There Are No “Good Guys”

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Sens. Mike Lee, Bernie Saunders, and Chris Murphy reveal that the scales have fallen from their eyes and they’ve realized that the Obama Administration’s policy in Yemen, fecklessly continue by the Trump Administration, was foolish:

More than 10,000 civilians have died and over 40,000 have been wounded in this war. Fifteen million people can’t access clean water and sanitation. An estimated 17 million people – 60 percent of the total population – do not have reliable access to food and are at risk of starvation.

When tragedies such as the war in Yemen occur, the American people’s instinct is to help. Americans have so far provided more than $768 million in humanitarian aid to that country.

What few Americans know, however, is that the U.S. military is making the crisis worse by helping one side in the conflict bomb innocent civilians. The millions we have spent in humanitarian aid were necessitated, in part, by a U.S. government failure.

In order to understand this failure, we need to understand how the United States got involved in Yemen to begin with. In March 2015, a coalition of Arab forces led by Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention into Yemen.

The goal of this intervention was to support the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi against Houthi insurgents who had taken control of much of the country, including the capital city of Sanaa.

The Obama administration, without consulting Congress, quickly authorized U.S. military forces to provide “logistical and intelligence support” to the Saudi coalition. U.S. military support for this intervention continues to this day. U.S. forces are coordinating, refueling and targeting with the Saudi-led coalition, as confirmed last December by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis .

We believe that since Congress has not authorized military force for this conflict, the United States should play no role in it beyond providing desperately needed humanitarian aid.

I think they should start their history of U. S. involvement in Yemen a little earlier, all the way back in 2010 when the Obama Administration began its “drone war” in Yemen. Ostensibly, armed U. S. drones began attacking Al Qaeda in Yemen. Unfortunately, our human intelligence in the region is poor and we rely heavily on local authorities. Although in theory we were fighting Al Qaeda and the action was given a fig leaf by the Authorization to Use Military Force, in reality we had become the Yemeni government’s air force, attacking individuals of unknown affiliation to Al Qaeda but whom the Hadi government didn’t like.

Under the U. S. Constitution the Congress has the sole authority to declare war. We look the other in exigent circumstances, allowing the president as Commander-in-Chief to make war for a short period in emergency conditions. Going after enemies of the Hadi government does not fit that rubric and in 2010 the Congress should have shut down the Obama Administration’s illegal campaign immediately.

Well, better late than never, I guess. President Trump isn’t popular with anyone in the Congress and the likelihood of the Congress acting now is much better than it would be with a president of whom they approved. It’s high time that the Congress began shouldering its responsibilities rather than delegating them to the president.

I hope this occasions a realization that there are no “good guys” in the Gulf. None of them are our friends. They’re all “bad guys”. The best we can do is butt out and keep our noses clean. If the objective is to protect our shores, protect our shores. Don’t enter into the civil wars of other countries.