The Last American Vagabond - Why They Are Lying About Yemen & How It Impacts You

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

In the latest episode of Foreign Policy, Robert Inlakesh explains why the media lies to the public about the war on Yemen and why the latest escalations implicate the world beyond West Asia.Since 2015, a concerted effort has been made to hide the truth. In this episode, we look into the hidden history of Yemen, why the Israelis are so invested, and debunk the popular myths about the ongoing war.Bitcoin Donations Are Appreciated:www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bitcoin-donation(3FSozj9gQ1UniHvEiRmkPnXzHSVMc68U9f)The Last American Vagabond Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Last American Vagabond Substack at tlavagabond.substack.com/subscribe

To have dignity, to have respect, to have our human rights. The occupation is not just the soldiers, it's not just the settlements, it's everything. What will separate the condition of humanity from the barbarism of the past, which we like to think we have since changed and progressed from. That might have been the work of American imperialism and international Zionism. We've come here to investigate what this means for the people living here. It's a violation of international law. It's a war crime.

These are the real journalists achieving liberation to unite the people in a way that we've never seen before. Welcome back to another episode of foreign policy with me, Robert and Lekesh for the Last American Vagabond. Today we're going to be looking at a subject which the Western corporate media not only has failed to cover accurately, but in many cases is simply ignored. Most people are left in the dark about what's happening there, and over the past two weeks, the war, and I'm talking about Yemen here, on Yemen, has escalated dramatically. Saudi Arabia and Yemen are again back at war. Maybe you've heard something like that in the headlines, but there's a number of different myths that we have to dispel in order to get to the meat and bones of this story and explain why this is so incredibly relevant, not. not just to the region, not just to the war between Iran on one side and the United States and Israel on the other side and the implications locally for that, but the global implications of the conflict in Yemen. And that's something that has been, quite frankly, hidden from everyone. Because they don't want you to know what is truly transpiring in Yemen, who is behind it, why they are behind it.

And really, if you think about it, a conflict in Yemen, which has caused the deaths of over 400,000 people in that country, primarily the majority of those deaths caused by the illegal medieval blockade that was imposed upon the country by Saudi Arabia and its allies since 2015. That war is a war that was, number one, greenlit by the United States, which the U.S. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and others with weapons in order to fight it. The United States, the Israelis and the British and the EU. EU countries were even involved in not only providing intelligence, logistical support, weapons, air defenses, training militants to fight inside of Yemen on their side, and a lot more. And really, if you think about this, there has to be a great reason why so many countries are involved, all the

Arab countries that are on the side of the West, which is the vast majority of them, the vast majority of the Arab countries' leaderships are pro-Western or in the West's camp, cited, at least initially, and directly participated in the coalition to attack Yemen in 2015. And if you've followed any reporting on this issue, you may have come across in the last few years the Yemeni issue, either because of the humanitarian crisis that has occurred in Yemen, or maybe because of Yemen firing ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and imposing a blockade on Israel in the Red Sea. And there's a lot of propaganda that has surrounded those events. But in order to understand this, we have to sort of get to the meat and bones of the issue.

And in order to do that, we have to dispel a number of myths that have been created. Number one is the Houthis, as they're known, and that's probably what most people are familiar with. When they hear anything about Yemen and the conflict there, they are told that there are the Houthi rebels who are Iran-backed and Iranian proxies. they are fighting the Saudi-backed, internationally recognized government of Yemen. Now, this is just completely untrue. Now, not that those two sides more or less exist, but the framing of it is completely untrue. Number one, the Houthis, that's not even their real name. That's a family name.

Like, for instance, Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are a family, and they named Arabia after their family. their family. But that's not the case in Yemen. They don't call themselves the Houthis, and in fact they have a party name, and their party is called Ansar Allah. Now this party currently heads up a government in Sana'a, which is the capital city of Yemen. They also, as a government, rule over the vast majority of Yemeni people living inside of Yemen. They live under their governance. They live under their governance. Also, since 2015, we're going to get into that a little bit more. Since that year, two-thirds of the Yemeni armed forces sided with Ansar al-Lah and their takeover of the capital,

which means the majority of the armed forces of Yemen are on their side. They have a government, which rules over the majority of the Yemeni population. And In fact, they were participants in a popular revolution against a Western-backed dictator, which lasted 33 years in power. So who are Ansarullah or the Houthis? Well, of course their origins traced back much further than this, but when they became a notable movement, what happened is there was a figure called Hussain al-Houthi who emerged in the 1990s.

