Dave Smith Explains the War in Yemen

Well let me ask you this, like being a libertarian and reducing government is what you're really interested in. So if that's the case, what are the things that get drastically reduced? Like, besides the obvious ones like military and what's, what is, what are the things that you feel there's egregious misspending or overspending on? Well I mean, okay so, right, I mean I know you've said besides that but I'm still going to just react. Number one is ending all of the wars. I mean it's just been, it's been one disaster after another. Millions of innocent people have been killed as a result of the wars in the last 20 years. We have nothing to show for them. Nothing. And we should end every last one of them. And the biggest one, the biggest one right now is what's going on in Yemen. And there's talks that they're going to escalate that. You're talking about Yemen again? Yes. But you were on CE Cup five years ago. And literally, and no one listened to me then. And fortunately no one has yet and now they're talking about escalating it. But it's the worst thing in the world. What is, explain what's going on. So alright, so basically Obama started a war in Yemen. I mean it was Obama's government working with the Saudis to launch a war against the Houthis in Yemen. And basically the backstory to it is that Obama had really, the Saudis were pissed off at our government and they're a big trading partner in ours. But number one, they were against the war in Iraq that George W. Bush started because they kind of were the only ones who saw obviously how this was going to go. And they were like, their big enemy is Iran. And you were like, well if you overthrow the Sunni minority government in Iraq, obviously the Shiites are going to take power. And then Iran's going to have all of this influence in the region. So you're just empowering our worst enemy. So don't do this. But America wanted to do it. Israel wanted to do it. All of the neocons wanted to do it and so the war ended up happening. And so the war happens. It went exactly that way. It was a gift to Iran. And then Obama came in and he made the deal with Iran that also really pissed off the Saudis. So Obama said, and you can Google this and you can find it, he said in order to placate the Saudis, he supported their war against the Houthis in Yemen. So we got involved in a war which has turned into a genocide to placate one of the most evil governments in the world, the Saudis. So Obama, that's what Obama, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize, gave us. Besides for funding bin Ladenite Islamists in Libya and Syria and committing literal treason, he should be tried for war crimes and literally spend the rest of his life in a cage for what he did in Yemen. He really launched a war of genocide to placate the Saudis. Is that really the only motivation for us getting involved? It's, I mean, yeah, they're basically that they're a big business partner of ours and we were pissed off and we were worried about losing that relationship. In this war, the United States' part is what? So basically, well, okay, so it's really, it's the Saudis and the UAE are really launching the war. The Saudis doing it, but with American weapons, for the first several years of the war, we were literally refueling their fighter pilots as they were doing it. And they're conducting the war in the most brutal, egregious way. I mean, they're bombing farms and they put a full blockade around the country. So there was something at one point, there was in the ballpark of a million cases of I'm not sure if they were actually all cholera or there were some other similar infections that were, but it's been hundreds of thousands of people who have died in this war. The UN said it was the number one humanitarian crisis in the world. And it's, these are infectious diseases that are targeting, that disproportionately hit babies. I mean, there's babies dying. And Yemen, by the way, before all of this was the poorest country in the Middle East. And they put a full blockade around the country. And this has been going on forever. Obama started it, Trump continued it through his entire presidency, funded the Saudis even more than Obama had, gave them even more weapons. And Biden said he was going to end it. And he said he was going to end the war. And there were some people, I will say Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul were both really great on this in the Senate, trying to bring awareness of this, that we got to end this. It's like, this is a genocide at this point. And Biden said he was going to end it. And he didn't. He backed off of that promise. And now, I guess the Houthis launched a few attacks that hit the United, the UAE. And so now they're talking about escalating the war. Anyway, so that's the biggest. So what government should stop doing, that's like the biggest one to me is like cut the military budget drastically. Stop fighting stupid wars. Anyway, on top of that, I would say