Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2021, pp. 59-60
Waging Peace
Despite President Joe Biden’s Feb. 4 announcement that he would end support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive military actions in Yemen, U.S. policy has not changed perceptibly over the past five months, according to experts hosted by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft on June 23.
Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted that while there has been a shift in public posture, in practice not much has changed since the Trump administration. “I do not see evidence that [U.S.] military assistance to the Saudi war effort has changed in any way,” he said. “Saudi forces continue to bomb targets in Yemen and to impose a ruinous naval and air blockade on the country, which is the primary cause of the terrible problem of malnutrition the Yemeni people are facing.”
Riedel explained that about three-quarters of Saudi Arabia’s military aircraft are U.S.-made. Without American spare parts, expertise, technical upgrades, munitions and tires, those planes cannot operate, he noted. “If you cut off the flow today, you would literally ground most Saudi aircraft tomorrow,” he said.
“It is time to de-link our Yemen policy from Saudi Arabia,” Riedel averred. “Saudi Arabia has been our partner for 75 years....It’s time to tell our Saudi friends to pull over, change drivers and get out of a war that is costing them a fortune.”
Radhya Al-Mutawakel, co-founder of Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights organization, said that since February airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition have decreased, “but we don’t know if this will last or not.” What is really needed, she explained, is an international plan to bring the violence to a definitive halt.
“We have not seen anything clear from the U.S. pushing for accountability, like trying to refer the Yemeni situation to the International Criminal Court,” Al-Mutawakel said. “I hope the U.S. administration will end the war and not just manage it,” she continued. “Peace means a sustainable peace where Yemenis can get their state again, [one] that is based on the rule of law and democracy.”
Holding all parties to the conflict—the Saudis and Houthis alike—accountable is the only way to stop them from targeting civilians, Al-Mutawakel stated. She pointed out that it is not just the Saudi-led coalition, but also the Houthis supported by Iran, that have caused Yemen’s humanitarian crisis. “When we talk about starvation as a weapon of war and we say that…Yemenis are being starved, we cannot talk about only one party to the conflict,” she said.
Since the Houthis presently control over 70 percent of Yemen, they have “zero incentive to come to the negotiating table,” Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute, opined. “From their perspective they will get much further continuing to pursue violence.”
Amid the myriad violations committed by all sides, Sheline said the Biden administration needs to take fresh action, such as encouraging the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution that holds all parties to the violence accountable. “The crisis in Yemen continues, nothing has improved there and it is simply unacceptable for the Biden administration to pretend that they have shifted their stance on this when they have not,” she said.
—Elaine Pasquini
