President Donald Trump is set to repeat one of the worst mistakes of his first administration: fighting an unwinnable war in Yemen. This time, it could be far worse as Trump has sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Red Sea, meaning Americans will be doing the fighting, not the Saudis.
While the Yemeni people will bear most of the suffering from Trump’s escalation, the needless war will further bleed the American treasury and deplete our arms depots.
If there is one thing that Americans should have learned about Yemen over the past decade is that there are no easy solutions. In 2015, Saudi Arabia announced it was going to conduct a swift regime change in Sanaa to remove the Houthis—Ansar Allah—from power.
As Scott Horton explains in the following excerpt from his book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, the war in Yemen was an utter disaster that was completely avoidable. Once again, Washington is dragging the American empire into another entirely avoidable war in the Middle East.
The excerpt is a cogent history of the U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, and its uselessness. Trump has fallen into a trap again that was avoidable; fighting the Houthis. They were, once upon a time, our allies in a fight against terrorism and Al Queda in the Arabian Peninsula. They have also been the government in Yemen for the past six years, at least, with the backing of the Yemeni population. What the Saudis and the U.S. are doing is trying to bring back a ruler that was aligned with the CIA and who was run out of the country by all Yemeni parties. So, Mr. Trump, good luck with that.