Opinion | In the Yemen 7 billion US dollars of useless bombings

The signal scandal has outrage about the way Trump Administration exchanged official texts about military strikes for Yemen. But dig a little deeper and there is an even bigger scandal.

This is a scandal about a failed policy that enables an enemy of the United States, will weaken our security and will cost thousands of life. It is one that also affects President Joe Biden, but reaches his apotheosis under President Trump.

It all goes back to the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023 and to the wild reaction of Israel, which takes up entire district of Gaza. The repressive Houthi regime of Yemen tried to gain regional support by supposedly attacking Israeli ships that passed nearby in the Red Sea. (In fact, it hit all types of ships.)

There are more problems than solutions in international relationships, and this was a classic example: an extremist regime in Yemen disabled international trade, and there was no simple solution. Biden reacted with one year of air raids to the Yemen against the Houthis, which consumed billions of dollars but did not achieve anything obvious.

After taking office, Trump increased the pressure on Yemen. He lowered humanitarian aid worldwide, whereby the Yemen was hit particularly hard. I last visited Yemen in 2018 when some children were already to death and is now worse: Half of the children under 5 years is malnourished – “Statistics that is almost unprecedented all over the world,” says Unicef, says UNICEF – auxiliary cuts recently forced more than 2,000 nutritional programs to conclude to Tom Flachter. The United States canceled an order for life -saving peanut paste, which was supposed to keep 500,000 Yemeni children alive.

Girls are particularly likely to die because Yemeni culture prefers boys. I once interviewed a girl, Nujood Ali, who was married to her will at the age of 10. Aid programs to strengthen Yemenite girls and the reduction of the children's marriage are now also cut.