The Yemen Data Project reports that U.S. strikes in Yemen over the last week have killed at least 25 civilians, including four children. The initial strikes that top Trump administration officials were celebrating killed at least 13 civilians and injured nine more. This is the bombing campaign that Waltz has been boasting about as he desperately tries to deflect attention from his ineptitude and lawbreaking. Dozens of innocent Yemenis are dead and many more are maimed so that Trump and his allies could congratulate themselves for being “tougher” than Biden.
Our government killed and injured these people as part of an ineffective and unnecessary war that the U.S. should never have been waging. That is the real scandal. It is this senseless death and destruction that our government is dealing out to people on the other side of the world that should outrage us. It speaks volumes about our leadership class and our foreign policy that the victims of these attacks receive almost no notice and if they are noticed at all they are quickly forgotten.
Administration officials defend their illegal war by talking about freedom of navigation and deterrence, but these are poor and insulting excuses for bombing poor, innocent people in a country that our government has already played a major role in wrecking and starving over the last ten years. Blowing up Yemeni civilians will not secure commercial shipping in the Red Sea, and the U.S. shouldn’t be doing this even if it could. Continuing to bomb Yemen will further destabilize the region, and it will kill more innocent Yemenis, but it is unlikely to achieve anything else.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
