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No. 112427
ID: 1808b0
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/bernie-sanders-saudi-arabia-war-yemen.html
The likely assassination of the Saudi critic and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi underscores how urgent it has become for the United States to redefine our relationship with Saudi Arabia, and to show that the Saudis do not have a blank check to continue violating human rights.
One place we can start is by ending United States support for the war in Yemen. Not only has this war created a humanitarian disaster in one of the world’s poorest countries, but also American involvement in this war has not been authorized by Congress and is therefore unconstitutional.
In March 2015, a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates started a war against Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Since then, many thousands of civilians have been killed and many more have lost their homes. Millions are now at the risk of the most severe famine in more than 100 years, according to the United Nations. The chaos in Yemen has also provided fertile ground for extremist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and created new opportunities for intervention by Iran.
The United States is deeply engaged in this war. We are providing bombs the Saudi-led coalition is using, we are refueling their planes before they drop those bombs, and we are assisting with intelligence.
In far too many cases, the bomb’s targets have been civilian ones. In one of the more horrible recent instances, an American-made bomb obliterated a school bus full of young boys, killing dozens and wounding many more. A CNN report found evidence that American weapons have been used in a string of such deadly attacks on civilians since the war began.
Yet last month, responding to congressional concerns, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo officially certified to Congress — and Secretary of Defense James Mattis affirmed — that the Saudis and Emiratis are making “every effort to reduce the risk of civilian casualties.”
The data refute these claims. According to the independent monitoring group Yemen Data Project, between March 2015 and March 2018, more than 30 percent of the Saudi-led coalition’s targets have been nonmilitary. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, civilian deaths in one region increased by more than 160 percent over the summer from earlier in the year.
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