Recent news stories report that the U.S. government has stockpiled tons of food aid in Colombia, ready to be forwarded to neighboring Venezuela, ostensibly to help avert a “humanitarian disaster” there.

But the truth is, there is a much greater humanitarian crisis in Yemen, where the United Nations has reported millions of civilians are near starvation and in desperate need of the simplest health care. Indeed, Washington is even more morally obligated to send food aid there, since it is precisely U.S. planes and bombs — not to mention Uncle Sam’s targeting assistance to the Saudi Air Force — that have directly caused much of those civilian casualties.

Yet I don’t hear any sympathies from Trump administration officials like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton (nor from any of the Congressional representatives from either Democratic or Republican parties) to alleviate the real and more urgent human suffering there. Does anyone smell an imperial hypocrisy here?

Danny H.C. Li

Keaau, Hawaii

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