The United States Is Wrong on Yemen. Again.

In late January, Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, boiled down the suffering of millions of Yemenis into a false binary in which Washington had done everything it could for peace. He claimed that the Houthi rebels in Yemen were to blame for the continuation of the seven-year conflict, which has become one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. With the Houthis launching ballistic missiles at the United Arab Emirates and a litany of their own war crimes, it’d be easy to fall for this simplistic analysis of the conflict. Yet, in suggesting that reaching a cease-fire and ending the war are simply up to the Houthis, rather than the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, McGurk reveals his misunderstanding of the conflict.

For years, U.S. officials