Riyadh’s Vietnam

To ask where Saudi Arabia succeeded or failed in Yemen is the wrong question. Saudi Arabia lost in Yemen the moment it decided to intervene militarily, and has only continued losing since.

Firstly, the intervention was a tacit admission that Yemen’s transitional process following the 2011 uprising – of which Riyadh was a primary architect and steward – had been irreparably botched. While they say war is politics by other means, that the richest country in the Arab World decided that bombing the poorest was the only means to address this political and diplomatic failure shows weakness and lack of vision, not strength.

Four years of ‘Operation Decisive Storm’ – on which estimates peg Saudi expenditures at billions of dollars per month – have been a litany of failures on all fronts: the humanitarian catastrophe has burned Saudi Arabia’s public image abroad; lawmakers in Washington, London and other European capitals are increasingly questioning their relations with Riyadh; Iranian leaders are marveling at Saudi Arabia’s military ineptness in front of a ragtag militia force while simultaneously gleeful that the war has forced the armed Houthi movement to shoulder up to Tehran more than ever. Meanwhile in Yemen millions of people are on the verge of starvation, their economy in ruins, their social fabric in tatters, and their government still in exile thousands of kilometers away in Riyadh hotels. All the while, various factions on the ground, supposedly fighting on the Yemeni government’s behalf, are actively and openly seeking to usurp its authority.

In short, Yemen has become Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam. Like that catastrophic American adventure, the losses will only end when those in charge realize that the war is no more winnable today than it was when they entered it. That it is time to stop the armed conflict and try a different approach.

This piece was first published in Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.