The Daily - Why U.S. Bombs Are Falling in Yemen

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi has renewed criticism of Saudi Arabia more broadly, including the kingdom’s role in the war in Yemen. It’s a war that has created what has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world — and one that the United States has backed from the beginning. Guest: Robert F. Worth, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. The killing of Jamal Khashoggi has reignited criticism of the Saudi kingdom more broadly, including its role in the war in Yemen, a war that has become the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and a war that the United States has backed from the beginning. It's Tuesday, November 20th.

In the middle of September, I arrived in the town of Dahyan, which is in the far northwest of Yemen. It's a farming town. It's a very simple place. And we arrived there early in the morning. And the main street of this town is not paved. It's just a dirt road, essentially. And soon after we arrived in the town, I saw that on the side of the road was a big crater. It was marked out with some wooden sticks and red traffic tape. And after we got out of the car and walked around, I discovered there were people doing a little parade, which was the commemoration of what had happened there six weeks earlier.

And what had happened there? This was where a bomb had struck a school bus full of children in August, killing almost everyone on board. There were 44 children killed and 10 adults. And just over a low stone wall was the wreckage of the school bus, which was twisted into an almost unrecognizable mass of blackened metal. Just beyond the crater where the bomb had struck was written in color on a wall in both English and Arabic, America kills Yemeni children. And this is something you find all over Yemen, that

when there's a major airstrike, there will be bomb fragments found. And usually they have serial numbers or other markings that identify them. And in this case, the markings made clear that it was an American-made bomb. Robert, what is a U.S. missile doing in Yemen? Yeah, the answer to that is a little complicated. Robert Wirth has been covering Yemen for The Times Magazine. Ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, you've had two big forces fighting for power in the region. The end of Iran's monarchy came early today

when Khomeini's followers took control of the Palace of the Shah. You have Iran, which is trying to spread its revolutionary form of Shiite Islam, on the one hand. And already there are signs of how Khomeini's Islamic movement is seeking to exert its power. And its great enemy, Saudi Arabia, which is spreading its hardline Sunni version of Islam. New theological schools and universities were built to produce more clerics to help spread the word. These two forces have been clashing ever since then, and caught in between them is the group that would later be known as the Houthis.

In between them is the group that would later be known as the Houthis. Now, they live right up against the Saudi border in a mountainous area. They are neither Sunni nor Shia, but they are classed in with the Shia. And the Saudis, fearing that the Houthis pose a threat to them because they see them as potentially siding with Iran, start to step up their efforts to promote their own Saudi version of Islam in that area. In other words, to neutralize this potential threat. And instead of winning the people in that area over, it has the opposite effect. It angers the people there who see this as an assault on their identity, on their religion. And so they start to push back.

That grows and grows over the years and eventually militarizes. And my recollection was also that Saudi Arabia is at this point an ally of the U.S. That's correct. And so the Houthis early on in their history adopt this slogan that you see all over Yemen, which they call their sarha or shout. Mm-hmm. God is great. Death to America. Death to Israel. Curses on the Jews. Victory to Islam. Forces on the Jews, victory to Islam. Robert, we sort of take the alliance between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia as kind of a given. But why exactly is the U.S. allied with Saudi Arabia, which seems to be a major factor in all this. The United States has a long and very important relationship with Saudi Arabia, which of course has been the greatest supplier of oil

from the Middle East. And because of that relationship, one of its elements is that we supply weapons to the Saudis. There have been many, many major, major weapons deals with the Saudis. We also provide a kind of security umbrella for them in the region. We are seen as the backers of Saudi Arabia by everybody in that region. And another reason that the United States and the Saudis get along well and have for such a long time is that the United States also considers Iran a major threat in the region ever since the Islamic Revolution and especially the hostage crisis that took place shortly afterward. So there's a big area of agreement in terms of Iran being this great threat in the region.

So what comes of the Houthis after the Iranian revolution? So they arose as a resistance movement against Saudi influence in Yemen. And then by the early 2000s, the Yemeni government starts to see them as a threat. And so there's a series of wars between the Yemeni government and the Houthis. Instead of crushing the Houthis, these wars actually make them stronger because they gain battlefield experience. They get a hold of a lot of weapons because the Yemeni military is very incompetent and corrupt. And they also forge important alliances because this war ends up hurting a lot of other people who sympathize with the Houthis and join forces with them.

