Last week, Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) spoke with Jake Tapper regarding the grossly under-reported Saudi intervention in Yemen. Murphy said: “There is an American imprint on every civilian life lost [there]...we have decided to go to war in Yemen”.
When asked by Tapper to clarify who “we” is in his aforementioned statement, Murphy responded:
I should be careful about the collective ‘we’...the United States Congress has not debated a war authorization giving the President the power to conduct this operation in Yemen. And given that we are not targeting al-Qaeda, where there arguably still is a pending war authorization dating from September 11th, this war to many of us looks like it’s unauthorized.
Since March 2015, the UN has reported a total of 3,704 civilian deaths in Yemen, the mass majority of which were caused by US-supported Saudi air strikes within the country. Due to the robust and quasi-taboo US-Saudi relationship, American support for the intervention often goes without in-depth questioning during the rare occasions in which the war is mentioned in the mainstream at all.
Before the intervention, the Saudis purchased billions of dollars worth of weaponry from the United States, including eighty-four F-15s, 170 helicopters, and 1,300 cluster bombs. Journalist Andrew Cockburn states: “This enormous deal totaled $60 billion: the largest arms sale in U.S. history.” Soon afterwards, they put those weapons to use; of the (at least) 69 illegal airstrikes documented within the country, 19 of them included cluster bombs.
US support goes beyond extravagant financing; the Americans have also supplied the Saudis with in-air F-15 refueling and intelligence used for targeting. The former of these two is particularly bothersome considering that at least one school and four Doctors Without Borders hospitals have been bombed by the Saudis during the course of the intervention, an obvious violation of international law.
Human Rights Watch states in a report:
Under the laws of war, the United States, by directly assisting coalition military operations...is a party to the conflict in Yemen. As such, the US has a legal obligation to investigate alleged violations of the laws of war in which US forces may have been responsible and appropriate prosecute war crimes that may have been committed. We are unaware of US participation in any investigations of alleged laws of war violations committed in Yemen.
The Saudis rely heavily on their financial relationship with the United States. By stopping the sale of arms to the Saudis, the United States could prevent another unnecessary destruction of an Arab nation. When Congress convenes this September, around the time the Saudis will be asking for another weapons sale, Senator Chris Murphy plans to introduce a bipartisan plan for Congress to intervene and prevent the sale from going through.
Murphy made a refreshingly accurate point when he stated: “We are helping to radicalize the Yemeni population against the United States”. If such insight had been held by US officials in decades past, perhaps thousands of lives in numerous Middle Eastern countries would not have been lost.