During this whole stupid US presidential race I heard very few arguments in favor of a Biden vote that struck me as anything more than the product of ignorance, propaganda distortion and partisan hackery. He'll probably be worse than Trump on war. His climate proposals are as much a band-aid on a sucking chest wound as his plans for economic justice. There'll still be racism in America. The fact that Trump ended up deporting far fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama means Biden's presidency probably won't even help things on that front.

As far as real changes that affect normal people, the coming Biden presidency doesn't offer many things to be especially hopeful about.

But there was one item on the Democratic Party's platform this election season that especially conscious people sometimes point to which I absolutely could respect as a good reason to vote for Biden. It reads as follows:

"Democrats will end support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and help bring the war to an end. This war is responsible for the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and it amplifies threats to the region and to our interests. Democrats believe that the United States should support diplomatic efforts—not block them."

“Vice Pres­i­dent Biden believes it is past time to end U.S. sup­port for the war in Yemen and can­cel the blank check the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has giv­en Sau­di Ara­bia for its con­duct of that war,” Biden cam­paign spokesper­son Andrew Bates told the Wash­ing­ton Post last year.

Now, you can believe them or not; it doesn't matter. The important point is that, while Trump vetoed congressional attempts to save Yemen (arguably the single most evil act of his entire administration), Biden campaigned on ending the war. He should therefore be pushed on that issue constantly, every time the opportunity presents itself.

The mass atrocity that is the Yemen war is without a doubt the single worst thing that is happening in our world right now. People don't like to look at it, they don't like to think about it, but it is. And it is entirely, and deliberately, man-made.

A coalition led by the US-aligned Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates has been hammering the poorest country in the Middle East with unbelievable savagery since 2015--armed and assisted by the US, UK, France, Australia, and Canada--in order to overturn a Houthi-led rebellion which ousted the previous US-backed central government. It's an extremely uneven assault by an extremely powerful cluster of allies, and Washington sits at the head of that power alliance.

Tens of thousands have been killed by the endless rain of western-manufactured explosives dropped from the sky by the Saudi coalition, and hundreds of thousands more have died from starvation and disease due to Saudi Arabia’s inhuman blockades on imports and its deliberate targeting of farms, fishing boats, marketplaces, food storage sites and cholera treatment centers with airstrikes. The goal is to make Houthi forces so miserable and hungry that they give up, no matter how many civilians they need to kill in the process.

It's hard to get accurate figures from an information ecosystem with so little interest in the matter--for years the mass media kept reporting that only 10,000 had died despite that statistical stasis being an obvious impossibility in an ongoing war. An analysis of United Nations data found that 85,000 children under five have died of extreme hunger and disease since the start of the war, but that was two years ago. Another UN report estimated nearly a quarter million people have died in the war, but that was a year and a half ago. Both numbers are necessarily much larger by now.