He actually got elected and participated in that political process in Yemen, but he founded a revivalist movement for what's known as Zaydi Islam. Now, the Zadis are a branch off of the Shia Islamic beliefs. And so in Islam, if you've heard anything about it, maybe you've heard there's Sunni and Shia. So there are, you know, off of the Sunni tree and the Shia, there are different branches. One of them is Zaidi Islam. It's actually in many ways closer to the Sunni, but many people hone in on the back that they are Shia and decide to affiliate them with Iran.

But what happened is Hasein and Houthi created this revivalist movement. The reason why he did this, and this was based in northern Yemen, was because he felt, amongst others, that Saudi Arabia was having too much influence on the faith throughout Yemen and that they wanted to push back against Saudi influence. And so this movement started growing. The ideas were communicated to the local population. And the government in Yemen at the time led by a man named Ali Abdullah Salih, who like I said was a dictator who lasted for 33 years in power. Now by this, year 2004, what Ali Abdulazah, the president of Yemen, decided to do was to have Hussein Al-Hutti arrested. Keep in mind that the Yemeni government was close to Saudi Arabia and had

these connections with the West, which would become a main source of Yemeni opposition to its government, that being the fact that its resources were not properly being used for the benefit of the people of Yemen, that there was too much influence from foreign powers, in particular the West. And so this revivalist movement that started in the north of Yemen was growing traction and presented a threat. And so when that campaign was launched to arrest Hussain al-Houti, it ended up resulting in his death. And from there, there was, of course, armed clashes, which erupted. Now, that's just a little bit of the background there. Now, again, mentioning that the Zadis in this revivalist movement, they are considered Shia.

Also, we have to analyze what this group was and who Hussain al-Huti was, because this movement was not, and I repeat, was not founded or backed by Iran in any way. In fact, Hussain al-Hutti, and you can track this back, in his speeches was rather opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran and many of its policies and many of its positions and that criticism actually aggravated the Iranians quite a bit at different points. Now today you don't see as staunch opposition on different issues as you saw before but it's important to consider that history in that context because this is not a movement

as it's portrayed as a bunch of rebels that simply came out of nowhere with Iranian backing and they are operating as an Iranian proxy, they are organic to Yemen. And whether you like them or not is not even part of the question. It's just simply fact that Iran was not behind creating them. Now, if we fast forward to the year 2011, we had the Arab Spring, as it was known, which triggered a number of revolts, revolutions, against leaderships throughout the Arab world. Now, as this was happening, of course, with dictators falling in Tunisia and in Egypt, this scared the living hell out of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf monarchies

who themselves are dictators and did not want to be overfrown or encouraged that. In Yemen, the people carried on that trend of revolts and they rose up in a popular revolution against their leader Ali Abdullah Saleh. Part of that revolt and involved in it were Ansar Allah, the movement, the Houthi rebels. And there was then as a conclusion of that revolution towards the end of 2011 where the people had come to the streets in their millions to oppose the government and demand that the leader stepped down, there was a process that was triggered by the Arab Gulf states. And Ali Abdullah Salih ended up signing on to an agreement to hand over power for there to be a transitional period and for elections to be held inside of Yemen.

Again, keep in mind, this was the Arab Gulf states, and an agreement was struck inside of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in order to reach this handover power. As a result of this process, there were elections. Now, not everyone participated in these elections, many were opposed to it, but there was a new president elected. And his name was Abu Rabu Manzur Hadi. Hadi was then again later on interpreted as being repressive, too close to Saudi Arabia, too close to the West, not allowing Yemen to gain access properly to its resources, its wealth, and as a result in 2015, Ansar Allah that were already placed and positioned in the capital city of Sana'at, decided to overfrow the government in Yemen.

