No, the US War on Yemen is Not 10 Years Old.
It Began in 2009
David Swanson / David Swanson.org

(March 27, 2025) — According to pretty much every media outlet and peace group, and the United Nations, and Wikipedia, the war on Yemen just turned 10. Happy Birthday!

Not so fast! Ten years ago was 2015. It was in 2009 that the US military began regularly sending missiles into human beings in Yemen, with the peak in that practice coming in 2012. We learned about this from people in Yemen, not from our “representative” and “democratic” government in the United States. But that doesn’t make it less real.

This new type of killing spree from the air — celebrated by US journalists and film makers over the past 15 years or so — was marketed as a new kind of war that might or might not be a war at all, depending on what could make it seem more legalisticish.

There were big debates when US citizens were blown up, along with everyone near them, or when their children were targeted and blown up, along with anyone near them, or when it became clear that most people being targeted with missiles from drones, in Yemen and elsewhere, had not actually been identified, never mind prosecuted and sentenced to be blown up, along with anyone near them, in a court of law.

There were objections to the practice of blowing up those who would come running to assist the injured from the first of a pair of “double-tap” strikes. There was offense taken at references to victims as “bugsplat.” But there was a general and rapid normalization of the sort of thing Signalgate would be about if the US media were not sociopathic, namely picking one person to murder and then blowing up a whole building — or car or wedding — full of people in order to murder him.

It was Obama’s first term. We peace activists — at least those not giving Obama an endless “chance” — went out and protested and were told that a “drone war” was obviously better than a non-drone war, that in a drone war “nobody gets hurt,” etc. And we said endlessly, even if it’s all now forgotten, that what we needed was no war at all, that drone wars had not replaced any non-drone wars but simply been added to them, and that the drone wars would likely turn into wider wars.

It was before the United States re-elected Obama to a second term that he took on the bombing of seven nations at a time and bragged to the New York Timesabout picking through a list of men, women, and children every Tuesday for whom to blow up, along with anyone near them. And Yemen was the model “successful drone war” — for anyone not peeking behind the curtain.

On April 24, 2013, a Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee hearing on drones was not your usual droning and yammering. Well, mostly it was, but not entirely. Of course, the White House refused to send any witnesses.

Of course, most of the witnesses were your usual professorial fare. But there was also a witness with something to say. Farea Al-Muslimi was from Yemen. His village had just been hit by a drone strike the previous week. He described the effects — all bad for the people of the village, for the people of Yemen, and for the United States and its mission to eliminate all the bad people in the world without turning any of the good people against it’

In part, Muslimi explained:
“Instead of first experiencing America through a school or a hospital, most people in Wessab [his village] first experienced America through the terror of a drone strike. What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America. . . .
The killing of innocent civilians by US missiles in Yemen is helping to destabilize my country and create an environment from which AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] benefits. Every time an innocent civilian is killed or maimed by a US drone strike or another targeted killing, it is felt by Yemenis across the country.
These strikes often cause animosity towards the United States and create a backlash that undermines the national security goals of the United States. The US strikes also increase my people’s hatred against the central government, which is seen as propped up by the Persian Gulf governments and the United States. I know that some policy makers in the United States and Yemen claim that AQAP does not use drone strikes as a tool to recruit more people to their cause. This is incorrect. The case of the Toaiman family in Mareb, as reported by NPR based on a trip in which I participated, is one specific example.
The Toaiman’s oldest son joined AQAP hoping to avenge the death of his father, an innocent civilian killed by a drone strike in October 2011. The son has 28 brothers waiting to do so as well. One of his youngest brothers, a 9-year-old, carries a picture of a plane in his pocket. The boy openly states that he wants revenge and identifies his father’s killer as ‘America.’ But the main issue is not whether AQAP recruits more terrorists because of drone strikes. AQAP’s power and influence has never been based on the number of members in its ranks. AQAP recruits and retains power through its ideology, which relies in large part on the Yemeni people believing that America is at war with them . . . . Drone strikes that miss their targets make these terrorists look brave. They become role models, simply by evading weapons being launched by the greatest military power on earth.”

In the months and years that followed, it would be widely acknowledged — even at the top level of the US military — that drone wars were counterproductive on their own terms — not that that was understood as any reason to stop them. And so, the United States weakened the government of Yemen and strengthened those who opposed it.

Finding itself in that hole, the US bravely kept digging until a full-blown war on air, land, and sea had engulfed the peninsula, with Saudi Arabia using US weapons and targeting to do much of the killing. This was then labeled a Yemeni “civil war” meaning that nobody in the decent and civilized part of the world had ever had anything to do with it.