‘Yemen Has Been a Place the US Has Seen Fit to Bomb With Little Public Discussion’:  — FAIR

Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Khury Petersen-Smith about Yemen distortions for the April 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

PBS (3/15/25)

Janine Jackson: You could say that US news media focus on this country’s lethal military assault in Yemen was distorted by the revelation that operational planning was fecklessly shared with a journalist in a Signal group chat. Though the sadder truth might be that, without that palace intrigue, US media would’ve shown even less interest in the US visiting what Trump brags of as “overwhelming lethal force” on the poorest country in the Arab world.

Most of what we’re getting are things like the April 9 parenthetical on PBS NewsHour, that the White House has reinstated emergency food aid to some impoverished countries, but “cuts will remain for war-ravaged Afghanistan and Yemen.” Yemen is presented as almost just a chess piece, a pawn in US designs in the Middle East, rather than a real place where real women, men and children live and die.

Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us now by phone from Boston. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Khury Petersen-Smith.

Khury Petersen-Smith I’m so grateful to be here. Thank you.

JJ: What people may have specifically heard is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying:

It’s been a devastating campaign, whether it’s underground facilities, weapons manufacturing, bunkers, troops in the open, air defense assets. We are not going to relent, and it’s only going to get more unrelenting until the Houthis declare they will stop shooting at our ships.

New York Times (3/16/25)

Or that, translated into New York Times language:

Some military analysts and former American commanders said that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping.

What context, information, history—what is missing from that snapshot that might help folks better understand what’s happening right now?

KPS: Often, I want to take a big step back and go into history, even recent history, but actually, this time, let’s start with the immediate, and that statement from Hegseth. Because Hegseth is, I think, known for brash hyperbole and these wild statements. But in that statement, he was actually speaking with some precision when he said, We’re going to do this. We’re going to maintain this lethal policy until the Houthis declare that they will stop firing at US ships.

And the reason that “declare” is an important word there is because the Houthis actually had stopped firing at US ships. When Israel entered its ceasefire agreement with Hamas, the agreement that Israel then broke, and we are now—not “we” in the US, but people in Gaza—really dealing with the reality of another broken ceasefire, as Israel really tightens its grip on the Gaza Strip, but when Israel and Hamas entered that ceasefire agreement, not only did Hamas honor it, but the Houthis actually honored it in Yemen.

Responsible Statecraft (3/21/25)

So the immediate context for this latest round of vicious US bombing is that, actually, the Houthis were not firing at US ships. The Houthis had stopped their attacks. And it was the United States, really, that started the combat again, followed then by Israel, which then violated the ceasefire. So that’s a really important context, because it’s not the case that this US bombing came in response to an attack by the Houthis on US ships. Actually, the Houthis had agreed to stop fighting, and the US refused to take yes for an answer.

JJ: Right. Maybe, for some folks, what is the nature of the Houthis embargo? What was the purpose of that? When did that start?

KPS: Sure, and we can get into where the Houthis as a political force came from, but if we just go to the more recent history, in October 2023, the Houthis, which are effectively running much of Yemen, they framed their attacks on Israeli forces, on Israel and on global shipping through the Red Sea, in the context of solidarity with Palestinians, and as a response to the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Yemen is on the Arabian Peninsula. It is adjacent to the Red Sea, and that maritime corridor is extremely important for global trade.

Al Jazeera (12/4/23)

And so the Houthis were basically taking advantage of that position, of that location, and saying, Until Israel stops its bombardment of Gaza, global shipping will be affected by our armed attacks—and Israel can also expect military intervention on behalf of the Houthis. So that’s really some other context for where this has come from. And it should be noted that, in the same way that the Houthis honored the latest ceasefire, the previous ceasefire that Israel and Hamas entered in the fall of 2023, November 2023, was also honored by the Houthis—and by Hezbollah, by the way. So these forces, these regional forces outside of Palestine that have framed their armed actions as a response to the Israeli attack, they have honored the agreements that Israel has entered with the Palestinians when that has happened.

JJ: That’s important to keep in mind, because Houthis and Hezbollah, and Hamas, are kind of tossed off in media as basically being a synonym for “terrorist.” You’re never offered any explanation, really, or rarely, of their role—with Houthis, in particular, their role within Yemen. It’s just as though these are kind of ragtag violent men.

