This is one of the latest crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen:

Airstrikes by a Saudi Arabia-led military coalition killed at least 70 people early Monday at a wedding celebration in a village on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, according to two local officials. The aerial attack in Wahija, south of the port city of Mokha, was at least the third in the last 10 days in which large numbers of civilians were killed by Saudi-led coalition forces.

One of the things that the U.S. is doing to support the attack on Yemen is to provide intelligence and assistance with targeting. The official line is that the U.S. is supposedly making the coalition’s airstrikes more “precise” and therefore less likely to kill civilians, but it’s clear from these incidents and from the coalition’s air campaign to date that Yemeni civilians are regularly being targeted. These attacks serve no remotely legitimate military purpose. They underscore just how atrocious and indefensible the Saudi-led campaign is. There seems to be no pretense at this point that these airstrikes are anything other than collective punishment of the people who happen to be in territory under Houthi control. U.N. Secretary-General Ban made a point of calling for an end to the air campaign in Yemen in his speech earlier today, and pinned responsibility for most of the civilian deaths in the war squarely on the Saudi-led coalition where it belongs.

Obama’s speech before the General Assembly predictably included no specific mention of the country that the U.S. is helping to wreck. It’s understandable that he would not want to advertise one of his greatest errors, but in one section of his speech he seemed to include an oblique reference to Yemen:

Of course, around the globe, we will continue to be confronted with nations who reject these lessons of history, places where civil strife, border disputes, and sectarian wars bring about terrorist enclaves and humanitarian disasters. Where order has completely broken down, we must act, but we will be stronger when we act together.

What Obama obscures here is that there is a sectarian war being waged by the Saudi-led coalition. That war is boosting both Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and a local affiliate of ISIS, and it is directly causing most of the humanitarian disaster currently afflicting the people of Yemen. The U.S. is aiding a group of governments responsible for causing most of the breakdown in order, and through its “action” the U.S. is helping to create the awful conditions that Obama pretends that our government is combating. No one has more obviously rejected the “lessons of history” than the Saudis and their allies as they have plunged into an ill-conceived military intervention in another country to dictate the political future of a people that has a long record of resisting foreign invaders, and they have done so with Washington’s full support.

Update: The death toll from the airstrike on the wedding mentioned above has been revised up to 131.