Photos: Wikimedia Commons
In November 2018,following more than three years in which Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates turned Yemen into a slaughterhouse, a group of Barack Obama-era foreign-policy practitioners demanded an end to US support for a conscience-shocking war. Even though they were out of power, they had a mechanism to make a difference. Sen. Bernie Sanders had introduced a congressional resolution to stop US military assistance for the assault on Yemen, and it garnered significant bipartisan support in both Congressional chambers. So these former senior officials lent their voices to the cause through an open letter.
Yes, they conceded, many of the signatories of their letter “worked on [Yemen and Middle East] issues… some directly, others less so” under Obama. And it was under Obama that the US began providing “some intelligence, refueling, and logistical assistance to the Saudi-led coalition.” But the Trump White House had “doubled down on support for the Saudi leadership’s prosecution of the war, while removing restrictions we had put in place.”
A “skyrocket[ing]” increase in civilian casualties was on grisly display. The Saudis were bombing “markets, weddings, and school buses.” Their US-supported coalition was preventing “critical food and medical supplies from reaching the Yemeni people.” Famine was imminent for millions of innocent Yemenis. And the United States, to the horror of these former officials, was “remain[ing] complicit.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had even “reportedly overruled professionals in the State Department” in order to posture as if the US had gotten Saudi Arabia and the UAE to reduce civilian harm. “[T]he time has come for us to end our support for and involvement in this brutal conflict,” they intoned.
Signatories to that 2018 letter included Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Avril Haines, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Samantha Power, and Jon Finer. Little more than two years later, they would return to power as Joe Biden’s secretary of state, national security adviser, director of national intelligence, UN ambassador, USAID director, and deputy national security adviser, respectively. And beginning in October 2023, they supported a different Middle East partner’s campaign of devastation, weaponized famine, and conscience-shocking assaults on helpless people.
Even before Vice President Kamala Harris lost Tuesday’s election, leftists on the internet posted darkly about whether liberals would react to a Trump victory by discovering their opposition to the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the broader Middle East war spiraling out from it. Posts like those turned my thoughts to that 2018 Yemen letter, issued so earnestly by those who mumbled through their complicity but suggested that they had learned their lesson.
While grace ought to be extended to those who seek to correct their mistakes, the horror of these past 13 months has made it clear that the senior Biden officials who signed that letter, in fact, learned nothing. We shouldn’t bother listening should they find themselves roused to speak against any escalation of the combination of genocide and regional war that Trump pursues or tolerates.
As in Yemen, So Too in Gaza
The 2018 open letter contains some disturbing templates when read in light of the current Middle East carnage. …
