The War America Ignores
Daniel R. DePetris
Security, Yemen
The Saudi-led war in Yemen is damaging U.S. interests, yet getting little attention.
The Middle East is often categorized as a cauldron of blood-soaked anarchy—an area of the world where those who rule care more about their family’s fortunes than the prosperity of their subjects and a region where political disagreements are resolved by bullets and vendettas rather than votes at the ballot box. President Barack Obama may not want to admit it openly (although he came close during his exhaustive interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic), but it’s likely that whenever he sees the Middle Eastern region on a map, he recoils. And for good reason: with the exception of his plunge into Libya in March 2011, President Obama has to the best of his ability attempted to transition the United States from a nation quick on the trigger to one that picks and chooses which civil war to engage in and which problem requires some amount of U.S. military force.
The barbarity and cruelty of Bashar al-Assad and the criminal nihilism of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant tend to get most of the bandwidth and airtime here in the United States. There are several publications that try to shed a light on other conflicts in the region that are just as threatening to U.S. national-security interests, or simply don’t get enough (or any attention) in the bubble that is Washington, D.C.
The civil war in Yemen, which has been going on for the last thirteen months, has largely escaped the level of concern that the Obama administration, the U.N. Security Council, and America's allies in Europe have devoted towards other crises in the Middle East. At the same time that Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura are working valiantly to sustain a credible comprehensive peace process in Syria, millions of Yemenis continue to be subjected to the twin horrors of an indiscriminate Saudi-led air campaign on the one hand and a predatory Houthi movement on the other.
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