Congress passed a bipartisan measure to end U.S. involvement in the war, but Trump vetoed it last month. A recent U.N. study calculated that if the war ends this year, it will have claimed 233,000 lives, and that if it continues until 2022, it will claim a total of 482, 000 lives. If it lasts until 2030, the U.N. estimated, it will cause 1.8 million deaths.

“Every day things get worse,” Lise Grande, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, told me this month. “There isn’t anyone working today in Yemen who doesn’t believe that the only solution to this terrible, senseless crisis is to end the conflict. We have to face the fact that if fighting drags on, Yemen will be a failed state, unstable for generations.”

“Nearly every family has either lost someone, is hungry, has children out of school or is battling cholera,” Grande said. “It’s hard to understand why the lives of so many innocent people seem to mean so little.”

The Mad Prince’s rash interference in Yemen not only backfired and helped Iran, but a CNN investigation also found that it led Saudi Arabia to give American weapons to fighters linked to Al Qaeda. The chaos led to the cholera outbreak, which worsened recently, with more than 300,000 suspected cases so far in 2019.

Iran and the Houthis have also behaved badly, but that’s a poor excuse for Americans to support war crimes against Yemeni children.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are no longer enthusiastic about the Yemen war, but they don’t want to leave and give Iran and the Houthis a victory. So it’s difficult to see how the war ends unless the U.S. forces the issue.

Trump has said that if the United States doesn’t sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, then Russia or China will. But Saudi Arabia needs American spare parts, and it also buys U.S. weapons partly for the implicit security guarantee that comes with them. No other country can provide that security blanket.