Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– Yemen goes through a civil war that does not end, frequent cholera outbreaks, and acute malnutrition among children. These days, however, the southern Arabian country appears on the news mostly in connection to the rebel Houthi movement’s attacks against Israel and ships transiting the Red Sea. The Houthis, led by Abdulmalik Al-Houthi, have their origins in the border areas with Saudi Arabia but now control most of northwestern Yemen, where the majority of the population lives.

The rebel group has grown increasingly close to Iran during the decade that has passed since the beginning of the civil war in Yemen. The Houthis are now considered to belong to Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”, which also includes Syria, the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas killed 1,139 people in Israel and took about 250 hostages. Israel responded by waging war on Gaza, and at least 42,603 people have been killed and 99,795 injured in Gaza (the total number of direct and indirect deaths is likely to be much higher, with a group of US doctors who served in Gaza estimating 120,000 Gazans have died).

Soon after October 7, the Houthis started to attack ships in the Red Sea, driving up global shipping costs and forcing a steep decline in the number of vessels transiting the area. At the same time, and despite the over 2,000km (1,300 miles) that separate Yemen’s capital Sana’a from Tel Aviv, the Houthis have carried out direct attacks against Israel.

Although the Israeli air defense system has normally intercepted the missiles and drones launched from Yemen, last July a drone slammed into an apartment building in Tel Aviv killing one person and leaving ten others wounded. The Houthis have announced they will stop their attacks if there is a ceasefire in Gaza. With no end to the war on Gaza in sight, there is no way of saying whether the Houthis are bluffing.

The Houthis’ increasingly assertive military activities have led to an unprecedented presence of the US Navy in the Red Sea, both protecting ships and targeting positions in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. Together with the UK, the US has conducted 200 airstrikes in Yemen since January 2024, with 74 civilian casualties reported as of September 2024.

Ironically enough, in the early 2010s, then-US President Barack Obama’s so-called “Yemen Model” was supposed to represent a new and lighter-footprint approach to the Middle East. Alexandra Stark, an associate policy researcher at RAND, greatly contributes to our understanding of the self-deceptive Yemen Model in her recently published book “The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East.”

Steven Simon, one of Obama’s Middle East advisors, spoke about the Yemen model as an “intelligence-driven, dynamic targeting” to disrupt terrorist activities by using drones. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) became a top national security priority for the Obama administration after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a terrorist connected to AQAP, failed to detonate a bomb aboard a commercial plane en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on December 25, 2009.

AQAP had a strong presence in Yemen, but according to the Obama White House, it could be neutralized by partnering with the Yemeni government and launching remotely directed drone strikes. This approach had the advantage of avoiding the boots on the ground that had made the Afghanistan and Iraq wars so unpopular at home. Stark argues that, at the beginning, some limited successes were achieved, but the Yemen model soon faced two critical problems.

First, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was so interested in the US funds newly available to his regime (connected to Washington’s counter-terrorism efforts) that he had little incentive to do his part in combating AQAP.  A US success against AQAP would have been a failure for Saleh. It would have led to a loss of the funds that oiled the wheels of his patronage system. Second, and equally important, was the mistake of approaching Yemen through the extremely narrow lenses of counterterrorism. Washington thought it could react to AQAP’s activities in Yemen as if taking place in a vacuum, “while largely ignoring or deprioritizing questions around governance, the allocation of political power, and economic development.”[1]

Alexandra Stark, The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). To Buy, Click Here.

Because of this narrow-minded approach, the US did not see (or did not want to see) how the US-Saleh partnership de-legitimatized the Yemeni leader in front of his population. The same applies to Saleh’s diversion of US counter-terrorism funds to pay for his military campaign against the Houthis in northern Yemen, which had been going on since 2004.

Although Saleh would be forced to resign in early 2012 following the Arab Spring protests, the US kept a similar counterterrorism partnership with Saleh’s vice-president and successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. During Obama’s two terms as president, an estimate of between 1,094 to 1,394 people were killed by US drone strikes, with around 100 of them being civilians, according to New America.

Leaving aside the horrible assumption that a drone operator is entitled to decide who lives and who dies, the drone campaign was most likely also a failure in purely utilitarian terms. As Stark notes, there is no systematic evidence of how the drone campaign was perceived by Yemenis, but more general research on counterterrorism points out that the death of non-combatants tends to swell the ranks of terrorist organizations. The US continues to strike AQAP targets until today, and the terrorist group is estimated to have between 3,000 and 4,000 members.

The US military never developed a transparent system to account for all the civilian deaths in Yemen as a result of US drone strikes. Even so, when in March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition intervened in the Yemen civil war to roll back the Houthis’ territorial advances, the US did not only equip the Saudis with the necessary weapons for the military operation. It also provided the Saudi armed forces with advice that would supposedly reduce civilian casualties. The almost 9,000 civilian deaths as a result of targeting by the Saudi-led coalition, as estimated by the Yemen Data Project, speak for themselves.

Obama’s decision to greenlight the Saudi intervention in the Yemen civil war (with a more secondary role for the UAE) was strongly connected to the broader context in the region at that moment. Obama sought to reassure Washington’s main security partners in the Gulf at a time when the US was about to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, providing sanctions relief in exchange for significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. Whereas US President Donald Trump would unilaterally abandon the JCPOA in May 2018, Saudi airstrikes on Yemen continued until April 2022.

