Image by Alex Shuper.

“Signalgate” is how some are christening Trump officials’ unintended disclosure of plans for bombing Yemen via a Signal group chat on March 15. Since Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg broke the story, outraged critics have demanded a return to “the ethic of accountability that our nation holds sacred.”

The analogy to Watergate is fitting, but not in the way they intend. Congressional furor over Nixon’s misbehavior fixated on the pettiest of his crimes. The articles of impeachment in 1974 failed to mention his role in a war of aggression that killed between two and four million people.

With Signalgate, it’s the Yemeni victims who go unmentioned, uncounted, unidentified. The real questions are left unasked: Why have Yemen’s Houthi rebels, the ostensible targets of the US bombing, attacked Israel and fired on ships in the Red Sea since October 2023? Under what conditions would they agree to stop? And, whatever one thinks of the Houthis, does the US government have any legal or moral right to attack Yemen, especially given its own enabling role in the deaths of several hundred thousand Yemenis – most of them children under age five – since 2015?

The answers to these questions are indisputable but inconvenient for the US-Israeli agenda. The Houthis began firing into Israeli territory on October 19, 2023. By that time hundreds of legal and human rights experts had already warned of a “potential genocide in Gaza.” The Houthis’ objective was straightforward and openly stated, on October 31 and many times........

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