The War We Can Stop: On the Seven-Year Conflict in Yemen

Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays.

We’re engulfed by war, rumors of war, videos of war, crimes of war—are we looking at “end times” approaching? Or just the dead end of the forever wars?

Our conversation this hour is about the seven-year war in Yemen. Our Yemeni guest sets it in the Ukraine context this way: “Yemen,” she says, “is the war we can stop.” It is called the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet, and still it gets scant news coverage. It is older than Ukraine’s war, vicious in its own way, an autocrat’s war much deadlier than Russia’s hammering of Ukraine, so far. The Yemen war, too, is a mismatch: Saudi oil wealth pounding the poorest nation in the Arab world, and using American planes dropping American bombs to do the pounding.

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