The Pentagon and State Department have denied knowing whether American bombs were used in the war’s most notorious airstrikes, which have struck weddings, mosques and funerals. However, a former senior State Department official said that the United States had access to records of every airstrike over Yemen since the early days of the war, including the warplane and munitions used.
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While American officials often protested civilian deaths in public, two presidents ultimately stood by the Saudis. President Obama gave the war his qualified approval to assuage Saudi anger over his Iran nuclear deal. President Trump embraced Prince Mohammed and bragged of multibillion-dollar arms deals with the Saudis.
As bombs fell on Yemen, the United States continued to train the Royal Saudi Air Force. In 2017, the United States military announced a $750 million program focused on how to carry out airstrikes, including avoiding civilian casualties. The same year, Congress authorized the sale of more than $510 million in precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, which had been suspended by the Obama administration in protest of civilian casualties.Walsh and Schmitt expose the head of Central Command, Gen. Joseph L. Votel, lying to Congress:
But in Congress, the mood was souring. In the March [2018] hearing, senators accused the Pentagon of being complicit in the coalition’s errant bombing, and pressed its leaders on how directly the United States was linked to atrocities.
General Votel said the military knew little about that. The United States did not track whether the coalition jets that it refueled carried out the airstrikes that killed civilians, he said, and did not know when they used American-made bombs. At a briefing in Cairo in August, a senior United States official echoed that assessment.
“I would assume the Saudis have an inventory system that traces that information,” said the official, who spoke anonymously to discuss diplomatically sensitive relations. “But that’s not information that is available to the U.S.”
But Larry Lewis, a State Department adviser on civilian harm who worked with the Saudi-led coalition from 2015 to 2017, said that information was readily available from an early stage.
At the coalition headquarters in Riyadh, he said, American liaison officers had access to a database that detailed every airstrike: warplane, target, munitions used and a brief description of the attack. American officials frequently emailed him copies of a spreadsheet for his own work, he said.
The data could easily be used to pinpoint the role of American warplanes and bombs in any single strike, he said. “If the question was “Hey, was that a U.S. munition they used?” You would know that it was,” he said.Just Foreign Policy is circulating a petition asking senators and representatives to call Votel back to Congress to testify under oath:
Incoming House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff has promised a "deep dive" on the U.S. role in the Saudi regime's war in Yemen in his committee. Other Congressional committees should do the same. In particular, they should compel General Votel to testify, under oath, in both open and closed session, about what Votel knew about the U.S. role in Saudi atrocities in Yemen, and when he knew it; about what he should he have known, and when should he have known it; and about why this knowledge wasn't reflected in Votel's testimony to Congress in March, when the Senate was about to vote on the U.S. role in the war.So much of what Obama did in the Middle East -- the war on Yemen, the war on Syria -- was predicated on getting the Iran nuclear deal finalized. When Trump came in and pulled out of the nuclear agreement it turned all U.S. policy in the region upside down. Trump was thinking, Why fight proxy wars when you can fight one war with the main enemy and win everything in one fell swoop?
The troop pullout in northern Syria is merely a prelude for a greater conflict.
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