Then comes 2011. A Fox News alert and breaking news out of northern Africa, where violent protests have been spiling out of control in Tunisia. Protests have been spiling out of control in Tunisia. What happened in Tunisia is proving to be a catalyst for uprisings in other parts of the Muslim world where grievance churns beneath the surface. The Arab Spring, which of course was a democracy movement. The mood of anger has spread to a growing list of countries. There have been demonstrations in Algeria, Jordan, Iran and Yemen.

In Yemen, the Arab Spring leads to a state of chaos. Huge numbers of unemployed youth, a lack of opportunities and rising poverty inspired young protesters to flood the streets of cities throughout Yemen. You have multiple armed factions competing for power. Yemen is plunging further into chaos after rebels took over the presidential headquarters. Today, the rebels continue to gain ground in the capital city. But keep in mind that the Houthis are not fighting for democracy. They are a militia that is fighting for power.

Houthis now are in control here and are taking revenge on their tribal enemies by destroying their properties. An army commander refers to the takeover as a coup and says rebels are taking weapons inside. taking weapons inside. And the Houthis essentially come out on top. At that point, Iran sees an opportunity.

By siding with the Houthis, they can strike a blow against their enemy in a way that's cheap and easy. So Iran sees an opportunity to go after Saudi Arabia by taking on the cause of the Houthis. The old enemy of my enemy is my friend. Exactly. And so it's right around that time that Iran starts supplying weapons and aid.

And that raises all kinds of alarms because, after all, it's been decades that the Saudis were worried that the Houthis would become an ally of Iran. Well, now it has happened, and they're starting to fire missiles into Saudi Arabia, the nightmare for the Saudis. The Saudis are obviously very, very upset about this. Now, at the same time this is happening, there's a transition taking place in Saudi Arabia. Power shifts in the Middle East. In Saudi Arabia, it was the death of 90-year-old King Abdullah. His more conservative brother, Salman, has already ascended to the throne. And the new king has a son. His name is Mohammed bin Salman. 34-year-old Mohammed took the key positions of defense minister and head of the royal court.

He is young, he is ambitious, and he wants to make a mark. And one of the ways he wants to do that is by striking a blow against Iran. Your old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who regards Iran as the main threat in this region and believes that Iran must be tackled and tackled now. The question is, how do you do it? And Saudi Arabia is going to- So he organizes a coalition of allied states to launch a war against the Houthis in Yemen. And they seek and they gain American backing for this.

President Obama authorized logistical and intelligence support. State department officials say the US speeding up delivery of weapons and increasing intelligence sharing with Saudi Arabia. And why, Robert, exactly does the United States sign off on this?

Why would it want to be so closely or at all associated with this? Well, first of all, the Americans and the Saudis do share a common enemy. They're both anxious about Iran and it's a fact that the Houthis are getting aid from Iran. So to some extent, the Americans are on board with the idea. But the U.S. was in the middle of negotiating the Iran nuclear deal.

Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not. A comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And the Saudis were very upset about this deal. They were worried about the consequences. The Americans needed to keep the Saudis on side. They didn't want to upset them too much. And so they felt they needed to do something to placate the Saudis.

So the Americans agreed to support the Saudi war in Yemen. And the war is launched in March 2015. And in fact, the war is announced officially in Washington. There was a horrifying attack today in Yemen. An airstrike in the north reportedly killed at least 50, more than half of them children. So the Saudis unleash a massive and often indiscriminate campaign of bombings. Now a hospital in Yemen run by the charity Doctors Without Borders has been hit by Saudi-led coalition airstrikes. Because a school bus bombed in a crowded market was left utterly destroyed. On Saturday, a similar strike hit a school. Post offices, universities, everything is getting hit.

Deadly airstrikes killing dozens in Yemen. 28 people were killed and dozens more injured. More than 30 people have been killed and more than 50 people have been killed. 82 people. More than 140 people. 140 people were killed. Saudi Arabia has denied carrying out any airstrikes in the area at the time, instead blaming the attack on Houthi rebels.

