How Biden Is Repeating Obama's Yemen Errors in Gaza

The U.S. is implicated in everything that our clients do with the weapons our government provides them.

The Obama administration began supporting the Saudi coalition attack on Yemen in March 2015, and U.S. client governments in the coalition enjoyed uncritical backing from Washington until the end of Obama’s term. When support for the war on Yemen became a signature policy of the Trump administration, many veterans of the Obama administration changed their minds and came out in opposition to the policy that they had started. Akbar Shahid Ahmed tracked down almost two dozen of these Obama administration veterans now serving under Biden to ask them if the lessons from Obama’s grave error on Yemen apply to the ongoing bombing of Gaza:

HuffPost contacted those 23 officials ― including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, domestic policy chief Susan Rice, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and top Pentagon appointees ― to ask how they perceived the situations in Yemen and Gaza differently.

None agreed to comment on the record.

It is understandable that these officials don’t want to talk about the lessons from Obama’s disastrous Yemen policy in connection with the Israeli bombing of Gaza. The administration’s current response to the bombing of Gaza is eerily reminiscent of the Obama administration’s indefensible Yemen policy in its lack of accountability for the client carrying out the bombing campaigns, its lack of attention to the worsening humanitarian crisis, and its continued arming of the government that commits war crimes against civilians. They are making almost all of the same mistakes for many of the same reasons, and they have evidently learned nothing from the catastrophic results of their previous errors.

While there are differences between the two situations, the underlying problems with the relevant U.S. policies are very similar. There is the same impulse to give a client government carte blanche in both cases. There is the same insistence that the client is acting in “self-defense” no matter what, and there is the same effective green light given for committing atrocities against civilians. Just as Obama did, Biden is reflexively siding with the more powerful party to a conflict and providing them with diplomatic cover to shield them from scrutiny and criticism at the U.N. In both cases, there is a severe humanitarian crisis that has been fueled by policies of blockade and indiscriminate bombing. In both cases, there is the same refusal to use our government’s considerable leverage with the client to rein in and halt the bombing campaign. There is the same misguided desire to “reassure” the client of U.S. support instead of holding the client accountable for its outrageous behavior.

Because the U.S. has armed and supported these different governments, our government is complicit in what they do to their neighbors and to the people under their control. Just as the Obama administration could not credibly claim that the U.S. was not a party to the war on Yemen, the Biden administration cannot pretend that it is uninvolved in the bombardment of civilian areas in Gaza. The U.S. is implicated in everything that our clients do with the weapons our government provides them, and our government has an obligation to rein them in when they use these weapons to terrorize and kill innocent people. That means cutting off all pending and future arms sales until further notice, and that is just the start.

The war on Yemen and the bombing of Gaza also show beyond any doubt that cruel collective punishment of the population through the enforcement of blockades does not make anyone safer, but it does make ordinary people poorer, hungrier, and sicker. The blockades of both Yemen and Gaza must be lifted for the sake of protecting innocent lives, and the Biden administration needs to bring much more pressure to bear on U.S. clients to make that happen.