And there were a number of factions that came along and sided with this decision in order to overfrow President Haddi. As a result, President Haddy fled. And Ansarullah took over and dissolved the Yemeni parliament and set up a committee, a revolutionary committee in order to govern the country. Eventually what happened is the party that was affiliated with the former dictator Ali Abdulah Saleh ended up forming an alliance briefly with Ansar Allah in order to govern the country. Later on that ended up deteriorating. Ansar Allah was of course since 2015 in that overfroll, was under attack by Saudi Arabia and the coalition that launched an attack on the country.

country to push them out of government and install or reinstall their puppet who had fled. And so they had full control over this side. Saudi Arabia started getting behind a breakaway faction of the Yemeni military. And later on, we saw that the United Arab Emirates had developed a big presence inside of the country. And this is just the history here in a nutshell, so everyone can sort of get an idea of what happened here. By 2017, the party affiliated with the former dictator of the country, ended up splitting from the alliance with Ansar ala. Ansarulah then took over governance of the

entire territory. It set up a new government, a new parliament, and it had, you know, a new prime minister and etc. to govern the country. So by this stage in the conflict, there had already been, since 2015, a war waged upon Yemen, which was backed by the United States, backed by the Israelis, backed by the British and the European Union, and of course all these Arab Gulf states and other Arab states had participated in this war to overfro on Sara Allah. Now, the reason why they did this is not because they oppose on Sara-law because it's a religious, religious movement and they don't like how they violate human rights and all of the rest of the nonsense that you might hear about them. And they thought that they were terrorists because of course there are nothing but Arab dictatorships who also

are practicing Islamic belief systems and implement Islamic law to one degree or another in their countries all surrounding Yemen. So that's never been an issue. That's not the reason why Barack Obama encouraged the Saudis to attack Yemen. That's not the reason why the Israelis got involved or the British. It was because this movement inside of Yemen that took over the capital city that began governing the majority, what would be the majority of the Yemeni population and had the majority of the armed forces of Yemen on its side, that was an independent movement and one that was opposed to Israel, that was opposed to US imperialism, that was opposed to Western imperialism,

and that preached to its own population these ideas of resistance and steadfastness. And yes, it was through a religious lens, but they were opposed to it not because of it being religious, not because of all the way they over-through the government was not done in a constitutional enough way. I mean, we're talking here about a revolutionary process to overfrow a dictator which was backed by the West and was in power for 33 years before the revolution occurred and removed him and there was this whole process that began inside of Yemen. So this is a quick overview of what happened there. Now some people will go, yeah, but how did the Houthis, the Houthis rebels and the proxies of Iran, how did they get these missiles? Well,

it may come as a surprise to everyone listening, but the ballistic missile program of Yemen and Yemen's armed forces actually predates Iran's ballistic missile program. So they have actually been developing ballistic missiles for a very long time. But of course, in this conflict, they have made great advances. And that is with the help of Iran for sure. There's no dispute over that. the fact that they've got their hands on this drone technology and missile technology and they've made these leaps and bounds, that is because of their allies that have helped them along the way. By the year 2022, that conflict had closed because of a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement. And what forced the Saudis to accept this and the Emirates to accept this was the fact that Yemen's ballistic missiles had advanced a fair bit.

and so had their drones. And they started taking out targets, oil targets in Saudi Arabia, and also going after targets in the United Arab Emirates. In fact, in early 2022, Yemen-Zan Saurala fired drones and missiles at the United Arab Emirates when the Israeli president Isaac Herzog was visiting Dubai. This is a real statement. So the UN came in, they brokered this ceasefire agreement,

they kept extending it, and this agreement ended up being, extended all the way till earlier this year last month. In fact. Now you've heard one side of this and that's the process by which Yemen reached a revolution and what sort of triggered Saudi Arabia to attack Yemen but what about the other side because we hear all the time about the internationally recognized government of Yemen. That's something that's repeated. Yemen even has a representative the United Nations, which is part of this internationally recognized government.