KPS: In many ways, that kind of description or that characterization of these different forces throughout the Middle East is an extension of the way that Israel and the United States portray Palestinians–that any Palestinian actions against Israel or against Israeli forces are devoid of context of the Israeli occupation, and that it’s driven by some kind of irrational hatred of Israel.

FAIR.org (10/25/24)

The other thing, in tandem with this notion of an ahistorical, decontextualized anti-Israel violence, is the notion that these are all proxies of Iran, that Iran is the puppet master in the shadows that’s pulling the strings of Palestinian forces like Hamas, as well as Hezbollah and the Houthis. And not only is that part of a campaign to demonize and really legitimize violence against Iran and throughout the region, but it also ignores the fact that these countries, of course, have their own national dynamics, and these forces have their own interests. Even if they have some alignment with Iran, they have their own interests.

And so it’s worth noting that the cause of the Palestinian freedom struggle is very popular in Yemen. This is a country that has been divided by civil war. There’s divisions in Yemen, but one of the things that really unites the Yemeni population is the support for Palestinians. And so that’s another important piece of context when we think about why the Houthis have acted the way they have, and have framed their actions in terms of the Palestinian struggle.

Middle East Eye (3/27/25)

JJ: I think I’m going to bring us back to Iran in a second, but I just wanted to say, a number of groups recently have stated the reality that US airstrikes across Yemen since mid-March are unconstitutional acts of war that lack congressional authorization. Hegseth is out there saying, We tracked this guy and he went into his girlfriend’s building and then we collapsed it. Well, as Paul Hedreen wrote for FAIR.org, that’s a war crime. Why does it seem quaint, or beside the point, to note that the US is not officially at war with Yemen, that killing civilians, as the US has done and is doing, these are crimes, yes?

KPS: Yes. There’s so many violations that are happening, but let’s start with the first one. It’s not only violations of international law that the US is committing by targeting civilian infrastructure, which it is doing in Yemen, it’s a violation of US law for the US to be effectively waging war against a country that it has not declared war against.

And to answer your question about, there’s something that’s maybe strange about just pointing that out, I think that we have to look at at least the past 25 or so years, the so-called “War on Terror.”

FAIR.org (8/31/17)

From the start, US forces have been operating in Yemen. The US special forces have been operating there. The US has carried out cruise missile strikes in the early days of the “War on Terror.” And that has continued during the Yemeni civil war, which really involved a massive intervention, and, frankly, its own kind of war, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, their bombardment of Yemen, which began in 2015.

This was devastating. And the United States played such an essential role in supplying the airplanes, the bombs that those planes are dropping, but also intelligence. They did everything except drop the bomb themselves when Saudi Arabia was doing it. They supplied the targets, they supplied the planes, they supplied the bombs, to the extent that at that time in Congress, there was finally a real debate, where people like Ro Khanna and others said, Wait a minute. The US is effectively waging war here. Congress has not actually made a declaration of war. This is a violation of US law that President Trump, the first time, was carrying out.

And so I think that all that context is really important, including, by the way, the bombing that President Biden did last year of Yemen. For many years, Yemen has been a place that the US has seen fit to bomb and otherwise do violence against, with very little public discussion in this country.

FAIR.org (4/21/21)

JJ: As your colleague Phyllis Bennis wrote, the US bombing of Yemen is always referred to in the media as bombing the “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” to avoid acknowledging that, like in Gaza, the bombs are dropping on civilian infrastructure and civilians already facing devastating hunger.

I also think that carefully chosen phrasing, “Iran-backed Houthi rebels,” it sounds like it’s greasing the gears for a wider war.

KPS: I think that’s absolutely right. The first thing to say, of course, is that these bombs have a devastating impact on civilian life, on the people of Yemen. There’s this US and Israeli notion that through so-called “targeted strikes,” and what they call “precision munitions” or whatever, that they’re just targeting who they call the “bad guys.” And again, still illegal even if you’re….

JJ: Yeah. And then anyone else is a human shield.

KPS: Right? Exactly. Even if the US was only targeting and hurting and killing combatants, it would still be illegal, according to US law.

But for what it’s worth, that’s simply not the case. Civilians have suffered tremendously over these, again, more than two decades of various operations that the United States has supported. It’s been catastrophic.

Khury Petersen-Smith: “There’s suffering on a mass scale in Yemen, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for that.”

