The Real Yemen Scandal Is The Illegal, Unjust War

The press is mostly framing the Yemen group chat scandal as a story of incompetence. There’s little attention being paid to the deadliness, illegality, and ineffectiveness of the strikes themselves.

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

One story and one story only is dominating American media attention this week: President Donald Trump’s national security team accidentally adding Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat in which they planned the recent air strikes on the Houthis, who govern Yemen. It’s easy to see why. This is a scandal that is unprecedented in terms of the incompetence and irresponsibility on display from top officials, especially given that it concerns the most traditionally sensitive of sensitive topics: war and national security.

But there is so much media fixation on Trump officials’ recklessness in potentially broadcasting classified information to prying eyes that a lot is being lost in the mix.

For one, there’s almost no discussion about the actual nature of the US strikes on Yemen, which were celebrated by Trump officials in the group chat as a great success. It does seem that some Houthi leaders were killed by the strikes. But they also destroyed a cancer hospital and killed at least twenty-five civilians in the first week — more than Joe Biden’s own yearlong bombing of the Houthis had managed to kill— with at least four children among the dead and another two injured.

At one point in the chat, Trump officials cheered that the Houthis’ “top missile guy” had been identified “walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed” (“Excellent”; “A good start,” others responded). Yet there were presumably other people in that building, too, and it’s hard to believe they weren’t some of the civilian corpses later found amid the smoking debris left by the bombings. If this is proven correct, it would bring up the question of whether Trump officials had admitted in writing to carrying out a war crime.

All this has barely registered in most of the coverage of the group chat, with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) one of the few to point out the comparative lack of outcry over dozens of innocent people being slaughtered. It’s hard to believe the US public would be comfortable with their tax dollars being used to kill random women and children. (The fact that members of the group chat stressed the importance of “messaging” for the strikes because “nobody knows who the Houthis are” suggests as much.)

Another question we might ask is: Are these strikes actually legal? As I wrote a little over a year ago when Biden first started bombing Yemen directly, the Constitution is famously pretty clear about who can actually declare war — namely, Congress.