Yemen War (Saudi Support)

The Yemen war is the definitive case study in how the United States enables catastrophic violence while maintaining the fiction of non-involvement. For nearly a decade, American-manufactured weapons dropped from American-built aircraft, guided by American intelligence, refueled by American tankers, and maintained by American contractors have killed tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians and created the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. Yet the war is barely known to the American public, has never been authorized by Congress, and continues through multiple administrations of both parties.

The war's origins lie in Yemen's failed political transition after the 2011 Arab Spring. When the Houthi movement, a Zaidi Shia revivalist group from northern Yemen, seized the capital Sana'a in September 2014 in alliance with forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Saudi Arabia viewed it as an intolerable expansion of Iranian influence on its southern border. On March 26, 2015, Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — 29 years old, with no military experience — launched Operation Decisive Storm, projecting a campaign lasting "a few weeks."

The Obama administration immediately signed on as the Saudi coalition's indispensable partner. Within days, the Pentagon established a joint planning cell at Saudi Arabia's air operations center in Riyadh, embedding American military personnel who assisted with target selection and intelligence. U.S. Air Force tankers began refueling Saudi F-15s before bombing missions. American-manufactured precision-guided munitions, cluster bombs, and general-purpose bombs flowed to Saudi Arabia through expedited arms sales. The State Department approved billions in weapons transfers with minimal scrutiny.

The decision to support the Saudi war was made without public debate, congressional authorization, or strategic justification. Yemen poses no threat to the United States. The Houthis, while receiving some Iranian support, are not an Iranian proxy in any meaningful sense — they are a Yemeni movement with Yemeni grievances. The primary U.S. motivation was maintaining the Saudi relationship and the massive arms sales that sustain it. Between 2015 and 2024, U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia totaled approximately 4.6 billion — a revenue stream that creates powerful corporate and bureaucratic constituencies for continued support regardless of humanitarian consequences.

The human cost has been beyond anything the euphemistic language of "supporting our allies" can capture. The Saudi coalition's air campaign has systematically struck civilian infrastructure: hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, sewage facilities, bridges, power stations, food storage, and ports. These are not collateral damage from strikes on military targets — multiple investigations by the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and journalists have documented a pattern of deliberate or recklessly indiscriminate targeting of civilian facilities.

The individual atrocities are numbing in their frequency and horror. In October 2016, coalition aircraft conducted a double-tap strike on a funeral in Sana'a, killing 140 mourners and wounding 500. In August 2018, a coalition bomb hit a school bus in Dahyan, killing 40 children — the bomb was identified as a U.S.-manufactured MK 82 made by Lockheed Martin, sold through a State Department-approved deal. MSF-supported hospitals were struck at least five times despite the coalition having GPS coordinates for every facility. Wedding parties, markets, residential neighborhoods — the bombing has been relentless and indiscriminate.

The blockade has been even more lethal than the bombing. Yemen imports 90% of its food, and the Saudi-led coalition's naval and air blockade has systematically restricted imports through the port of Hodeidah, through which 70% of Yemen's supplies flow. The result is the world's worst famine: an estimated 85,000 children under five died of starvation between 2015 and 2018 alone. The destruction of water infrastructure triggered the largest cholera epidemic in recorded history — over 2.5 million cases. The UN estimates that 377,000 people had died by the end of 2021, with 60% of deaths from indirect causes: starvation, disease, and the collapse of the healthcare system.

The Khashoggi murder in October 2018 briefly pierced the wall of American indifference. The Saudi regime's assassination and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — personally ordered by MBS according to U.S. intelligence — forced a reckoning with the character of the ally the U.S. was arming. But the reckoning was short-lived: the Trump administration declined to impose meaningful consequences, and arms sales continued.

Congress, to its credit, attempted to assert its constitutional authority. In March 2019, both chambers passed a War Powers Resolution directing the president to withdraw U.S. forces from the Yemen conflict — the first successful invocation of the War Powers Act since its passage in 1973. Trump vetoed the resolution. Congress failed to override. The episode demonstrated the constitutional impotence of the legislative branch in matters of war: even bipartisan majorities cannot halt presidential war-making when the executive is determined to continue.

Biden's February 2021 pledge to end U.S. support for "offensive operations" in Yemen was carefully crafted to change the rhetoric while preserving the substance of American involvement. The U.S. stopped providing aerial refueling (which had actually ended under Trump in 2018) and suspended some precision-guided munition sales. But intelligence sharing continued. Aircraft maintenance and spare parts contracts continued. "Defensive" arms sales — including the systems that enable the bombing campaign — continued. The distinction between "offensive" and "defensive" support is a legal fiction: you cannot separate the bullets from the gun.

The war's strategic futility is now undeniable. Nearly a decade of bombing, at a cost of hundreds of billions to the Saudi treasury, has achieved nothing. The Houthis control more territory and possess more military capability than when the war began. Their 2023-2024 attacks on Red Sea shipping demonstrated the ability to project force across an entire region — something they could not do in 2015. The U.S. and UK are now bombing Yemen directly, having created the conditions for the very threat they claim to be addressing.

The 4.6 billion in U.S. arms sales that fueled the war dwarfs the humanitarian aid provided to address the catastrophe those weapons created. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics have profited enormously from the conflict. The Saudi relationship — built on petrodollars, arms sales, and geopolitical convenience — has proven more valuable to American policymakers than the lives of Yemeni children.

Yemen reveals the structural incentives that make American war-making so difficult to stop. The arms industry profits from weapons sales. The executive branch values the Saudi alliance. The military provides support as a matter of institutional routine. Congressional opposition is structurally insufficient to overcome a presidential veto. The American public is largely unaware of the war and its consequences. Each element of the system has its own logic; together they produce a machine that enables mass killing with no mechanism for accountability or restraint.

The 377,000 dead, the 85,000 starved children, the 2.5 million cholera cases, the generation of traumatized and malnourished survivors — these are not the unintended consequences of American policy. They are the predictable and predicted results of a deliberate decision to arm and support a military campaign against one of the poorest countries on earth, made by officials who understood exactly what would happen and chose to proceed because the Saudi relationship was deemed more important than Yemeni lives. That is not a failure of policy. It is the policy working as designed.