{UAH} Be Outraged by America’s Role in Yemen’s Misery

Be Outraged by America's Role in Yemen's Misery

The United States supplies bombs and other support for the war that's killed civilians and is creating famine.

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

• Sept. 26, 2018

Children in Yemen are acutely malnourished. Those who survive will often be stunted for the rest of their lives, physically and mentally.CreditHammadi Issa/Associated Press

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Children in Yemen are acutely malnourished. Those who survive will often be stunted for the rest of their lives, physically and mentally.CreditCreditHammadi Issa/Associated Press

The news about Brett Kavanaugh and Rod Rosenstein is addictive, but spare just a moment for crimes against humanity that the United States is supporting in far-off Yemen.

President Trump didn't mention it at the United Nations, but America is helping to kill, maim and starve Yemeni children. At least eight million Yemenis are at risk of starvation from an approaching famine caused not by crop failures but by our actions and those of our allies. The United Nations has called it the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and we own it.

An American bomb made by Lockheed Martin struck a Yemen school bus last month, killing 51 people. Earlier, American bombs killed 155 mourners at a funeral and 97 people at a market.

Starving Yemeni children are reduced to eating a sour paste made of leaves. Even those who survive will often be stunted for the rest of their lives, physically and mentally.

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Many global security issues involve complex trade-offs, but this is different: Our behavior is just unconscionable.

At least eight million Yemenis are at risk of starvation from an approaching famine.CreditEssa Ahmed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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At least eight million Yemenis are at risk of starvation from an approaching famine.CreditEssa Ahmed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

"Yemen's current crisis is man-made," said David Miliband, the former British foreign secretary and current president of the International Rescue Committee, who recently returned from Yemen. "This is not a case where humanitarian suffering is the price of winning a war. No one is winning, except the extremist groups who thrive on chaos."

The United States is not directly bombing civilians in Yemen, but it is providing arms, intelligence and aerial refueling to assist Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they hammer Yemen with airstrikes, destroy its economy and starve its people. The Saudi aim is to crush Houthi rebels who have seized Yemen's capital and are allied with Iran.

That's sophisticated realpolitik for you: Because we dislike Iran's ayatollahs, we are willing to starve Yemeni schoolchildren.

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