Biden Has Done Nothing To Reverse Disaster in Yemen under Saudi Bombs and U.S. Sanctions

May 22, 2021 (EIRNS)—CounterPunch website published a report on the fact that President Biden’s statements at the beginning of his term that he would counter the Saudi-led war on Yemen meant nothing. Charles Pierson, a member of an anti-drone warfare coalition in Pittsburgh, wrote under the title “Is Biden Ghosting Yemen?” that in Biden’s first foreign policy speech on Feb. 4, he pledged he was “ending all support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” But he also “recommitted the U.S. to its decades-long defense of Saudi Arabia,” Pierson wrote, and singled out “threats” to Saudi Arabia from “Iranian-supplied forces.”

Forty-one House Democrats wrote to Biden, asking for clarification. They never got a response, and the war rolled on. Then on April 6, Pierson reports, “70 civil society organizations, including the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers) and the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, and celebrities such as actor Mark Ruffalo and comedian Amy Schumer, wrote to Biden. Also on April 6, Congressional Democrats—75+ of them this time—sent another letter. None of these letters has elicited so much as a peep from the White House. There’s a term for deliberately ignoring texts and other communications: ‘ghosting.’ Is Biden ghosting Yemen?”

A better term is direct complicity in genocide, as Biden has done nothing to stop the war or lift the sanctions or break the Saudi blockade. A few days ago Biden signed the Congressional “woke” Hate Crime Bill. In his statement he said solemnly: “We must speak out against hate. Speak out. Silence is complicity.” Indeed, Joe, silence on your crimes in Yemen, described by the UN as the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world,” is complicity in a very serious crime.