Portside

The United States is fueling a conflict that has resulted in war crimes and famine.

Saudi Arabia's puzzling effort to blacklist its tiny neighbor Qatar begs the question of who's really isolated in the Gulf. The attack on Qatar is part of Saudi Arabia’s aggressive new foreign policy that is being led by Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. As Saudi Arabia’s “monarch in waiting,” Mohammed has launched a disastrous war in Yemen that’s killed more than 10,000 civilians and sparked a country-wide cholera epidemic there.

Millions are threatened by famine, as Riyadh prepares an assault on the country’s key port.

On March 26, 2015, the Saudi-led coalition started aerial attacks on Yemen, transforming a civil war into an international conflict and a humanitarian disaster. Even as the Trump Administration moves to increase the US role in the fighting, no end to the war is in sight. There are now some 40,000 human casualties, including more than 2,500 children and 1,900 women killed directly by the air strikes. And a child dies every ten minutes from disease or hunger.

On Oct. 13, the U.S. carried out its first direct military action against Houthi targets in Yemen, in alleged retaliation for two failed missile attacks on a U.S. ship. The Obama Administration thus underscored its position as a co-belligerent in the Saudi-led war, even as calls mount for an international investigation into Saudi war crimes following the Oct. 8th bombing of a funeral that killed 140 people and wounded hundreds of others, the deadliest attack of the war.

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An Iraqi politician once said that the problem in his country was that parties and movements were “too weak to win, but too strong to lose.” This is increasingly the pattern for the whole region and is spreading elsewhere. It carries with it the possibility of an endless cycle of indecisive wars and an era of instability that has already begun.

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Saudi Arabia’s relentless war in Yemen is a destructive failure. The U.S.-backed military intervention that began one year ago has killed an estimated 6,400 people, half of them civilians, injured 30,000, and displaced 2.5 million. According to the UN, 80 percent of the population (20 million people) is now in need of some form of aid. This week the Saudis agreed to a cease fire and peace talks, but will the Obama Administration press them to end the carnage?

Art as politics in the powerful new exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York by Laura Poitras. Museum director Adam Weinberg sets the show "in the tradition of socially and politically engaged artists - progressive artists such as Ben Shahn and Alice Neal." He said, "The aim of the projections is to provoke moral and ethical responses." Indeed, they do. Or they should.