The War in Yemen (and Congress’s Response)
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2018
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Gregory Johnsen, a former member of the U.N. Security Council Panel of Experts on Yemen and the author of the book "The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia," to do a deep dive on the conflict in Yemen: its origins; its current state; and the role Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States have played and are likely to play moving forward. Joining Ben and Greg was Daniel Byman, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and Lawfare’s own Foreign Policy Editor.
After Ben and Dan’s conversation with Greg, Brookings Fellow Molly Reynolds and Lawfare's Scott R. Anderson sat down for a conversation about Yemen-related legislation that is currently churning on Capitol Hill, and what it may mean for the future of U.S. involvement in the conflict there.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.0 | The real concern that I have is that the war that we've been talking about is |
| 0:38.0 | the Saudi-led war against the Houthis. |
| 0:40.0 | And that's the war that the international community really wants to stop. |
| 0:44.0 | I think in Yemen, unfortunately, the worst of the fighting is yet to come. |
| 0:48.0 | The worst of the fighting happens when the regional and international powers |
| 0:52.0 | withdraw or pull back. |
| 0:54.0 | And the local Yemeni fighters, then it's a mad scramble for power. |
| 0:57.0 | And you have all these guys, all these groups, none of which are strong enough, |
| 1:01.0 | but all of which connect to spoilers, and they're fighting one another. |
| 1:05.0 | And that I think is a, the fighting will be worse. |
| 1:09.0 | And I'm very worried that at that point when it becomes just a local Yemeni civil war, |
| 1:13.0 | that the international community will just turn away. |
| 1:15.0 | And as long as it's just Yemenis fighting and killing other Yemenis, |
| 1:19.0 | then nobody really cares. |
| 1:21.0 | I'm Scott Ari Anderson. |
| 1:23.0 | And this is the Lawfare Podcast for December 11, 2018. |
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