Analyzing the seven years of Saudi airstrikes on Yemen, Stark identifies only two episodes in which the US appears to have used some of the leverage over Riyadh that came with Washington’s military and diplomatic support for the Saudi-led campaign. The first moment came in October 2016, when a Saudi airstrike on a funeral killed 140 civilians and wounded 600 more. In response to this, the Obama administration reduced the number of US personnel assisting the Saudis in their airstrikes and temporarily froze a $350 million weapons deal. The number of Saudi airstrikes temporarily decreased after the US decision.

The second limited use of US leverage over Saudi Arabia took place in December 2017, when the Trump administration called the Saudi coalition to stop the blockade of the key Yemeni port of Hodeidah. The Saudis did so and allowed the arrival of four new cranes to the port donated by USAID. These two moments of US pressure on Saudi Arabia were too half-hearted and inconsistent to yield sustainable results. Still, they give us a glimpse of what could have happened had US leaders cared enough about Yemen.

Not everyone in the US was willing to forget Yemen, however. Stark devotes a chapter of her book to the Yemen advocacy coalition, a diverse alliance ranging from humanitarian NGOs such as Oxfam to libertarian-minded groups such as Defense Priorities. They were united by the desire to stop US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and asked the US Congress to apply pressure to that effect on President Trump. The Yemen advocacy coalition organized a long-running campaign to inform the broader public of the US’s role in the Yemen war and lobby politicians on Capitol Hill.

In early 2019, the House of Representatives and the Senate approved legislation relating to the War Powers Resolution, which restricts the involvement of US forces abroad without congressional authorization. Trump used his veto power to stop the legislation in its tracks. However, Stark credits the campaign with having “an effect both on the Trump administration and the behavior of the Saudi-led coalition.”[2] Stark argues that one of its most significant successes was raising the reputational costs of being engaged in the war for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. She notes this played a role in the Emirates’ decision to withdraw most of its forces from Yemen in July 2019.

“The Yemen Model” concludes with some general lessons from Washington’s approach to Yemen during the last decade and a half. First, prioritizing short-term stability at the expense of addressing the root causes of conflict, as the Obama administration did when partnering with Saleh against AQAP, is ultimately counterproductive. Second, the US democratic system, as shown by the Yemen advocacy coalition, offers opportunities to demand accountability from political leaders even in the usually secluded realm of foreign policy. Third, the US cannot shape the world alone but the leverage it can exert over its security partners is very strong.

Stark’s book does not discuss the war on Gaza, but her concluding thoughts on the Yemen model are extremely relevant. A former official quoted in a 2017 article explained that the Obama administration became “very frustrated” with how the Saudi-led forces were carrying out the war in Yemen but believed US support was having a positive impact. If this sounds familiar, it is because we are now witnessing a similar dynamic, only on a probably even deadlier scale.

In January 2024, US President Joseph Biden was reportedly “running out” of patience with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. In March 2024, we were told he was “extremely frustrated” with the Israeli leader. Examples of such reports could go on and on. If we did not know that the Biden administration has contributed $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023, or that the US shields Israel diplomatically at every international venue, we could be forgiven to think that Biden is simply powerless. But the billions in military aid and the US key diplomatic support equal enormous leverage. A leverage the US actively decides not to use.  Even if the cost is tens of thousands of lives in a war that can already be defined as regional and now risks expanding to Iran, gaining an even more dangerous dimension.

[1] Alexandra Stark, The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 31.

[2] Ibid., p. 161.

The Israeli strikes came a day after a Houthi drone strike, which may amount to a war crime, on a Tel Aviv residential neighborhood that killed one civilian and wounded four others. The Israeli airstrikes, which killed at least six civilians and reportedly injured at least 80 others, hit more than two dozen oil storage tanks and two shipping cranes in Hodeidah port in northwest Yemen, as well as a power plant in Hodeidah’s Salif district. The attacks appeared to cause disproportionate harm to civilians and civilian objects. Serious violations of the laws of war committed willfully, that is deliberately or recklessly, are war crimes.

“The Israeli attacks on Hodeidah in response to the Houthis’ strike on Tel Aviv could have a lasting impact on millions of Yemenis in Houthi-controlled territories,” said Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Yemenis are already enduring widespread hunger after a decade-long conflict. These attacks will only exacerbate their suffering.” 

Human Rights Watch interviewed 11 people about the Hodeidah attack, including a Houthi official in Yemen’s oil industry and four United Nations agency staff with knowledge of the port. Human Rights Watch also analyzed satellite imagery of the targeted locations and photographs of potential weapons remnants collected by the nongovernmental organization Mwatana for Human Rights. Human Rights Watch sent its preliminary findings to Israeli authorities on July 31 and to the Houthis on August 7. Neither has replied.

The Israeli attacks killed Ahmed Abdullah Musa Jilan, Salah Abdullah Muqbil al-Sarari, Abdul Bari Muhammad Yusuf Ezzi, Nabil Nasher Abdo Abdullah, Abu Bakr Hussein Abdullah Faqih, and Idris Dawood Hassan Ahmed, all Yemen Petroleum Company employees. The Houthi drone strike on Tel Aviv killed 50-year-old Yevgeny Ferder in an apartment building. 

An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, said that the Houthi drone was an “Iranian-made Samad-3” unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The Samad-3’s guidance and targeting capabilities are unclear, and the Houthi’s target was uncertain, making it difficult to determine whether the strike hit its intended target. The Houthis did not indicate that it was attacking a military objective, but stated that they had struck an “important target,” possibly a reference to the US Embassy branch office in the vicinity.

The Houthi attack, which deliberately or indiscriminately harmed civilians and civilian objects, may amount to a war crime. In recent months, the Houthis have indiscriminately launched numerous missiles at the Israeli port towns of Eilat and Haifa. 

Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces damaged or destroyed at least 29 of the 41 oil storage tanks at Hodeidah port, as well as the only two cranes used for loading and unloading supplies from ships. The airstrikes also destroyed oil tanks connected to the Hodeidah power plant, causing the power plant to stop operating for 12 hours.  

A remnant that Mwatana for Human Rights collected at the site bore the markings of Woodward, a US manufacturing company, and matches remnants collected in other contexts of the GBU-39 series bomb made by the US company Boeing. The GBU-39, known as the “small diameter bomb,” is a guided, airdropped munition. 

Human Rights Watch also wrote to Woodward and Boeing on August 14 but did not receive a response

The Hodeidah port is critical for delivering food and other necessities to the Yemeni population, who depend on imports. About 70 percent of Yemen’s commercial imports and 80 percent of its humanitarian assistance passes through Hodeidah port, which UN Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative Auke Lootsma said was “absolutely crucial to commercial and humanitarian activities.” Rosemary DiCarlo, under-secretary-general for the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, described the port as a “lifeline for millions of people” that should be “open and operating.” 

A UN agency official said that about 3,400 people, all civilians, work at the port. The official said on July 30 that he had not “seen a single new vessel entering the port since the attack, which is an alarming indication” for humanitarian aid provision. Other Yemeni ports lack the same capacity to manage imports, and the damage and destruction of the oil tanks, loading cranes, and broader damage to the port’s facilities would take significant funding and time to rebuild. 

The Houthi oil industry official said that the early evening strikes were carried out “while dozens of civilians were there, including staff who run these tanks, and truck drivers who were there to take oil to transport to other governorates.” 

Human Rights Watch analysis of satellite imagery found that the oil tanks burned for at least three days, posing environmental concerns. Musaed Aklan, an environmental expert at the Sana’a Center, a Yemeni research group, said that “the toxic fumes resulting from the burning of thousands of tons of fuel … undoubtedly pose a serious risk to public health.” He said that oil leaks from the tanks into surrounding areas “risk contaminating nearby water sources, soil, beaches, and marine habitats.”

Hagari, the Israeli military spokesperson, described the target of attack as “Al Hudaydah Port, used by the Houthis as the main supply route for the transfer of Iranian weapons from Iran to Yemen.” He said the Israeli air force “struck dual-use infrastructure used for terrorist activities, including energy infrastructure. Israel’s necessary and proportionate strikes were carried out in order to stop the Houthi’s terror attacks.” The Israeli government has not provided information to substantiate these claims.

Under UN Security Council Resolution 2534 (2020), the UN Mission to Support the Hodeidah Agreement is mandated to oversee Hodeidah city and port to ensure that no military personnel or material are present. An official for a UN agency that monitors the port said that the agency had never found evidence of a Houthi military presence in the port. He said that another UN agency that inspects vessels before they enter the port had not found any weapons. Two UN officials who operate in Hodeidah noted that Houthi authorities provide prior approval for UN access and accompany UN officials on inspections.

The oil industry official said that the oil tanks at the port are not owned by the Houthis but “by Yemeni businessmen who import the oil and resell it to fuel stations and other institutions.” Aid organizations also own some of the oil and use it for their operations. A WFP official said that the organization lost 780,000 liters of fuel in the attack, which it was using to “support hospital generators” and water and sanitation infrastructure across Yemen. The remaining oil is used for various other public purposes, said the oil industry official and Mwatana. Two UN agency officials said that the oil at the port was imported from the United Arab Emirates.

The Israeli airstrikes also struck the main power plant in Hodeidah. Two people knowledgeable about Hodeidah said that the power plant was the city’s main source of electricity, providing electricity to hospitals, schools, businesses, and homes. The climate in Hodeidah governorate is among the hottest in Yemen, making electricity critical for fans, air conditioning, and refrigeration.

The applicable laws of war prohibit deliberate, indiscriminate, or disproportionate attacks on civilians and civilian objects. An attack not directed at a specific military objective is indiscriminate. An attack is disproportionate if the expected civilian loss is excessive compared to the anticipated military gain of the attack. When used by an armed force or non-state armed group, port facilities, oil storage tanks, and electrical power plants can be valid military objectives. 

No information has been made public indicating that weapons or military supplies were being stored at or delivered to the port, or that the oil and electricity, monitored under Resolution 2534, were being diverted to the Houthi military, which would make the Israeli attack unlawfully indiscriminate. However, even if the attack were against valid military objectives, the harm to the civilian population likely made the attack disproportionate. In addition to the reported civilian casualties, the damage to the port facilities would appear to inflict excessive immediate and longer-term harm for large swaths of the Yemeni population who rely on the Hodeidah port for survival.

Israel’s allies, including the United States and the United Kingdom, should suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel so long as its forces commit systematic and widespread laws-of-war violations, including in Gaza and in Lebanon, with impunity. Governments that continue to provide arms to the Israeli government risk complicity in war crimes. 

The UN Panel of Experts on Yemen has also previously found that Iran is likely supplying weapons to the Houthis. Iran should not provide missiles to the Houthis so long as the Houthis continue to use them in unlawful attacks.

“The Israeli airstrikes on critical infrastructure in Hodeidah could have a profoundly devastating impact on many Yemeni lives over the longer term,” Jafarnia said. “Both the Israelis and the Houthis should immediately halt all unlawful attacks affecting civilians and their lives.”

Via Human Rights Watch

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Israeli Strikes damage Fuel Depot at Hodeida

( Middle East Monitor ) – The Israeli port of Eilat officially declared its bankruptcy, after eight months of complete paralysis of commercial activity and its cessation of receiving ships and containers, especially coming from the Asian countries’ markets, carrying with them the needs of the economy and its industrial sector. This includes raw materials, intermediate goods, production inputs, machinery and equipment, crude oil and fuel, wheat, food, cars and other market needs.

