Yemen is the world's worst atrocity and it's currently ongoing and there's a famine there. There's a blockade from Saudi Arabia. There's indiscriminate bombing of civilians. They've bombed open marketplaces. They've bombed mosques. They've bombed civilian infrastructure and this is something that got a little bit of coverage for awhile but now it's mysteriously disappeared.
Now, why did it disappear? Well, Joe Biden famously came out and said we're not gonna help Saudi Arabia anymore with offensive bombing.
Now, notice the wording there? He added the word "offensive," which means--what- he's leaving the wiggle room to say we're gonna help them with defensive bombing. Yeah, but what if none of the bombing is defensive? Well, they'll just call it defensive and help bomb and that's the gist of it and that's what they did.
And the left has been placated, too. I haven't seen much from any of the people, even the ones who led the charge, whether it's Bernie Sanders or Ro Khanna on the left. I haven't seen them really take it to Biden on this.
The day before, the aforementioned Sanders and Khanna in an opinion piece in The Guardian wrote
The recent breaching of the United States’ embassy in Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa by rebel forces, and the detaining of Yemeni employees of the embassy, is the latest escalation in a war that has gone on for far too long. It is a war that the United States has supported and remains deeply involved in. It’s time for that complicity to end.
For more than six years, Saudi-led military intervention into Yemen’s civil war on behalf of Yemen’s exiled government against Yemeni rebels has been a key driver of the largest humanitarian disaster in the world. “The country’s economy has reached new depths of collapse, and a third wave of the pandemic is threatening to crash the country’s already fragile healthcare system,” United Nations humanitarian relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said in September, with millions “a step away from starvation”.
Under first the Obama and then the Trump administration, the United States was Saudi Arabia’s partner in this horrific war. In 2019, Congress made history by passing its first War Powers Resolution through both chambers of Congress, pressing Donald Trump to end this support. It marked the first time that Congress invoked the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to direct the president to withdraw troops from an undeclared war.
It appears the two congressmen (yes, Rachel Maddow and others, Senators are members of Congress) are not sitting idly by as
We have proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to finally end all US support for the Saudi war effort. The House already passed this amendment for the third consecutive year. Given that this amendment simply codifies a prohibition on providing support for the Saudi war that already passed both houses of Congress in 2019 – legislation supported at the time by multiple officials now in the Biden-Harris administration – it is long overdue for this provision to be included in the final defense policy bill that is sent to the president’s desk.
Still, Kulinski is right not only on the policy but also that nobody "has really take(n) it to Biden on this. In their commentary, Sanders-Khanna mentioned the current President only twice, the above reference to the Biden-Harris administration and when they "welcomed the Biden administration’s announcement earlier this year that it would end support for 'offensive' military operations led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and name a special envoy to help bring this conflict to an end."
Noting "under first the Obama and then the Trump administration, the United States was Saudi Arabia’s partner in this horrific war," the two Democrats place blame on the two last presidents rather than the current one. Trump and Obama do deserve the brunt of the criticism, but it's now the Biden Administration which can, as Sanders, Khanna, and Kulinski all understand, time for an American president to end American support for Saudi Arabia's brutal adventure.
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