones. Thebunk. I mean, President Saleh was a major ally of the U.S. had allowed them to enter Yemen and do as they please with Yemen in the name of fighting terror, right? Same with the Bush administration

while, you know, during the Bush administration, their Obama administration. And so for decades and decades, this man had been stockpiling all of these weapons, which he left for the Houthis. The first two and a half years,

he was cooperating with the Houthis, gave them access to everything that he had. He would remain in control of the Yemeni military, much of them Yemeni military. And so all of these missiles are ones that were already, in the country, either purchased from the U.S. or purchased from elsewhere, but it had been part of his stockpile. And so there's no evidence of Iranian weapons other than Nikki Haley pointing at

some, you know, missile and saying that's Iranian, and we have to take her word for it. Yeah, seriously. All right. Now, let's talk about this activism. Obviously, it's summer break for these congressional people, but it's so important. I mean, this never happened in my lifetime until the Yemen war that Congress would have dared to pass a war power. resolution to try to force an end of the war. Now, of course, they could just defund all participation in the war, which is really Congress's role. But anyway, at least they're doing this. And we can do a huge push by being as loud as we possibly can in organizing a really big push all at once to get this war powers resolution through. And it's H.J. Res. 87 in the House. And it's S.J. Res. 56 in the

Senate. We're going to do the biggest push that we can to try to get this thing through Congress. And they got, you know, more than 100 co-sponsors already. So, you know, I know that you'll be doing your best to promote that as well. And we'll be doing everything we can here on anti-war radio to help to push that through. Something's got to be done. And this is it. So thank you again so much for your time on the show, Shereen. I hope everyone will read your great article. It's how long will the fragile truce in Yemen last? And it's It's at ResponsibleStateCraft.org. Help make this one viral, folks.

And thank you again, Shereen. Thanks so much for having me, Scott. All right, y'all, and that is Anti-War Radio for this morning. I'm Scott Horton. Our website is Scott Horton.org, and I'm here every Sunday morning from 9 to 9.30. I'm on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. Phone number is 818-98-58-5735 to support KPFK.org.

See you next week. I'm going to be able to be.