3 Months of the Illegal War in Yemen

It has been a pointless war that the U.S. should never have waged, and it needs to end now.

Almost three months after it began, the illegal U.S. war with the Houthis in Yemen continues. The war has failed to halt attacks on Red Sea shipping. As of last week, the U.S. and its allies have reportedly launched over four hundred strikes on targets in Yemen, but the repeated attacks on the Houthis appear to have done nothing but make them even more determined to launch more attacks of their own.

Military action was never likely to force an end to the attacks on shipping. Using force in this case was a blunder, and it has made it more difficult to resolve the situation now that the U.S. and its allies have killed dozens on the Houthi side. The U.S. and its allies have been fortunate so far not to have suffered any casualties, but their forces remain at risk on an unnecessary mission.

U.S. forces are still waging this war without proper authorization. Senators have questioned administration officials about the legal authority for this campaign, and the administration has had no good answers. It is depressing but not surprising that members of Congress cannot stir themselves to do their jobs and take responsibility in one of the clearest cases of presidential overreach that we have ever seen. The president had no authority to launch this campaign, and he has no authority to continue it almost 90 days later.

Just a few years ago, both houses of Congress pressed to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi coalition’s war on Yemen on the grounds the U.S. was engaged in hostilities without authorization. Today U.S. forces are openly striking Yemeni targets without Congressional debate or a resolution authorizing the mission, and hardly anyone in Congress says a word. Congress was right to stand up to Trump in 2019 on war powers, and Congress ought to do the same with Biden now. Congress ought to demand an end to the campaign and the withdrawal of U.S. naval forces from the area, but that is clearly beyond our feeble representatives.

Shipping companies that stopped using the Red Sea have no incentive to go back as long as the conflict continues. As one shipping executive told Bloomberg last month:

“It’s a quite binary situation,” Rolf Habben Jansen, chief executive officer of Hapag-Lloyd AG said on an earnings call this month. “It is either safe for our people or it is not. As long as it is not safe, we will not send our people through the Red Sea.”

The U.S. and its allies cannot restore security in the Red Sea by conducting an open-ended bombing campaign. The only plausible remedy is to press for an end to the war in Gaza in order to get the Houthis to cease their harassment of commercial ships. That is the way to ensure that the Red Sea is safe enough for all ships to use.

It is bad enough to put U.S. forces in harm’s way when there are no truly vital U.S. interests being threatened. To do it as a diversion from an atrocious U.S.-backed war elsewhere is rotten. The U.S. should use force only when absolutely necessary, and this war is one of the least necessary that our government has ever waged. It has been a pointless war that the U.S. should never have waged, and it needs to end now.