The reason for this was the successive attacks launched by the Yemeni Houthi group on Israeli ships in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, as well as the targeting of ships from countries supporting the the genocidal war it is waging against the people of Gaza, most notably American and British ships.

According to the World Cargo website that reports global shipping news, the port of Eilat has officially declared bankruptcy due to the lack of commercial activity. According to data provided by the port’s CEO, Gideon Gilbert, the port has not witnessed any activity or revenues during the past eight months, and attacks by Yemeni forces in the Red Sea caused a decline in shipping traffic by 85 per cent. This sharp decline led to heavy losses for the port, which forced it to request financial aid from the Israeli government to cover its expenses and avoid permanent closure.

Times of India Video: “Big Win For Iraqi & Houthi Fighters; Israeli Port Declares ‘Bankruptcy’ After Attacks | Watch

Major ports and economic and financial facilities are expected to declare bankruptcy in Israel during the coming period, given the almost complete paralysis that has affected economic activities, including vital sectors such as technology, information technology, direct investment, building and construction, real estate, industries, agriculture, domestic tourism and aviation. The bankruptcy may even extend to the financial and banking sector in light of the wave of flight of money and huge deposits from Israel’s markets and banks, the flight of foreign investors, the increase in the rates of bad loans and those that are unlikely to be repaid, and the decline of the shekel, foreign reserves, and the state’s public revenues, especially from taxes.

The danger of the bankruptcy of the Port of Eilat lies in the fact that the port is considered one of the most important Israeli ports. It is actually the only Israeli port overlooking the Red Sea. It represents a main gateway and a vital lung for Israel’s foreign trade with Asia, Africa and some Gulf countries. Its paralysis has disrupted supply chains and burdened the Israeli economy, causing it huge trading losses.

The announcement of the bankruptcy of the port of Eilat is only a drop in the ocean of the huge economic and financial losses that Israel has suffered since the start of the war on Gaza. It also reveals the severe damage that the Houthi attacks have inflicted on the Israeli economy, especially its trade with China, India, South Korea, Singapore, and other Asian and Gulf countries. Were it not for the logistical and commercial support that Israel receives from some countries in the region that supply Israel’s markets with its needs through Gulf ports in Dubai and Bahrain, the impact would have been greater and more painful, and Israel’s economy and markets would have witnessed collapses in vital activities, and unprecedented jumps in the markets, especially in the prices of food commodities and living.

Of course, continuing the Gaza war does not serve the interest of the Israeli economy, the activities of which have been disrupted and which has suffered heavy losses and massive damage. Some of its sectors have even been completely paralysed. According to figures from the Bank of Israel and the Israeli Ministry of Finance, the cost of the war from 7 October until the end of March 2024 reached over 70 billion shekels ($73 billion).

This is just the cost of the war. What about the cost of evacuating about 250,000 Israelis from their homes in the “Gaza Envelope” settlements, the Western Negev and the Lebanese border, and the cost of paying the salaries of the approximately 360,000 reservists who were called up from their civilian jobs? They disrupted the work of schools, universities and economic facilities, including tourism, restaurants, cafes and entertainment venues. What about the other repercussions of the war on the Israeli economy, such as the rise in inflation rates, the intensification of the general budget deficit and the increase in government debts? What about the cost of losses to economic facilities, commercial interests, and small and medium businesses in Israel, which witnessed a severe recession due to all government resources and budgets being allocated and utilised for the war?

Middle East Monitor

This article appeared in Arabic in Al Araby on 16 July, 2024

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. “Israel” has been used in accordance with IC house style.

The Gate of Lamentation

In a sense, it couldn’t be more remarkable, historically speaking. Modest numbers of Yemenis have managed to launch a challenge to the prevailing world order, despite being poor, weak, and brown, attributes that usually make people invisible to the American establishment. One all-too-modern asset the Houthis have is the emergence of micro-weaponry in our world — small drones and rockets that, at the moment, can’t be easily wiped out even by the sophisticated armaments of the U.S. Navy.

Another is geographical. The Houthis command the Tihamah coastal plain, the eastern littoral of the Red Sea. It stretches from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (the entry point to that sea from the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean) to the Suez Canal, which connects the shipping in those waters to the Mediterranean, and so to Europe. The Bab el-Mandeb, known for being treacherous to navigate even in the most peaceable of times, is said to mean “the Gate of Lamentation,” and these days, it’s living up to its name. Keep in mind that 10% of world seaborne trade flows through the Suez Canal and, perhaps even more importantly, 12% of the world’s energy supplies.

What we might call the Battle of the Tihamah has already lasted seven months and, surprisingly enough, given the opponents, its outcome remains in doubt. The Associated Press quotes Brian Clark, a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute and a former Navy submariner, as expressing concerns that the Houthis are on the verge of penetrating American naval defenses with their missiles, raising the possibility that they could inflict significant damage on a U.S. destroyer or even an aircraft carrier. Repeated American and British air strikes against suspected Houthi weapons sites in and around the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, have so far failed to halt the war on shipping. Even high-tech American Reaper drones are no longer assured of dominating Middle Eastern airspace since the Houthis have shot down four of those $30 million weapons so far.

