The War We Can Stop
This week: conversations on the war in Yemen, with Shireen Al-Adeimi and Annelle Sheline. Listen today at 2 pm, or anytime at our website.
The war in Yemen, which has killed hundreds of thousands, has been waged with American weapons, and on this week’s show, Shireen Al-Adeimi tells us:
The average person needs to understand that we are Putin in Yemen. We have caused all of this death and destruction. We keep pointing the fingers at Saudi Arabia, the UAE, but the U.S. is a warring party in Yemen. None of this would have been possible to this degree without U.S. support. The Saudis and Emiratis are completely incompetent and completely dependent on U.S. support from A to Z.
Al-Adeimi is a Yemeni-American professor of education who’s been raising awareness of US military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. She says:
It’s absolutely soul-crushing to even imagine what people there are going through, what my own family and friends and neighbors are going through. I avoid watching videos coming out of Yemen because it’s so entirely devastating. Because I have a personal connection to that place and to those people, it’s very difficult to dissociate from the destruction, but actually also watching the video is what got me into this work, what got me into activism, because I watched a video of a man while bombs were being dropped and he was trying to comfort his children and his family, and he’s filming and he’s saying, “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” and he’s kind of moving them to the basement. But every time he said, “don’t worry,” his pitch was increasing, and you can just hear the sheer terror in his own voice as he’s comforting the family around him. And you just hear the bombs and you see the destruction. It was so incredibly devastating to me that I just couldn’t stop crying and then finally had to pick myself up and figure out, what can I do? What can I do to stop this devastation?
We’re joined as well this week by Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who tells us about the thinking behind US support for Saudi Arabia’s war:
A big part of it actually has to do with great power competition. And I think there’s been a calculation made by the Biden administration and they think that it’s in US interests to continue to be the primary purveyor of arms to countries like Saudi Arabia and like the UAE. And they fear that if the US doesn’t provide these autocratic and clearly very aggressive states with the weapons that they will turn to China or they will turn to Russia, or they’ll get their weapons elsewhere, and that U.S. leverage in the region would would be impacted—that the very influential weapons lobby that has a big impact on Congress, they would not be happy at all to see our sort of market share as currently the world’s largest supplier of weapons—they fear what would happen if that went down.
Yemen’s Historic Skyscrapers
UNESCO has also listed sites in Yemen where there’s “cultural heritage at risk”; these include sites of historic art and architecture, such as Shibam. From UNESCO:
Surrounded by a fortified wall, the 16th-century city of Shibam is one of the oldest and best examples of urban planning based on the principle of vertical construction. Its impressive tower-like structures rise out of the cliff and have given the city the nickname of ‘the Manhattan of the desert’.
This week’s ephemeral library
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