Representative Rohit "Ro" Khanna of California's 17th district announced in an October 10 op-ed in the New York Times that he has introduced a "bipartisan congressional resolution" in the House calling for an end to US support of the "horrifying" Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Khanna, who served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the US Department of Commerce from 2008 to 2012 under President Obama, recently broke from the mainstream Democratic party when he declared himself a "Justice Democrat" -- aligning himself with the new and progressive Justice Democrat party recently co-founded by The Young Turk's CEO Cenk Uygur and Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk.

Congressman Khanna's stand against the War In Yemen is both a bold political statement as well as a long overdue attempt to redress US support for the repressive monarchy in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi destruction of Yemen

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia launched "Operation Decisive Storm" in March of 2015 when the Sunni state began to bombard neighboring Yemen. As of January 2017, the UN reported that the Saudi-led and US-backed campaign had killed over 10,000 civilians. 140 were killed in one instance alone when a Saudi warplane bombed a wedding in the town of Sanaâ.

In his op-ed for the New York Times, Khanna correctly pointed out that Yemen has been subjugated to "a famine of biblical proportions, in the words of Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council." According to Democracy Now!, Yemen is facing an unprecedented cholera outbreak in which nearly one civilian is killed each hour. Cholera is said to have killed up to 2,000 people in Yemen as of this month.

The Saudi-US effort has also failed to yield geopolitical success. A confidential UN report found that "The Saudi Arabia-led coalition strategic air campaign continues to have little operational or tactical impact on the ground" and has actually empowered AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) in their ability to "launch terrorist attacks against targets in the West."

Ro Khanna's resolution and Saudi-US relations under Trump

Khanna's legislation, entitled House Congressional Resolution 81, calls for the White House to "remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen." We will most likely not see Khanna's directive come to fruition, however, as President trump is currently at the helm of arguably the most pro-Saudi administration in US history -- having supplied the Islamic monarchy with $1.56 billion in military aid" and "more than doubled its bombs, missiles, and ammunition deliveries to Saudi Arabia" since taking office in January.
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