Trump said Houthis agreed not to fight the US, weighs joining the war after they killed an American.

…(cont) I wrote this down — hold on, it's in the car, give me a second, it's wedged under the seat next to the thing that used to be a fan belt — here. September 20th. The president said the Houthis had agreed not to fight the United States. Agreed. That's the word that ran in the story, not "paused," not "we're told," agreed — like my fence, like there was a handshake somewhere and a line everybody could point to.

By whom, exactly — is there anything in writing from the Houthis' side of it? Two days after that the Houthis took the port city of Mocha, with what the reporting said was Iranian weapons and guidance behind them. By the 14th, the coverage had stopped calling it unrest and started calling it Yemen heading back to all-out war. The G7 spent September 22nd asking Iran to stop arming a fight that, officially, had just been called over.

On October 4th, Washington put its backing for the Saudi offensive in writing. That's not a mood, that's a filing. Sometime after that — I don't have the date on this page, I'd have to call somebody — a strike hit Riyadh's airport and three people didn't get to go home. Then Saturday, the same airport again: twelve dead this time, one of them American, more than three hundred hurt. The dog barked at the television during that part, which he never does, so I remember exactly where I was standing.

And now the president is weighing whether to put the United States into the fight himself. Not the fight that was supposed to be finished three weeks earlier. The other one. The one that kept going the whole time underneath that word.

Not the body count, not the dates — just the one thing, because it did the same job out here that it did on my fence: it let two parties act like a question was closed without either one checking where the ground actually sat. I don't know what the Houthis signed onto, or with whom. I know what got said on the 20th, what got filed on the 4th, and what landed on that airport twice since.

So when that same airport got hit twice after the president's word ran in the paper, which part of his sentence turned out to be true — the part where the fighting stopped, or the part where it didn't?

Oh — excuse me, before you go, one more thing, and I'm sorry to bring this back up: the man who told the country this was settled three weeks ago is the same man deciding this week whether to send Americans into the part that kept going the whole time. I just think somebody in that room ought to ask him which one he still thinks is settled.