It's pretty horrific what is happening, and the effect has been one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Yemen are struggling to survive in camps without basic health supplies and sanitation. More than two million have been forced to leave their homes since the war began three and a half years ago. Yemenis who've lost their homes in the civil war are beyond the reach of even the most basic relief that aid groups can provide. People don't have enough food, they don't have enough water. The UN's humanitarian chief is warning of the worst famine in the world has seen in decades

unless the Saudi-led coalition allows aid into Yemen. The United Nations has warned that the number of those at risk of famine could rise to 12 million. Some 8.5 million people there are already on the brink of starvation. You go into any hospital in Yemen and you see just nightmarish scenes of people waiting around outside. There's no room. There aren't enough doctors. The International Committee for the Red Cross says the number of suspected cholera cases in Yemen has reached a million. The disease continues to spread in what the UN has called the world's worst cholera outbreak.

Everywhere you look, you see women holding sick and emaciated children. As I was driving back from Saada in the far northwest to the Yemeni capital, we stopped at one point by a broken bridge, and this flock of women came out clutching babies, and one of them was a woman who appeared to have been living underneath a twist piece of what looked like shrapnel. It was probably 100 degrees out under a baking sun. And she was clutching a few children. And they literally seemed to be living under this piece of metal. And I just was, I was amazed to think, you know, how do you

survive in a desert like that with no water? You've got nothing to live on. And you're taking shelter under a piece of shrapnel and then knocking on the windows of any cars that passes. It's just a haunting image. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. So, Robert, I asked you at the beginning of our conversation how it could be that an American-made missile took out that school bus and killed all those children in Yemen. And it seems like the answer is that we have a longstanding strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia. And part of that alliance means we sell them missiles

that they decided to drop on Yemenis in a war that we support. So it makes sense that there's real anger towards the U.S. and that people would write on that wall, America kills Yemeni children. That's right. There really are American bombs falling. And the longer they continue to fall and the longer people continue to go through the rubble and find

parts with American serial numbers on them, the worse that anger will be. But as for the Houthis, you have to remember, they are not the good guys in this war. They also are guilty of torture, of disappearances, of extralegal executions. They, at this point, are operating on almost purely military basis. It's not clear what their vision is for the future apart from self-preservation. And what is the view of this war at this point by the U.S.? Donald J. Trump arriving in Saudi Arabia for his first foreign trip as president. This is an American first. Never before has a president set foot on Saudi soil for his first trip abroad. First of all, after Trump came into office, he seemed to double down on American support for this war.

Yesterday, President Trump signed a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is essentially a green light to continue to have essentially a proxy war. The United States hoping the Saudis and others essentially fighting Iran inside Yemen. And he makes very clear that he views Mohammed bin Salman as his favorite son in the region. Thank you very much, everybody. It's a great honor to have the crown prince with us. Saudi Arabia has been a very great friend and a big purchaser of equipment and lots of other things. His view of the Middle East is very much shaped by the Saudis. And he seems to give the Saudis almost carte blanche to do whatever they want.

I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. There was no indication that Trump wanted to be critical of the Saudi war in Yemen until about two months ago. The State Department is looking into accusations that Saudi Arabia was involved in the alleged murder of a prominent Saudi journalist. Jamal Khashoggi disappeared last week in Turkey. As the Turks let out bits and pieces of information about the murder in dribs and drabs. Turkey's president says his country is

studying CCTV footage taken at the consulate and airport. Turkey says it has given audio recordings of the journalist's killing to the United States and other Western countries. People began to suspect that Mohammed bin Salman, our great friend in the region, himself ordered this brutal killing. Suspicion has fallen on Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. We know that the international community has no trust in the Saudis coming clean with what happened.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle claim the orders must have come from the top. And that began to shine a spotlight for the first time on who is this guy? Is he really the great reformer we've been seeing him as? It is clearly that the war in Yemen now is gaining renewed attention and the question marks are being erased over U.S.-Saudi partnership. And of course that led to questions of what is he doing in Yemen? This policy of Saudi Arabia, of inflicting massive civilian casualty and suffering, for what? Voices that had been critical of the Saudi war and were overlooked for a long time start to get heard.

People are dying every minute in Yemen. And our silence and our inaction means that we are complicit. People in Congress are speaking up and in the cabinet, Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Mattis also call for a ceasefire. The longer term solution and by longer term, I mean 30 days from now, we want to see everybody around a peace table based on a ceasefire that will permit the special envoy to get them together in Sweden and end this war. And so there's a kind of accumulation of criticism and of public calls for something to finally change in this war.