Crux Video: “Incoming US Aircraft Carrier Primary Target” In Red Sea Houthis Declare After Attacks On Four Ships”

Idling the Suez Canal

Given how little Americans generally know about Yemen, some historical background is perhaps in order. The Houthi movement has its roots in Zaydi Shiism, which took hold in northern Yemen in the 890s. (Yes, the 890s, not the 1890s!). Today’s Zaydis are upset by Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Last December, large crowds of them came out in the Zaydi stronghold of Saadeh and other northern Yemeni towns to protest Israel’s intensive bombing of that 25-mile strip of land. Waving Yemeni and Palestinian flags, they pledged support against “the armies of tyranny,” shouting, “We closed Bab el-Mandeb, O Zionist, do not approach!” and “The Yemeni response is legitimate, and the Red Sea is forbidden!”

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The Houthis have indeed struck commercial container ships in the Red Sea, even seizing one, the Galaxy Leader (which, believe it or not, they turned into a tourist attraction). They also sank two cargo ships, killing three crew members. Although they maintain that they are only hitting Israeli-owned vessels, most of their attacks have, in fact, targeted the vessels of unrelated third parties like Greece. Their strikes have, however, caused a major disruption in world trade.

The Houthis have also fired large numbers of ballistic missiles at the Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat, idling it since November. Some five percent of Israel’s imports once arrived through Eilat. Now, such trade has been rerouted to Mediterranean ports at a distinctly higher cost, while southern Israel’s economy has taken a big hit. Gideon Golber, the CEO of the Port of Eilat, demanded that the United States intervene. And Israel is anything but the only country to suffer from such attacks. Ports such as Massawa, Port Sudan, and Berbera in the Horn of Africa have also become ghost towns, while the traffic through the Suez Canal is now so light that Egypt, which collects transit tolls, is suffering significant economic damage.

In addition, those Houthi strikes, local as they may seem, have had an impact on global supply chains. Insurance costs have risen radically, with crushing war-risk premiums. Ocean container ship rates surged this spring, as companies involved in the trade between Asia and Europe have been forced to avoid the Suez Canal and instead take a far longer route around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Atlantic coast of Africa. Shanghai to Rotterdam rates skyrocketed from $1,452 for a 40-foot container in July of last year to $5,270 in late May 2024.

Revolutionary Shiite Islam

The present militia commander in Yemen, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, considers himself part of a Shiite revolutionary tradition that goes back a long, long way. So, to truly grasp the dangers of the moment for the U.S. Navy in the Red Sea, it makes sense, believe it or not, to momentarily journey deep into history.

Last year, al-Houthi observed the death in battle of the founder of his tradition, Zayd Ibn Ali, in the year 740. His “movement, renaissance, jihad, and martyrdom,” he said, “made a great contribution to the continuity of the authentic Islam of Muhammad… He faced tyranny and had an impact on instituting change.”

A generation of Americans involved in the Middle East has come to understand that there are two major branches of Islam, the Shiites and the Sunnis. Neither is monolithic, with each branch having several denominations. The division between the two goes back to questions about the succession to the Prophet Muhammad (who died in 632). One faction of early believers invested leadership in senior disciples of the Prophet from his Quraysh clan. Over the centuries, these became the Sunnis.

Another faction, which gradually evolved into the Shiites, favored Muhammad’s son-in-law and first cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Seeking a dynastic succession, they invested leadership in Ali’s descendants through the Prophet’s daughter Fatimah. Most Shiites historically acknowledge 12 Imams or leaders of the dynasty. The Zaydis, however, accepted only five early Imams.

Unlike the Shiites of Iran and Iraq, Yemen’s Zaydis never had ayatollahs. Nor did they curse Sunnis, with whom they often had good relations. The Zaydi branch of Shiism in Yemen was led by court judges or qadis, typically hailing from a caste of putative descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, the Sayyids or Sadah, who emerged as mediators in tribal feuds. Critics of today’s Helpers of God government in North Yemen allege that, despite its populist rhetoric, it is dominated by a handful of clans who consider themselves descendants of the Prophet, including the Houthis themselves.

Saudi Hegemony and the Rise of the Houthis

Forms of Arab nationalism and a rhetoric of anti-imperialism are anything but new in Yemen. After World War II, with European empires weakened, a desire for independence swept the Global South. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt emerged as the nationalist leader who finally kicked the British out of his country, inspiring so many others in the region. Egyptian-backed young officers in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, staged a coup in 1962 against a hidebound theocratic leader who had long kept the country in a state of isolation. In the process, they drew it into a civil war between republican nationalists and royalists. Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all backed the royalists, but some 100,000 crack Egyptian troops won the day for the young officers before withdrawing in 1970.

In 1978, Colonel Ali Abdallah Saleh, a politician in North Yemen, launched an internal coup within the officer corps there and appointed himself president for life. His corrupt government, putatively a secular Arab nationalist one, would receive billions of dollars from the fundamentalist royalists of Saudi Arabia.

The Helpers of God party militia, or the Houthis, arose among the Zaydi Shiites of northern Yemen in the 1990s as a backlash against the inroads that neighboring, wealthy Wahhabi Saudi Arabia had made. That country’s Wahhabism had arisen as a puritan reform of Sunnism in the eighteenth century. Saleh allowed its missionaries to proselytize the Shiite Zaydis, provoking the anger of the latter.

Under the influence of the anti-Saudi Houthi family, Zaydi militiamen based in Saadeh in Yemen’s hardscrabble north turned radical, coming into frequent conflict with the Yemeni army. When the Arab Spring youth revolt overthrew Saleh in 2012, the Houthis’ political wing sought influence in the new government. But in September 2014, impatient with an interminable reform process aimed at drafting a new constitution and electing a new parliament, the Houthis marched into the capital, Sanaa, and took it over. Behind the scenes, they had allied with the deposed president, Saleh, before his death, and the army faction still loyal to him, which gave them access to billions of dollars in American-supplied weaponry. By early 2015, the Houthis had expelled Saleh’s successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, from the capital and made an unsuccessful bid to take over all of Yemen from Saadeh in the north to Aden in the south.