So what is that? Well, initially, that internationally recognized government, so-called, was President Haddi and his loyalists who sided with the Saudis and decided to take their backing and the use of Saudi militants and Saudi-backed militants, including some fighters that were even taken from Sudan to fight on their side against the Ansarullah led forces in Yemen. All of this was what made the internationally recognized government, and they held claim to, well, we have the elected president of the country. By the year 2022, that was no longer the case.

President Hadi handed over his powers to the Yemeni presidential council, and this council was created in the Ritzkartz-Karrow. Herald Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, not in Yemen. And the leader of it was not an elected official that ran in any sort of democratic race in Yemen. This presidential council doesn't have any real legitimacy. It was simply formed by the Saudis in Saudi Arabia, literally in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. And there is no real up. elected president. There's no elected representatives. In fact, in South Yemen, which still,

that area which is called the South, which represents not only a strip of the south of the country, but also most of the east of the country, most of which is not actually inhabited. That's something as well that is not well communicated about Yemen's demographics, but historically what has been sovereign Yemen, the so-called recognized, internationally recognized government for some time was composed of the Saudi-backed forces and also what was known as the sovereign transitional council. And the STC were supposed to be, or they were sold to us, as this organic movement of Yemeni separatists.

And they were based in a city called Aden, which is a strategic port city, which is why the British historically occupied it. And so they had this joint governing coalition that they formed. Until earlier this year, when the Emirates decided that they were going to push harder to try and clear out the Saudi-backed forces and take over South Yemen for their very own. Now, what they started doing is paying off people in different areas and committing their STC, sovereign transitional council forces to offensives to seize more territory. And at the beginning, they started seizing some territory. And so Saudi Arabia reacted to the United Arab Emirates and as the more powerful party or country, put them in their place and ended up wiping out the STC.

And there wasn't a massive civil war which caused this that was sort of just buying everyone out and pressuring the United Arab Emirates to completely desert Yemen. And that's what it did. And when the United Arab Emirates decided to pull out of Yemen, all those forces which we were told were part of an organic movement in Yemen, which was part of the internationally recognized governing coalition, suddenly dissipated overnight. they ceased to exist.

They're loyalist militias, including one called the Southern Giants Brigade, perhaps one of the most powerful militia groups in the country, which many of their strongest fighters, are actually former al-Qaeda fighters, people with the mentality of al-Qaeda, who are fighting against the Ansarullah forces, the Yemeni-armed forces. They all just switched sides,

or just decided to call it quits. Suddenly this all happens, and this is a so-called organic movement. And the second, the UAE deserts Yemen, and decides that it's no longer viable, that it continue on its path there. Suddenly they just go away. It's interesting, isn't it? That just happens like that to a completely organic movement or are told him. The reality is the SDC were proxies of the United Arab Emirates, like the, sort of, so-called internationally recognized government forces of proxies of Saudi Arabia.

So what we actually have is the narrative that is presented to the public about Yemen is actually flipped on its head. But here's where we get into the interesting part. Nobody's going to tell you the truth about that. No country really other than a handful of nations around the world are going to express the truth about the situation inside of Yemen because quite frankly everyone would rather do business with Saudi Arabia, with Qatar, with the United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain, with Kuwait. These are all mega-rich Arab countries, and of course they are key to global oil supplies.

Now the situation is sort of changing. Because we're now seeing a situation where the Strait of Hormuz is closed because of Iran, and the Bevlmandeb Strait, which Yemen, of course, has control over, specifically on Sarala. That has been closed off at least to Saudi Arabia as a counter-blockade on top of Saudi Arabia's blockade on Yemen. So the situation has indeed evolved, and that's why in the recent weeks Yemen's Ansarala has mobilized its armed forces and is committing itself to offensive strikes using ballistic missiles and drones, not only against the Saudis, but they're proxy forces inside of the country as well. And the reason why this is

all so incredibly important is that in the past, countries even like Russia and China, would not want to side with Yemen's Ansar al-La against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but those power dynamics are now shifting. So if Yemen's on Saral-Lah, the government there in Sena is able to, with its armed forces, take control of the rest of Yemen. Suddenly, there is an Arab power with control over one of the most important waterways, the most important trade routes in the world, that emerges, gets its hands back on its resource-rich territory, most of which is towards the east of the country and is still held by Saudi proxy forces, and they are opposed to Israel and the Greater Israel Project.