that we need to end all corporate welfare. Can we stop before you move on to that? Sure. So what the motivations that they have for getting involved in wars that benefit Saudi Arabia are, is it negotiations in terms of like oil access? Is it negotiations in terms of like control of the region? Is it compromises in terms of like, they make these compromises in terms of like, we want to do this and you want to do that, so we'll allow you to do this, we do that, and then we'll work together? So there's several really big financial incentives behind it. Number one, Saudi Arabia buys a tremendous amount of weapons. So this is worth a lot of money for weapons manufacturers. There's also the whole petrodollar thing, where it has been this agreement for a long time that Saudi Arabia will peg their oil to US dollars and only trade in dollars. And this does a lot to keep our currency afloat. That was the reason, that was part of the reason why the war with Iraq happened, right? Wasn't that, didn't that have something to do with them taking their money, like taking the, they weren't going to put their oil on the US dollar anymore? Supposedly Saddam Hussein around the year 2000 had a plan to start trading oil in gold and other assets and not using dollars anymore. I've also seen people say that Qaddafi had plans to be in on this. I don't know if that's true or not. I do think it's interesting. I do know that very shortly after we got off the gold standard, after Richard Nixon put us on the gold standard, took us off the gold standard, that we made this deal with Saudi Arabia in the 70s where they would only trade oil for dollars, which in some ways kind of replaced the gold standard. Like look, dollars aren't redeemable for gold anymore, but they are redeemable for oil. And so you got some commodity kind of behind the money and that allows us to print as much money as we want to without suffering the consequences of it quite as drastically because there's still some value to the money for other people. We can export our dollar around the world. I'm sure there's other motivations that I don't know about, that I don't know for sure what they are, but I do know that hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being slaughtered over these wars. So whatever exactly the motivation is, it ain't worth it. It's also one more crazy addition to all of this is that we're fighting on the side of Al-Qaeda over there. Like Al-Qaeda is fighting the Houthis. There's still a pretty sizable Al-Qaeda presence in the Arabian Peninsula and particularly in Yemen and they're the enemies of the Houthis. We're fighting on the side of Saudi Arabia and Al-Qaeda against the Houthis because Iran kind of likes them. It's nuts. And we need to just stop doing it. But it's insane. While our country's falling apart, we're still trying to remake the world. It's just, it's bananas. The idea though, the reason why they're making these concessions to these other foreign countries is that ultimately it does help America in some sort of a way. Well, I mean, I'm sure they would argue that. Have you ever talked to a CIA guy or someone who's involved in this sort of international politics and they could kind of explain, not saying that you would agree with them, but saying to you the motivation or why it's beneficial to be involved with these countries, rather? Well, yeah. I mean, I've heard, I have talked to several of them and I've heard a lot of their arguments. By the way, there's also a lot of those guys who would agree with me on this or I would agree with them, I should probably say more accurately. I mean, I'd highly recommend anybody who wants to know what's really going on to listen to Colonel Douglas McGregor, who is as smart and as decorated as you could possibly be. And he's the guy who really makes the argument the best that we should be completely out of all of these wars. Is he retired? Yeah, I believe he is at this point. Yeah, I believe he is. But he was actually, I believe he was McMaster's boss at one point, but McMaster's rose up, I guess the political stuff with it did a little bit better than him and he ultimately became the guy and he didn't, but also might be because of what their views are on this stuff. There are people who will make these arguments, but really usually the arguments that they come down to like, well, I mean, it's like the way the wars were sold. It's like, well, we had to go into Iraq because of whatever, weapons of mass destruction, or we had to go into Syria because Assad was killing all of his own people, or we had to go into Libya because he was about to go genocidal, or we had to go into blah, blah. Yemen, they don't really try to make this argument as much for. Well, you don't hear about it. It's never discussed. It's just, there's no real strong defense of it. What's been going on, so how many years now? You were talking about it. Eight years, seven years maybe now? Yeah. Wow. And now they're talking about ramping it up after Biden promised to end it.