Meanwhile, their dominance of North Yemen proved unacceptable to the Saudis and the allied United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose secular potentate, Mohammed Bin Zayed, had long despised such Islamic political movements. As a result, those two countries launched an air war against the Helpers of God in the spring of 2015. The ruinous Seven Years War that followed would displace millions and endanger even more millions with food insecurity and disease. It failed, however, to dislodge the Helpers of God and, by 2022, a truce was finally agreed to. Perhaps thanks to that painful experience, the Saudis have declined to join the Americans this year in the Battle of Tihamah. And in some fashion, the Houthis’ experience of the intensive aerial bombing tactics of Saudi Arabia and the UAE years ago undoubtedly left them with particular sympathy for the Palestinians under incessant Israeli air assault in Gaza.

An Alliance of Resistance

Both the Saudis and the Emiratis saw the Houthis as a mere cat’s paw for Iran. Although the Iranians did indeed offer them some support, this was a distinct misreading of the relationship between Sanaa and Tehran. At the very least, Iranian aid was dwarfed by the billions of dollars in weaponry Washington provided to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in those years.

In reality, the Houthis are homegrown Yemeni nationalists, having even attracted some Sunni tribes into their coalition. Still, their current leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, has clearly been influenced by aspects of Iran’s political radicalism and chants “death to America” and “death to Israel” just the way Iran’s clerical leader Ali Khamenei does. Like the regime in Iran, the Houthi government has no respect for domestic human rights or dissent. Although there is no command line from Tehran to Sanaa, the Houthis do loosely form part of Iran’s “alliance of resistance” against Israel and the United States. However, it’s not clear that Iran, closely allied with Russia and China and covertly exporting its U.S.-sanctioned petroleum to China, ever wanted international shipping costs to double, thanks to the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, something which hurts all three of those countries.

Despite the Houthi appeal to religious identity, it’s also mainly a movement of Arab nationalists, which helps to explain its deep sympathy for the Sunni Palestinians as fellow Arabs. In an interview at the beginning of June, Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi condemned Israel for its genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and its targeting of the West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem. He similarly denounced Washington as an imperial partner of Israel and an enabler of its crimes, as well as a hypocrite in theoretically promoting respect for the rule of law, while dismissing or even threatening international courts and supporting crackdowns at American colleges and universities when their students protested Israeli policies. He also praised the resistance of the vaguely allied forces of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Shiite militias. In the process, he vowed that however intense American (and British) air attacks on Yemen became, he and his movement would never back down from their support of the Palestinian people.

At the moment, the situation in the Red Sea remains militarily muted, but it has the potential to become one of the most dangerous in the world, rivaling those in Ukraine and Taiwan. In the meantime, it remains a drag on the global economy, while helping to contribute to stubborn inflation and supply-chain problems.

Significant Houthi damage to a U.S. naval vessel at any point in the future could plunge Washington into warlike acts that might risk direct conflict with Iran. President Joe Biden could, of course, lower the temperature by moving far more strongly to end Israel’s total war on Gaza, an intolerable affront to norms of international humanitarian law that only strengthens the vigilantism of the Houthis and their like. While the ongoing Israeli assault should be ended to prevent further death and looming mass starvation in Gaza, it should also be ended to forestall yet another ruinous American war in the Middle East.

Copyright 2024 Juan Cole

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Recent revelations that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the US have held secret talks as a way of resolving months of attacks by Tehran-backed Houthi rebels on shipping in the Red Sea have raised eyebrows. Surely the two countries have been implacable foes for decades? How could they be engaged in constructive negotiations?

On first glance this seems unlikely. Since its establishment following the 1979 revolution in Iran, the ideology of the Islamic Republic established in its wake has played heavily on anti-imperialism and the rejection of what is seen as “US hegemony”.

Tehran has tended to divide the international system in terms of what it sees as the “oppressed” and the “oppressors” with the US as the chief oppressor and the Islamic Republic the defender of the oppressed.

These ideas were an important part of political culture and debates among many Iranians before 1979 in response to what many people felt had been excessive foreign interference. Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, co-opted these ideas.

In practical terms, this meant a rejection of the Carter administration’s close involvement in Iranian affairs, despite human rights abuses under the Shah of Iran.

The desire to reject US influence was perhaps evident in the takeover of the US embassy in 1979 and the subsequent hostage crisis. With the Iran-Iraq War which broke out after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, defence against the US also became an integral part of the Islamic Republic’s ideology because it was perceived that Iraq had US support.

But to view the Islamic Republic’s relationship with the US simply in terms of Khomeini’s ideology – or without appreciating different approaches from within the Islamic Republic over the years – provides an inaccurate picture. Historically, pragmatism and dialogue have also played an important role.

Mohammad Khatami, who was elected president of Iran in 1997, was pragmatic, and considered dialogue integral to the Islamic Republic’s ideology. He sought to bring Iran out of the isolation from the international system that had been characteristic since the 1979 Revolution.

Hindustan Times video: “Iran-U.S. ‘Secret Talks’ Near Houthi Territory | Biden Pleading Tehran For Help In Red Sea? | ”

Khatami’s Dialogue Among Civilisations speech to the United Nations in 1998 drew on intellectual debates about the aims of the Islamic Revolution and reforming the Islamic Republic. His speech recommended designating 2001 as the year of dialogue among civilizations, a proposal that was unanimously adopted by a vote of the UN general assembly.

