Shireen Al-Adeimi, Yemen anti-war activist and professor at Michigan State University, discusses the many interests behind the war on Yemen, which have the potential of derailing Biden's announced ending of US support for the Saudi-led coalition in this war that has devastated one of the Middle East's poorest countries.

Transcript

Greg Wilpert

Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. I'm your guest host, Greg Wilpert. President Joe Biden recently announced on February 4th that the U.S. will no longer support "offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales." The announcement was welcomed with joy in many circles, considering that the six-year Saudi-led war in Yemen has killed over 230,000 people and has brought most of the Yemeni population to the brink of famine. But what does Biden's declaration really mean? Will the Yemen war finally come to an end now?

Joining me to discuss this question and related issues is Shireen Al-Adeimi. She is an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University who has been very active in raising awareness about the war in Yemen, her country of birth. Thanks for joining me, Shireen.

Shireen Al-Adeimi

Thanks for having me.

Greg Wilpert

So you recently wrote an article for the publication In These Times in which you say that it's too soon to celebrate the end of U.S. support for the war in Yemen. What makes you say that?

Shireen Al-Adeimi

Yes. So my colleague Sarah Lazare and I wrote this article because we were seeing a lot of initial reactions of joy and celebration, and of course, that was my initial reaction as well. We'd worked really, really hard over the last six years to bring an end to U.S. complicity in this war because of how involved the U.S. has been in Yemen, and an announcement like that by Joe Biden was what we've been waiting to hear all these years, but when we listened carefully to what the announcement actually was, there are some caveats that made us really skeptical and worried about what this might mean for really truly ending the war in Yemen, and whether this might just be a sort of rebranding of the war while the situation on the ground doesn't change qualitatively for the average Yemeni.

Greg Wilpert

So first of all, can you maybe say a little bit more as to what it is exactly that Biden said that makes you skeptical about the finality, so to speak, of U.S. support.

Shireen Al-Adeimi

So he says that he will end "offensive operations" in Yemen. The offensive role here is concerning because then he goes on to say that he is committed to defending Saudi Arabia from Houthis, he called them Iran groups or something like that ("Iranian-supplied forces") and defending Saudi "sovereignty," and this to me, sounds a lot like what the Obama-Biden administration, framed the war as to begin with in March of 2015, almost six years ago, when they said they were supporting the Saudi-led coalition in order to defend Saudi territories and borders from the Houthis.

And so if all of these six years past six years have been a defensive war, then what changes when Biden says we're ending offensive operations? The other concerning thing was that he said they are going to be ending "relevant arms sales." Now, Saudi Arabia receives about 70 percent of their arms are from the United States. So what is relevant and irrelevant here when they're using these arms to bomb Yemen, both them and the UAE.

So ending the war is going to require ending all forms of support, not just "relevant arms sales" and not just "offensive ope...