Three members of the United States House of Representatives wrote in a Tuesday editorial at the New York Times about their legislation (H.Con.Res. 81) that would use the authority of Congress under the War Powers Resolution to end US participation in the war in Yemen. In the editorial, the representatives — Ro Khanna (D-CA), Mark Pocan (D-WI), and Walter Jones (R-NC) — also describe key US participation in the war as well as the war’s devastating consequences.
The editorial begins with the following:
Imagine that the entire population of Washington State — 7.3 million people — were on the brink of starvation, with the port city of Seattle under a naval and aerial blockade, leaving it unable to receive and distribute countless tons of food and aid that sit waiting offshore. This nightmare scenario is akin to the obscene reality occurring in the Middle East’s poorest country, Yemen, at the hands of the region’s richest, Saudi Arabia, with unyielding United States military support that Congress has not authorized and that therefore violates the Constitution.
For nearly three years, the United States has been participating alongside a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in a brutal military campaign in Yemen. The United States is selling the Saudi monarchy missiles and warplanes, assisting in the coalition’s targeting selection for aerial bombings and actively providing midair refueling for Saudi and United Arab Emirates jets that conduct indiscriminate airstrikes — the leading cause of civilian casualties. Meanwhile, the Saudi coalition is starving millions of Yemenis as a grotesque tactic of war.
This is horrifying. We have therefore introduced a bipartisan congressional resolution to withdraw American armed forces from these unauthorized hostilities in order to help put an end to the suffering of a country approaching “a famine of biblical proportions,” in the words of Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council. After all, as Foreign Policy has reported, the Saudi coalition’s “daily bombing campaign would not be possible without the constant presence of U.S. Air Force tanker planes refueling coalition jets.”
Continue reading the editorial here.
Jones and fellow H.Con.Res. 81 original cosponsor Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) are members of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Advisory Board.