In 1998, Khatami addressed the American people on CNN, as a part of this dialogue. He drew parallels between the American war of independence and Iran’s search for a national identity, declaring: “We feel that what we seek is what the founders of the American civilisation were also pursuing four centuries ago. This is why we sense an intellectual affinity with the essence of the American civilisation.”

In 2001, Khatami condemned the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Under his direction, Iran also signed a secret deal to provide assistance to US forces in their campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan that year.

‘Axis of Evil’

But a combination of factors, including being labelled as a key member of George W Bush’s “axis of evil”, contributed to more strained relations with Washington under Khatami’s successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Considered by many as a populist leader, Ahmadinejad’s policy towards the US (and Israel) was aggressive, ideological, and less pragmatic. With a dramatic rise in human rights abuses under Ahmadinejad, western concerns centred on Iran’s uranium enrichment activities and Bush’s “war on terror” rhetoric prompted a steady deterioration in the Islamic Republic’s relations with the US.

After Barack Obama took office as US president in 2009, reports of fraud in the Iranian presidential election of that year brought Iranians in big cites on to the streets. Obama condemned what he called the “unjust” violence against protesters. Meanwhile EU, UN and US sanctions hardened as a response to Iran’s developing nuclear programme.

Nuclear deal

At this stage Iran’s political establishment could see the need to restore the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy both with the Iranian people and internationally. The election of Hassan Rouhani as president in 2013 went some way to resolving both of these issues.

In contrast to Ahmadinejad, Rouhani promoted a policy of “constructive engagement”. A series of secret meetings between the Obama and Rouhani administrations contributed to the signing of the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) – the Iran nuclear deal – in July 2015. This restricted Iran’s nuclear programme in return for a promised easing of sanctions.

The JCPOA was just one sign of this pragmatism between Tehran and Washington. The US and the Islamic Republic also cooperated in response to the rise of Islamic State (IS). The removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 with the subsequent de-Ba’athification policy created a security vacuum in Iraq which allowed IS to grow.

Despite different priorities and their ongoing rivalry, the Islamic Republic and the US needed to cooperate against what each saw as the greater enemy. This sort of backchannel communication was seen again recently when the US secretly warned Tehran it had intelligence of a planned IS attack in Iran in January.

Ultimately, the Islamic Republic’s priority is its own survival. This is all the more pertinent following the massive “woman, life, freedom” protests.

The death in custody in September 2022 of the Kurdish-Iranian woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, for what the Islamic Republic’s morality police said was improper wearing of her hijab, sparked the largest protests since the 1979 revolution drawing horrific violence from authorities. An upshot was that many ordinary Iranians questioned the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.

Given this crisis of legitimacy at home, it makes sense for the Islamic Republic to balance its ideological fervour with a degree of pragmatism in its relations with the outside world. Hence the indirect secret talks with the US – conducted with an Omani diplomat as the go-between – over the Red Sea attacks.

If pressure applied by the Islamic Republic and Washington on the Houthis and Israel respectively can bear fruit in some way, both sides increase their chances of coming out with a political win when they most need it.

Shabnam Holliday, Associate Professor in International Relations, University of Plymouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in this cycle). Kuwait has oil wealth and is a compact country with lots of social interaction. The high score may reflect Kuwait’s lively labor movement. That sort of movement isn’t allowed in the other Gulf States. The United Arab Emirates came in at 22, and Saudi Arabia at 28.

These countries are all very wealthy and their people are very social and connected to clans and other group identities, including religious congregations.

But everyone else in the Middle East is way down the list.

As usual, Gallup found that the very happiest countries were Scandinavian lands shaped by social democratic policies. It turns out that a government safety net of the sort the Republican Party wants to get rid of actually is key to making people happy.

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden take the top four spots. Israel, which also has a Labor socialist founding framework, is fifth. The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg fill out the top nine.

The Gallup researchers believe that a few major considerations affect well-being or happiness. They note, “Social interactions of all kinds … add to happiness, in addition to their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” My brief experience of being in Australia suggests to me that they are indeed very social and likely not very lonely on the whole. Positive emotions also equate to well-being and are much more important in determining it than negative emotions. The positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and altruism, among others.

Benevolence, doing good to others, also adds to well-being. Interestingly, the Gallup researchers find that benevolence increased in COVID and its aftermath across the board.

They also factor in GDP per capita, that is, how poor or wealthy people are.

Gallup Video: “2024 World Happiness Report; Gallup CEO Jon Clifton”

Bahrain comes in at 62, which shows that oil wealth isn’t everything. It is deeply divided between a Sunni elite and a Shiite majority population, and that sectarian tension likely explains why it isn’t as happy as Kuwait. Kuwait is between a sixth and a third Shiite and also has a Sunni elite, but the Shiites are relatively well treated and the Emir depends on them to offset the power of Sunni fundamentalists. So it isn’t just sectarian difference that affects happiness but the way in which the rulers deal with it.

Libya, which is more or less a failed state after the people rose up to overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, nevertheless comes in at 66. There is some oil wealth when the militias allow its export, and despite the east-west political divide, people are able to live full lives in cities like Benghazi and Tripoli. Maybe the overhang of getting rid of a hated dictator is still a source of happiness for them.

Algeria, a dictatorship and oil state, is 85. The petroleum wealth is not as great as in the Gulf by any means, and is monopolized by the country’s elite.

Iraq, an oil state, is 92. Like Bahrain, it suffers from ethnic and sectarian divides. It is something of a failed state after the American overthrow of its government.