And it’s just worth repeating that the humanitarian situation in Yemen, the destruction of Yemen’s infrastructure, the destruction of their sanitation facilities, the massive food insecurity that was caused, in particular, by the Saudi campaign of bombing—this was declared by the United Nations to be the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Subsequently, unfortunately—devastatingly—that crisis has been, on the global stage, eclipsed by the catastrophe in Gaza. But there’s suffering on a mass scale in Yemen, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for that. So that’s the first thing that it’s important to say.

But, again, the notion that there’s some evil Iranian puppet master pulling the strings ignores Yemen’s own history and politics. And I think that you’re absolutely right: it’s about setting up an escalation of US and Israeli violence that is targeting Iran, which, essentially, the US is preparing for. They’ve moved more ships and more personnel into the Middle East. They’re very open about threatening Iran. When they started this latest round of bombing of Yemen, the Defense spokesperson said that “we are putting Iran on notice.” So it’s a pretty thinly veiled threat toward Iran, and I think that we should take it very seriously. I think that for many  in the United States, it might be unimaginable for the US to have an open war with Iran, but I think that we are going to have to take these threats very seriously, and work to prevent it.

CNN (2/2/17)

JJ: Let me just end on that note: What are the places for intervention? I am always sorry to sort of end with “call your congressperson,” but what are the levers that we have to work with, to prevent this slow-motion nightmare that we’re looking at? And then, also, what would you like to see journalists do?

KPS: I think that it is important for people to put pressure on US officials. And of course that includes members of Congress, where, unfortunately, there’s quite a large degree of unity in Congress about attacking Iran. And that’s been true for a long time.

In fact, the last time Trump was in office, there were members of Congress who were saying that Trump wasn’t going hard enough on Iran. This was during the era of so-called “maximum pressure.”

So just challenging that consensus is extremely important. We should keep in mind that, in the early days of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, members of Congress could say what they have always said, which is: You may not like this Israeli operation, but A) Israel has this so-called “right to defend itself,” and B) this is what the American people want. And then they no longer were able to say that, because they were flooded with calls and demonstrations and so many messages saying that the majority of Americans actually opposed this. And that only grew as the situation went on.

Voice of America (1/27/17)

And that kind of cleavage between US elected officials and the US population is important. It lays the basis for actually changing that policy. So getting that ball rolling around Iran, before things escalate, is extremely important.

JJ: I appreciate that.

What I have seen that is critical and probing on this has been independent reporting. And I guess that might be the place, obviously, to continue to look. But what would you like journalists to be especially looking out for, or especially trying to avoid?

KPS: If I could say one thing to journalists who are doing their work right now, I would encourage them to please consider Iran and Yemen countries just like any other country. And countries that, when the people of these countries speak, know that there’s a diversity of opinions, as exists in every single society. And when the government speaks, they should take it seriously enough to evaluate it critically. And that’s true of any government.

And, frankly, one of the things that I’m struck by, this persistent reality in US journalism, is that countries like Israel and United States, particularly when they speak on international questions, and particularly when we talk about Iran or Palestine or Yemen, US journalists afford this credibility to the US and Israel that they deny to Palestinians and Yemenis and Iran.

When Israel bombs Gaza, and we hear the reports of how many people were killed, it’s still the case that American journalists use the Israeli language of saying “according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry,” as though US government agencies are identified with whatever political party happens to be in power at the moment. That’s simply not true.

Associated Press (3/25/25)

The question is, why is there this kind of skepticism or cynicism, this notion that, well, this might not be a credible source, the government in Palestine, but the notion that the Israeli government or the US government, which have been shown to lie so many times—I mean, Pete Hegseth about this very episode, that our conversation is about, this scandal about sharing these plans on Signal, he lied directly to reporters.

And so I really hope that instead of affording him whatever credibility US journalists have afforded government officials, which I have thoughts about that as well, certainly now, when one has lied directly to you, the media, I hope that you treat his statements with the appropriate amount of interrogation. And then take seriously the perspectives that are coming out of Yemen and Iran, which are interesting and should be evaluated with the same tools of journalism that you extend elsewhere.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Khury Petersen-Smith of the Institute for Policy Studies. You can find their work online at IPS-DC.org. Thank you so much, Khury Petersen-Smith, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KPS: I’m so grateful too. Thank you, Janine.