They actively launch attacks on Israel in support of Gaza. They are the only government in the world that took that decision to intervene on the side of the Palestinians in Gaza. They will suddenly have control over a key port in the region, a key waterway. They will have a say over what's going on in the Red Sea. And of course, that influences Egypt. It influences Europe because you have to cross through the Babel Mendeb Strait, go through the Red Sea, up to reach the Suez Canal, which then means that you reach Europe. So this is a very important waterway.

And if Yemen manages to liberate itself, this is a huge. problem not only for Israel but for all those Arab states which have sided with the US that have sided in one way or another with the Israelis and have sacrificed their sovereignty because of this if Yemen is liberated if Yemen gets its hands on its resources if Yemen is a major player and we already know they are capable militarily and they will continue to develop. If that's the case, they will be the only Arab government which is actually sovereign. And so this threatens all those Arab dictatorships that, quite frankly, are not sovereign. They have no sovereignty. They just bow down to whatever the United States and the

Israelis want in the region. They accept that the terms are dictated to them. And this could actually end up inspiring action in these other Arab states against their leaderships, because they will learn, in the lesson that will be drawn from this, is that you can revolt, you can change your leadership, you can determine your own destiny. That is the last thing that they want. And Yemen, if it is an independent state, it's a state that eventually the entire world is going to have to recognize. They can't keep pretending that a bunch of old guys in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in

Saudi Arabia are somehow the legitimate government. They're going to have to recognize Ansar Allah's government as a physical reality that exists here on Earth, not in the mythical land that they create in their own heads that everyone just goes along with to please the Gulf states in the U.S. If that happens, the picture in the Middle East changes dramatically. And as a result, the global oil supply as well, that situation is going to be dramatically altered because if the Iranians are already requesting that they are going to receive a fee for transiting the Strait of Hormuz, Yemen's Ansar al-Law could do that with Bebel Mendeb. And they could coordinate something like that.

Suddenly now you have these two countries in the region that support Palestine, that are opposed to Israel and its expansionist endeavors that are military powers, both of which have withstood U.S. airstrike campaigns to try and destroy them and conspiracies to commit regime change and overthrow them, and they will have a lot of power over those Gulf Arab states. Right now, the immediate impact of this, which Pete Hegson, apparently doesn't even know what's happening is that that blockade is imposed on Saudi Arabia, which means that 6 million barrels of oil per day are no longer being exported. Saudi Arabia is not exporting its oil any longer.

And that situation will remain in its oil facilities which are being systematically destroyed by Yemen's and Saurulan. They will continue to be attacks of this nature, as long as the South blockade and aggression against Yemen continues, this is going to have a major impact. There is no wonder that the Israelis, that the US government, that the British government and the EU have been so opposed to Ansar al-Lagh, and they have been so opposed to what's happening in Yemen and who's governing it, that they have committed their own resources to attacking them all of these years and allowing for a blockade and helping implement a blockade on the country which has killed over 400,000 people and caused one of the worst humanitarian

crises in the world. And it's interesting that in all of this, most people have no clue about any of these details. Despite the fact that the West has been involved the entire time, that the Israelis have been involved, that Yemen is very much relevant. to the regional war that's going on. It's engaged in the regional war that is ongoing and is affecting the global oil supply right now. But again, if you follow the Western corporate media or media anywhere in general,

they're not going to tell you any of this. In fact, the chances are they're not going to call Ansar Allah by its name. In fact, they're probably just going to call them the Houthis and that they're proxious. of Iran and they're a bunch of these savage terrorists who carry around daggers on their wastes and are, you know, so uncivilized and barbaric and we just need to think that they're, you know, irrelevant to everything else and Saudi Arabia, I guess, has a right to go after them

and reinstall the so-called legitimate, internationally recognized government. But after listening to all of this, you'll probably have realized that that narrative is rather stupid. And once you know, you sort of can't unknown. But that is this episode of Foreign Policy for the Last American Vagabond. Till next time, people, question everything.