Robert, even as members of the Trump administration begin grappling with whether or not we should still be involved in this war, I'm remembering that this whole operation started as an effort by both the Saudis and the U.S. to try to contain the influence of our mutual enemy, Iran. And I wonder to what extent the Trump administration and the Saudis still see it that way as really about Iran, or has it become about something totally different at this point? I think for the Saudis and their allies, it remains very much a war against Iran. That has always been their concern. The United States, of course, shares that concern. But I think the question is, is this war in Yemen an effective way to push back against Iran? And is it? You know, I think the Obama administration had doubts about that from the very beginning. The Trump administration

was more inclined to trust the Saudis on that question. And now I think you're seeing a return of doubts just because time kept passing, the civilian casualties kept piling up, and yet the Houthis are not weaker. If anything, they're stronger. And so that just naturally, you know, pushes people to ask the question, what are we doing here? Is this the right way to accomplish our shared goal, which is to push back against Iran? And I think there's a strong feeling among some in the administration and certainly many outside of it, this is not the way to do it. When you're in Yemen,

outside of the areas of Houthi control, it's often kind of a lawless zone with multiple different factions fighting each other. But inside the Houthi areas, there is this generally a feeling of unity that they're all together in this struggle. On September 21st, I was in Sana'a, the capital,

and there was this huge, very triumphal parade. In which lots and lots of major Houthi figures participated, and there was music, there was marching. There was everybody grabbing their AK-47 and thrusting it in the air and chanting. The Houthis feel empowered by this war, which is exactly the opposite of what the Saudi coalition had been hoping for. And not only that, on this same day, there were similar processions elsewhere going on around the Arab world because it was Ashura, which is a big Shiite holiday.

And what you heard from clerics and even from some battlefield commander types in Iraq and in Lebanon was tremendous sympathy with the Houthi cause. A feeling that these guys were the victims of a terrible Saudi war. They were the oppressed. And we sympathize with them. You know, our hearts are with them. We're willing to go and fight on their side. Which sounds like the definition of a mission that has backfired for the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. I think that's true.

I think far from crushing the Houthis, as the Saudi coalition must have hoped, this has in some way empowered them, made them feel that their cause is just and that they have friends and allies all over the place. It's really intriguing to me, Robert, that after all these years of death in Yemen, that what feels like a pivot point here is the murder of a single man, not even in Yemen, but in Turkey by Saudi Arabia, that that is starting to feel like a turning point.

What do you make of that? I think it highlights the way that it's not institutions that matter in these countries, but people. So much depends on the person who runs this country and what that vision is, how they operate. And if suddenly something happens that cats a new light on who that person is, it really can make an enormous difference in terms of how we see that person and how we see everything they're doing. I think a lot of people feel

that there's something incredibly strange about this scenario where you have a drama playing out day by day, having to do with the death of a single person, a journalist, and yet so much turns, so many lives turn on that one murder. I think, though, for most people in the region, they're willing to take anything as long as there's a way to look more closely at what's happening and ask, is it worth it? So what's changed is nothing in the geopolitics of all this, what's changed is that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi has changed

global perceptions and most importantly, American perceptions of Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. I think that's right. You know, two people really will decide all of this. One of them is Trump and one of them is Mohammed bin Salman. I think certainly Trump has the power to really push Mohammed bin Salman on this, but it's very hard to know how much pressure he's going to exert. And I think what he wants, it's pretty clear, is to avoid all of this. He likes Mohammed bin Salman. He would like to keep supporting him. If he could go back to business as usual, he would.

And so the question really is, are there going to be circumstances where he's going to have to push MBS to take action? So really, the fate of this war and the people of Yemen are up to two men, Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman. But really, it's up to President Trump. I think that's true. Robert, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. On Friday, the Times reported that the CIA has reached the conclusion that Mohammed bin Salman himself ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. But in an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace on Sunday, President Trump suggested he still believes the crown prince's denials.

Question. Did MBS lie to you, sir? I don't know. You know, who can really know? But I can say this. He's got many people now that say he had no knowledge. What if the crown prince speaking to you, the president of the United States, directly lied to you? Well, he told me that he had nothing to do with it. He told me that, I would say, maybe five times at different points. But what if he's lying?

As recently as a few days ago? Do you just live with it because you need him? Well, will anybody really know? All right. Will anybody really know? That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.