President Trump’s veto of the resolution to end American support for the Saudi-UAE coalition in Yemen, and Congress’s failure to override it, has given U.S. defense contractors a green light to proceed with a business model that counts innocent Yemenis’ deaths as the cost of doing business.
If Washington continues to support the deadly campaign that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have waged against Yemen, then war and suffering are all that we can expect for Yemen’s people. Will Congress change that with a veto this week?
Getting Americans to be honest about our war crimes is like pulling teeth. After leaving the Yemen war completely out of his book on foreign policy, Obama aide Ben Rhodes finally admits “We were wrong” to trust the Saudis by supplying them with arms for their onslaught on Yemeni civilians. Of course he blames Trump for being even worse.
An eight-year old American girl in Yemen’s Bayda province was killed along with 14 other civilians on Sunday during the Trump administration’s first counter-insurgency operation. An American soldier was also killed during the fighting, which was ordered by the president without being fully briefed, according to critics from within the armed forces who–in an unusual move–leaked to the press.