Money for Human Needs NOT for Bombing Yemen!
Speech given by AWC member Wyatt Miller at the Money for Human Needs NOT War Protest organized by the MN Peace Action Coalition on Tax Day, 4.15.2025
The U.S. is bombing Yemen. It has killed over 120 Yemeni people, wounded hundreds more, and destroyed basic infrastructure. This latest bombing campaign, which started a month ago today, has already cost U.S. taxpayers around $1 billion dollars.
This in itself is outrageous. But on top of that, what’s outrageous is the lack of outrage we’ve seen from our politicians like Amy Klobuchar and most of the U.S. media. When Trump’s national security circle inadvertently leaked to a journalist that it had collapsed an entire civilian apartment building to assassinate one alleged “bad guy,” the story was about the administration’s incompetence at using group chats – not at its admission to committing a war crime.
Likewise, last week Trump tweeted a video of U.S. warplanes bombing a large, traditional gathering of Yemeni civilians on Eid, farcicly claiming it was a terrorist planning session. It was barely covered by the media. These bombings have continued every day for a month, and yet many Americans don’t even know that Trump has started yet another forever war.
The worst part is that ten years ago, bombing Yemen was actually much bigger news. Because the war on Yemen has been going on for over ten years. When President Obama authorized drone strikes on Yemen, it was hugely controversial and people criticized him for years – including here in Minneapolis where an entire “drone not drones” annual music festival was launched.
When Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other U.S. allies began a ground invasion and a massive aerial bombing campaign in Yemen, the UN called it the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and opposition to weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia featured in political campaigns across the West.
And now that Trump is doing away with both quiet drone assassinations or a proxy war, and starting direct U.S. military involvement in the slaughter, and instead of making headlines, Yemen is suddenly a footnote.
But I say this not to wallow in despair, and not just to show how normalized U.S. wars have become, but to highlight an important fact about Trump’s renewed war on Yemen. Past U.S. administrations had to resort to drones and proxies, and to avoid all-out U.S. involvement in Yemen, precisely because they knew it would be unpopular. In the decade following the invasion of Iraq and the massive protests against it, it was cemented in the minds of millions of Americans that that war was a disgusting disaster and a colossal waste of money and lives. The anti-war movement didn’t stop the war in Iraq but it forced U.S. imperialism to change how it operated, and at least for a few years, put up a political limit to how directly the U.S. could militarily intervene, because politicians feared popular backlash.
The war on Yemen like all U.S. wars is unpopular. And let’s not forget: Yemen is under attack for standing with Palestine against Israel’s genocide. Fighting a new war to protect Israel is more unpopular right now than it’s ever been.
But the backlash isn’t automatic. Trump thinks he’s immune to backlash, so we have to be the backlash. The good news is that millions of people are mobilizing against Trump in an unprecedented way. People, correctly, understand that Trump is an unprecedented threat to all of us.
People like Amy Klobuchar want us to believe that all of the millions of people who are protesting Trump think just like her, and that only a little sliver of what Trump does is truly bad, and that maybe the problem with Trump’s wars is that he’s not waging them competently enough. I don’t believe it! People aren’t stupid, people understand that the bullshit is connected, and we in the anti-war movement need to go out and find our people, build our movement into the movement against Trump rather than silo ourselves off from it
When the people of Yemen are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!
