basquebromance
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- Nov 26, 2015
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Despite its lofty rhetoric about sovereignty and human rights, the Biden administration has been working overtime to kill a congressional attempt from Bernie Sanders to end US support for the Saudi war on Yemen
Biden’s White House began whipping behind the scenes to kill the measure, telling lawmakers that its passage would jeopardize what it cast as the administration’s successful diplomatic efforts in the conflict, and threatening to veto whatever passed. Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, quickly came out as a “no” vote, with his counterpart, Senator Dianne Feinstein, another Democrat, soon following suit. Late on Tuesday, Sanders withdrew the resolution, saying he would instead work with the White House to negotiate new language that everyone could agree on, and promising to reintroduce it if he and the administration couldn’t come to an acceptable agreement.
Though Sanders put on a brave front, casting the decision as his willing choice to work with the White House for a happy compromise, reporting from Capitol Hill appears to tell a different story.
In the process of the flurry of lobbying and advocacy in the run-up to the vote, lawmakers who haven’t thought about the war since the start of last year have been forced to put the matter at top of their minds and develop a stance on it. Sources say they got word from numerous senators that they intended to vote for the resolution, and they point to the public support it got from Republican senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, as well as Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. While not a cosponsor, Murphy is an influential liberal voice on foreign policy who made a floor speech before the vote and later appeared on MSNBC calling for the end of US support.
The war in Yemen is not only one where the United States is unambiguously on the wrong side, helping a repressive monarchy wage war on impoverished neighboring civilians and carry out a range of stomach-churning atrocities while doing so. It’s also one that makes a mockery of US rhetoric about democracy, sovereignty, and human rights, undermining future efforts to hold other states accountable for their own, similar crimes.
Such hypocrisy may not raise an eyebrow in Washington, but it does in the rest of the world, as we’ve seen with the developing world’s response to the Russian invasion. States have been unwilling to follow the West and take the risks that diplomatic and economic isolation of Russia would entail for them, partly because they view the principles and “rules-based international order” that are meant to be at stake in that conflict as being selectively and opportunistically invoked by powerful states, with Yemen being a prime example. As Murphy said on the Senate floor, ongoing US support makes the United States “morally weaker, because for us to be a participant in any way, shape, or form in a war with this kind of misery, it really shapes the way that people think about us in the region and around the world.”
Incredibly, even as the administration remains divided over seeking a diplomatic route to deescalating the war in Ukraine — and even as the idea has been effectively made taboo within significant swathes of US discourse — the White House is citing the importance of diplomacy to argue against ending its backing of an aggressor state in this war. It’s warped logic — ending US support would most likely enhance diplomacy here, since it would incentivize the Saudis to look for a peaceful way out — but it’s also untrue. As former UN special envoy to Yemen Jamal Benomar told the Intercept, “There’s been no diplomatic progress whatsoever . . . So an all-out war can resume at any time.”
Some have actually turned to attacking antiwar activists as the real problem. Center for International Policy fellow Kate Kizer told Politico that “what they’re doing is undermining support for activism,” while Huffington Post foreign affairs reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed accused activists of reducing “what could have been a productive conversation” into “DC power plays” by backing the resolution.
Yet in 2018, Kizer herself called US backing for the Saudi war “unquestioned executive overreach” while praising Sanders’s identical push for a war powers resolution as “a bold action” from Congress that meant “upholding its constitutional role as the sole body that can declare war.” Just six months ago, when the truce was still actually in place, she called it “a means to . . . pressure both the administration, as well as the Saudi and Emirati monarchies, to seek a final diplomatic resolution to the intervention and broader war.”
When asked about this contradiction, Kizer, pointing to this Twitter thread, said that the Saudis’ pause in bombing and the Houthis’ expansion of war aims and disinterest in negotiations mean that it’s “no longer the coalition who needs to be pushed to the peace table to end the war,” but the Houthis. Kizer also says that the Senate’s earlier stripping of House-passed bans on US support via spare parts and maintenance in multiple National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs) means a war powers resolution “is not the tool to use to actually hold these monarchies accountable.” (Though the Senate also stripped such House-passed provisions from NDAAs during the years Kizer backed a war powers resolution, and in any case, this is a little like saying Trump’s veto of the resolution is a reason not to try to pass it again).
Flip this around and it’s hard to imagine, quite rightly, any of these arguments being taken seriously if they came from foreign officials trying to justify their support for Russia, whose brutal bombing campaign on Ukrainian infrastructure has similarly been read ― by the US special advisor to the commander of Ukraine’s forces no less ― as a way to push an unwilling Ukrainian side to the negotiating table. In that case, US voices would likely and correctly respond that any complicity in a terrible war killing and maiming civilians is wrong, period, and should end as soon as possible, as we can see from the fierce criticism Iran has faced for doing far less to aid Moscow’s war effort than Washington has done to help the Saudis.
