House Votes to End Support for Saudi Arabia's War in Yemen

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : While some have celebrated the passage of the amendment, other experts say that ending support for the Saudis will empower Iran in the region.
51% : But with the Yemen under blockade, any aid provided by Iran hasn't matched the billions of dollars' worth of F-15s, drones, and other advanced technology the United States has provided to the Saudis, according to antiwar.com editorial director Scott Horton.
48% : In recent years, there have been further reports of Iran sending arms to the Houthis.
47% : "Consistent with its regional strategy, Iran seeks to establish a Hezbollah-styled proxy relationship with the Houthis, who are perched next to the Red Sea and on Saudi Arabia's southern border," Foreign Policy said in March.
45% : The Saudis have supported an Arab coalition led by former Yemen president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who was ousted during the conflict after a brief rein; and the Iranians have backed the Houthis, a political faction of Yemeni Shi'ites -- Shi'ites being the dominant religious group in Iran.
45% : Worried by the risk of more direct intervention by Iran, U.S. officials say they are urging the Saudis to set their sights more narrowly on halting rebel advances and reaching what amounts to a battlefield stalemate that leads all sides to the negotiating table."
45% : "The limited amount of support Iran has given to the Houthis over the course of the war, include radio equipment, training and supposedly a 3D printer and schematics for building drones," Horton wrote in his book "Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism."
41% : "Among other reasons, the White House needed to placate the Saudis as the administration completed a nuclear deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia's archenemy," the New York Times reported in March 2016.
40% : It would be hard to do so, given Iran declared the Houthis to be Yemen's official government in 2019.
37% : "The Houthis are not Hezbollah and, despite their publicly expressed sympathies for the Islamic Republic, have not developed a similarly tight relationship with Tehran," Middle East experts Joost Hiltermann and April Longley Alley wrote for Foreign Policy. "
36% : But the extent to which Iran is backing the Houthis in the midst of its economic and fiscal crisis is unclear.
36% : Bernadette Meehan said in April 2015 that the administration's assessment is that "Iran does not exert command and control over the Houthis in Yemen," while Foreign Policy denied a Tehran-Houthis connection in 2017.
35% : And every part of the Middle East, and other places that was under attack, was under attack because of Iran," Trump said at the time.
34% : The conflict in Yemen has been described as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
31% : Estimates have put the number of dead Yemenis from the conflict at more than 230,000, with the United Nations declaring the matter a humanitarian crisis.
30% : Citing the industry publication Jane's Defence Weekly, reporter Gweynne Dyer said the rocket fired from Yemen didn't match ones made by countries like Iran and North Korea.
29% : Previous allegations of Iran arming the Houthis have been debunked by Wikileaks disclosures.
25% : Meanwhile, Obama was negotiating with Iran over a nuclear arms deal.
25% : Later, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley claimed that a rocket fired from Yemen into Saudi Arabia had been supplied by Iran, but investigative reporting cast doubt on that allegation.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.