Signalgate shows Trump bombing of Yemen just for Show, Ignores Dead Yemeni Children

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The high-level Trump administration Signal message thread on bombing Yemen on which someone on the staff of National Security Adviser Michael Waltz included The Atlantic‘s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg is what is impolitely called in the military a SNAFU (Situation Normal All F*cked Up). Yes, it is a security breach of gargantuan proportions. Yes, the whole exchange was illegal according to the US Official Records Act, according to which important government discussions and decisions must be documented in lasting media.

But the truly sad dimension of the SNAFU is not the revelation that the Trump Administration is the Gang that couldn’t Shoot Straight, in Jimmy Breslin’s phrase. We knew that.

It is that seasoned military personnel like Waltz, a former Special Operations colonel in Afghanistan, appear to have learned nothing from America’s longest failed military campaign, the absurdly named “war on terror.” It was more often a “war of terror,” which left hundreds of thousands dead and millions homeless.

As for the recent Trump bombing of Yemen, Jordan News reports,

“Peter Hawkins, UNICEF’s representative in Yemen, shared his observations from Hudaydah, stating: ‘I was in Hudaydah over the past three days. I passed through the western plains where people are in the streets and on the roadside, begging and looking for help. They have surrendered. I personally saw a heavily damaged building where three children were injured from yesterday’s bombing.’

“He further said, ‘Eight children were killed in the latest airstrikes in northern Yemen. These airstrikes have a direct impact on the people living in the areas surrounding the target zones. We also have staff members affected by this bombing. It is extremely shocking, and as I mentioned earlier, we have verified the deaths of 8 children in these airstrikes.'”

Hawkins has pointed out that Trump moves like cutting off USAID funds for Yemen and designating the Houthis a terrorist organization are like a “death sentence for thousands of children.”

Photo of Yemen by irwan zahuri: https://www.pexels.com/photo/smiling-children-making-gestures-posing-outdoors-14927253/

So about those Signal messages:

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote in response Vice President JD Vance’s suggestion that bombing Yemen be put off a month to see what the situation with oil prices will be,

“VP: I understand your concerns ” and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what “nobody knows who the Houthis are” which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

Hegseth is not saying that nobody knows who the Houthis are in the sense that they are an unknown quantity. He is saying that the Trump MAGA base does not know who the Houthis in Yemen are, and therefore it is a tough task to convince them to shed their isolationism and support this military action. Trump’s brand is that he claimed to have opposed the Iraq War and doesn’t want to spend American blood and treasure abroad. So, his base may ask, why is he bombing the bejesus out of Yemen, and what the hell is Yemen?

Hegseth is actually just a talking head from the Fox stable of fatuous prevaricators, and is the least qualified secretary of defense in American history. That is why his comments are on public messaging. He is advising that the Trump team blame Biden for the Houthis’ continued operations against commercial vessels in the Red Sea, which they conduct in order to protest the Israeli genocide against the civilians of Gaza. And he thinks that although no one in MAGA cares about Yemen, the Houthis, or the Red Sea, they may be gotten on board if the Houthis can be configured as a cat’s paw of Iran.

Hegseth himself, of course, has no idea whether the Houthis have a command line to Tehran. (They don’t.) He is inadvertently revealing that the tag line of “Iran-backed” that is routinely applied to the Houthis is US government propaganda, undertaken for public relations purposes. Iran does, of course, give the Houthis some money and armaments, but the Houthis would be there even if Iran did not exist — they are a native Yemeni movement of the Zaydi branch of Shiism, which is not connected to the Twelver Shiism of Iran. And the Houthis aren’t hitting ships in the Red Sea because Iran tells them to. Iran, which is close to China, may not even want Red Sea trade disrupted for Beijing. The Houthis lead a coalition of tribes, many of which are Sunni Muslims, and they need unifying issues with a pan-Islamic appeal. The genocide in Gaza fills that bill, since all Yemenis are upset about it. In fact, throughout the world, only sociopaths are not upset about the atrocities conducted by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As for Biden, he also bombed Yemen, and tried to put together a coalition of naval powers to patrol the Red Sea. But local states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia could not afford to look to their publics as though they were policing the Red Sea to allow Israel to go on massacring the Palestinian civlians of Gaza with impunity, and the Biden team couldn’t bring them aboard. Besides which, naval escorts of container ships can’t stop drone and missile attacks on them, anyway.

So Hegseth’s attempt to blame Biden for the resurgence of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea is, again, just propaganda. The Houthis survived seven years of US-backed Saudi and UAE bombing campaigns. Guerrilla movements are hard to defeat from the air. Biden’s and the British government’s bombing raids never stood a chance of affecting Houthi behavior.

Then Hegseth weighed in again, later in the discussion:

“Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first “or Gaza cease fire falls apart ” and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”-operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”

In this message, Hegseth makes the odious argument that Yemeni civilians must die under US bombardment or else the Trump administration will look as though it is dithering.

As for Israel taking action first, I couldn’t follow his reasoning there. The Israelis have already bombed Yemen. They may do so again. Why should that consideration cause the Trump administration to rush to carry out its own bombing raids?

Hegseth’s fear that the ceasefire in Gaza might fall apart shows that he is not paying attention. It was because the Israeli government blockaded food and other aid to Gaza and then began again bombing civilian apartment buildings in Gaza that the Houthis began targeting Red Sea commercial traffic again.

Hegseth admits that Trump is not bombing Yemen to defeat the Houthis. He says that the considerations are freedom of navigation and the reestablishment of deterrence.

Again, Biden also bombed Yemen, but bombing guerrilla groups does not establish deterrence, or Vietnam wouldn’t be in the hands of the Communists and Afghanistan wouldn’t be in the hands of the Taliban.

Hegseth is making this argument because JD Vance had written, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

Vance later added, “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

The vice president’s point is that Trump administration bombing of Yemen to protect Red Sea shipping primarily benefits Europe and US interests here are minor. He thinks that bombing the Houthis and patrolling the Red Sea is a European responsibility, not an American one.

It is interesting that Vance does not bring up Israel as a consideration. Surely the main reason Trump is bombing Yemen is to enable Netanyahu to continue his genocide unimpeded, not to ensure freedom of navigation, which the US does not actually believe in or it would not arbitrarily confiscate Iranian oil tankers.

So, yes, doing military planning by Signal is illegal, and yes emailing sensitive security and military documents to a journalist who used to serve in the Israeli military as a prison guard is a major breach of national security.

But the shame of these email messages is that they do not show an understanding of the limits of air power in guerrilla war, they misunderstand what actions might constitute real deterrence, and they show that for the Trump team the entire exercise is a mere performance for the public. Vance comes across as the smartest of them, since he realizes that the MAGA base doesn’t likely want this performance, anyway, and that the attempt at one-upman-ship with Biden on Red Sea policy could backfire in the Red States because it just looks like more Bidenism.