Yet for some reason, US journalists, politicians, and thinkers seem unwilling to apply that same simple moral calculus to their own government’s actions.
Biden’s White House began whipping behind the scenes to kill the measure, telling lawmakers that its passage would jeopardize what it cast as the administration’s successful diplomatic efforts in the conflict, and threatening to veto whatever passed. Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, quickly came out as a “no” vote, with his counterpart, Senator Dianne Feinstein, another Democrat, soon following suit. Late on Tuesday, Sanders withdrew the resolution, saying he would instead work with the White House to negotiate new language that everyone could agree on, and promising to reintroduce it if he and the administration couldn’t come to an acceptable agreement.
Though Sanders put on a brave front, casting the decision as his willing choice to work with the White House for a happy compromise, reporting from Capitol Hill appears to tell a different story.
In the process of the flurry of lobbying and advocacy in the run-up to the vote, lawmakers who haven’t thought about the war since the start of last year have been forced to put the matter at top of their minds and develop a stance on it. Sources say they got word from numerous senators that they intended to vote for the resolution, and they point to the public support it got from Republican senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, as well as Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. While not a cosponsor, Murphy is an influential liberal voice on foreign policy who made a floor speech before the vote and later appeared on MSNBC calling for the end of US support.
The war in Yemen is not only one where the United States is unambiguously on the wrong side, helping a repressive monarchy wage war on impoverished neighboring civilians and carry out a range of stomach-churning atrocities while doing so. It’s also one that makes a mockery of US rhetoric about democracy, sovereignty, and human rights, undermining future efforts to hold other states accountable for their own, similar crimes.
Such hypocrisy may not raise an eyebrow in Washington, but it does in the rest of the world, as we’ve seen with the developing world’s response to the Russian invasion. States have been unwilling to follow the West and take the risks that diplomatic and economic isolation of Russia would entail for them, partly because they view the principles and “rules-based international order” that are meant to be at stake in that conflict as being selectively and opportunistically invoked by powerful states, with Yemen being a prime example. As Murphy said on the Senate floor, ongoing US support makes the United States “morally weaker, because for us to be a participant in any way, shape, or form in a war with this kind of misery, it really shapes the way that people think about us in the region and around the world.”
Incredibly, even as the administration remains divided over seeking a diplomatic route to deescalating the war in Ukraine — and even as the idea has been effectively made taboo within significant swathes of US discourse — the White House is citing the importance of diplomacy to argue against ending its backing of an aggressor state in this war. It’s warped logic — ending US support would most likely enhance diplomacy here, since it would incentivize the Saudis to look for a peaceful way out — but it’s also untrue. As former UN special envoy to Yemen Jamal Benomar told the Intercept, “There’s been no diplomatic progress whatsoever . . . So an all-out war can resume at any time.”
Some have actually turned to attacking antiwar activists as the real problem. Center for International Policy fellow Kate Kizer told Politico that “what they’re doing is undermining support for activism,” while Huffington Post foreign affairs reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed accused activists of reducing “what could have been a productive conversation” into “DC power plays” by backing the resolution.
Yet in 2018, Kizer herself called US backing for the Saudi war “unquestioned executive overreach” while praising Sanders’s identical push for a war powers resolution as “a bold action” from Congress that meant “upholding its constitutional role as the sole body that can declare war.” Just six months ago, when the truce was still actually in place, she called it “a means to . . . pressure both the administration, as well as the Saudi and Emirati monarchies, to seek a final diplomatic resolution to the intervention and broader war.”
When asked about this contradiction, Kizer, pointing to this Twitter thread, said that the Saudis’ pause in bombing and the Houthis’ expansion of war aims and disinterest in negotiations mean that it’s “no longer the coalition who needs to be pushed to the peace table to end the war,” but the Houthis. Kizer also says that the Senate’s earlier stripping of House-passed bans on US support via spare parts and maintenance in multiple National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs) means a war powers resolution “is not the tool to use to actually hold these monarchies accountable.” (Though the Senate also stripped such House-passed provisions from NDAAs during the years Kizer backed a war powers resolution, and in any case, this is a little like saying Trump’s veto of the resolution is a reason not to try to pass it again).
Flip this around and it’s hard to imagine, quite rightly, any of these arguments being taken seriously if they came from foreign officials trying to justify their support for Russia, whose brutal bombing campaign on Ukrainian infrastructure has similarly been read ― by the US special advisor to the commander of Ukraine’s forces no less ― as a way to push an unwilling Ukrainian side to the negotiating table. In that case, US voices would likely and correctly respond that any complicity in a terrible war killing and maiming civilians is wrong, period, and should end as soon as possible, as we can see from the fierce criticism Iran has faced for doing far less to aid Moscow’s war effort than Washington has done to help the Saudis.
Yet for some reason, US journalists, politicians, and thinkers seem unwilling to apply that same simple moral calculus to their own government’s actions.
