Biden's 'Sustained Campaign' in Yemen Is Illegal and Pointless

That isn’t going to stop the administration from pressing ahead with military action that the president himself has acknowledged isn’t working.

The U.S. and Britain continue to wage war on Yemen while pretending that they aren’t at war:

The U.S. and U.K. launched strikes against eight Houthi targets Monday, the two countries said, in a continuing bid to stop the Yemeni rebel group’s attacks on ships transiting the Red Sea.

The strikes marked the second major assault by a joint force of the two countries and the eighth time overall that the U.S. has targeted the group, which is armed, funded and supported by Iran.

The latest round of attacks is part of the Biden administration’s plan for a “sustained campaign” that Congress has never debated or authorized. The U.S. has dubbed the campaign Operation Poseidon Archer, and the administration has no idea when it will be concluded. According to the Post, U.S. officials say that they “don’t expect that the operation will stretch on for years like previous U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria,” but that is not much of a consolation when the administration can’t even admit that it is fighting a war.

Knowing how our government tends to prolong and alter its military missions once they start, it isn’t hard to imagine the current campaign morphing into something else over time. The troops that are now in Syria were sent there to fight ISIS, but now they stay there to oppose Iranian influence and serve as targets for local militias. U.S. forces have been fighting in Somalia for more than a decade and a half, and there is no sign that they are leaving anytime soon. Once U.S. forces are involved in hostilities in a country, there is considerable resistance to extricating them. Even if the new war in Yemen turns out to be the limited one that the administration claims that it is, that won’t change the fact that it is illegal and unauthorized. If support for the Saudi coalition war on Yemen merited a war powers challenge (and it absolutely did), direct military action in Yemen definitely requires that Congress step up and put a stop to the president’s illegal war.

Besides being illegal, the new war in Yemen is pointless. No one expects that the campaign will achieve its stated goal, but that isn’t going to stop the administration from pressing ahead with military action that the president himself has acknowledged isn’t working. Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror, commented on Biden’s determination to continue the strikes:

Statements like Biden's are the wages of normalizing the War on Terror. To everyone accustomed to Forever Wars, they sound like declarations of resolve, defiant in American opposition to the ever-shifting, ever-implacable Enemy. To everyone else, they sound like fucking madness, a promise that we will have during this permutation of the Forever Wars what we have had during every prior permutation of the Forever Wars: neither peace nor victory. 

Biden might as well have said that the bombings will continue until morale improves. The president’s “sustained campaign” will not succeed and should never have started. He is exceeding his constitutional authority, and he is also making a terrible policy blunder. The ones that will suffer most from this latest conflict are innocent Yemenis, just as they have suffered most from the war that has ravaged their country for the last decade.

The new war in Yemen is an example of the sort of reckless and destructive policies that the government will come up with when our leaders are obsessed with America’s global “leadership” role. According to the same Post report, “Officials said that ideology, rather than economics, was a chief driver of Biden’s decision to mount the current campaign.” The ideology in question was Biden’s belief that “the United States had to act…as the world’s ‘indispensable nation….’” Biden is ordering attacks on Yemen not to defend vital interests, but because he wants to vindicate the idea that the U.S. is the “essential nation.” It is an example of so much that is wrong with our foreign policy today and has been for decades.

The U.S. has already done incalculable harm to the people of Yemen between its backing for the Saudi coalition and the “war on terror,” and now our government is intervening once again. There is no good reason for the U.S. to be committing acts of war on Yemeni soil, and our government should halt these strikes immediately. Congress must insist that the president end this operation, and if he refuses they must cut off funding for it.