Iran, another oil state, is 100. Its petroleum sales are interfered with by the US except with regard to China, so its income is much more limited than other Gulf oil states. The government is dictatorial and young people seem impatient with its attempt to regiment their lives, as witnessed in the recent anti-veiling protests.

The State of Palestine is 103, which is actually not bad given that they are deeply unhappy with being occupied by Israel. This ranking certainly plummeted after the current Israeli total war on Gaza began.

Morocco is 107. It is relatively poor, in fact poorer than some countries that rank themselves much lower on the happiness scale.

Tunisia is one of the wealthier countries in Africa and much better off than Morocco, but it comes in at 115. In the past few years all the democratic gains made during and after the Arab Spring have been reversed by horrid dictator Qais Saied. People seem to be pretty unhappy at now living in a seedy police state.

Jordan is both poor and undemocratic, and is ranked 125.

Egypt is desperately poor and its government since 2014 has been a military junta in business suits that brooks not the slightest dissent. It is 127. The hopes of the Arab Spring are now ashes.

Yemen is 133. One of the poorest countries in the world, it suffered from being attacked by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 until 2021. So it is war torn and poverty-stricken.

Lebanon ranks almost at the bottom at 142. Its economy is better than Yemen’s but its government is hopelessly corrupt and its negligence caused the country’s major port to be blown up, plunging the country into economic crisis. It is wracked by sectarianism. If hope is a major positive emotion that leads to feelings of happiness, it is in short supply there.

Some countries are too much of a basket case to be included, like Syria, where I expect people are pretty miserable after the civil war. Likewise Sudan, which is now in civil strife and where hundreds of thousands may starve.

Poverty, dictatorship, disappointment in political setbacks, and sectarianism all seem to play a part in making the Middle East miserable. The role of the United States in supporting the dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere, or in supporting wars, has been sinister and certainly has added significantly to the misery. For no group in the region is this more true than for the Palestinians.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Everything is going well in the “Special Relationship” between the US and the UK. After an American chemist dared to suggest that adding salt to the quintessential British cup of tea could represent an improvement, the US embassy stepped in and calmed restless audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. “We cannot stand idly by as such an outrageous proposal threatens the very foundation of our special relationship,” posted the US embassy in London in January 2024. The embassy noted that “the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy. And never will be.”

There was never a risk of a diplomatic conflict, of course, because two countries that agree to jointly strike Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen continuously for almost two months are not likely to create a tempest in a teapot. The long-running dynamics in the US-UK relationship that help explain their joint strikes in Yemen, not frivolous discussions on tea, are part of Tom Stevenson’s latest book, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony”, a collection of articles published by the author over the years for the London Review of Books (LRB).

Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, discusses Yemen in the book concerning the US-UK support for the bombing operations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have carried out in Yemen for seven years. Stevenson obviously could not have had the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis in mind when his book went to press at some point in mid-2023. Still, his assertion that, within the British establishment, “nostalgia for global influence has produced a compulsive Atlanticism and a reflexive resort to military actions that the UK is near incapable of actually performing”[1], could also serve as a clever analysis of the most recent events.

Facing its decline as a global power, “the dominant trend of late twentieth-century Britain was not resurgence as an independent power but a new surrogacy” to the US.[2] With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed “end of history”, following Washington’s lead seemed more self-evident than ever. This was the case even if it implied invading Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire:British Illusions and American Hegemony. Click here.

Tony Blair was perfectly content to become George Bush’s junior partner. He was not alone among European leaders in embracing America’s turbocharged bellicosity after the 9/11 attacks. In Spain, for instance, Prime Minister José María Aznar from the center-right Popular Party was only too happy to meet Bush and Blair in the Portuguese Azores archipelago four days before the invasion to support the US-UK alliance. The Spanish press referred to Bush, Blair, and Aznar as “El Trío de las Azores” (The Azores Trio) and Spain sent 2,600 soldiers to Iraq between August 2003 and May 2004. Eleven of them would die there.

The Spanish participation in the Iraq War ended after the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who had campaigned on the promise to withdraw the troops from Iraq, defeated Aznar in the national elections of March 14, 2004. The Iraq War was key in Zapatero’s victory. It will soon be exactly two decades since March 11, 2004, when Madrid suffered a series of terrorist attacks in commuter trains that killed 193 people.

Aznar’s government blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for the attacks despite knowing early on that everything pointed at al-Qaeda. The terrorist group had attacked Spain due to its involvement in the Iraq War. When the truth was eventually revealed right before election day, Zapatero’s Socialist party won a surprise victory. In an interview three years ago, Aznar continued to defend that his decision to join the conflict in Iraq “represented Spain’s most important role in many decades.”

In the early 2000s, the UK was not the only country with a vanished empire overplaying its relevance at the international level by seeking to stay close to the US. Whereas Spain soon shifted course, the UK has tied its future even closer to the US after Brexit, notes Stevenson. One of the examples the author provides is the trend in British weapons acquisitions. During the last twenty years, the UK has almost uninterruptedly procured more than 50% of its weapons imports from the US. However, this has recently only intensified. The data offered by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that in the period from 2020 to 2022, the last year for which data is available, weapons imports from the US represented 95% of British total expenditure on weapons produced abroad.

One of Stevenson’s main arguments regarding the US-UK relationship is that London has often been conducting a foreign and defense policy that makes little sense in terms of promoting British national interests. For instance, Stevenson points to Britain’s commitment to deploy patrol vessels and a frigate in the Indo-Pacific area with the vague objective of “projecting power.” This is the kind of investment London has often committed to despite it more likely benefiting the US than the UK, if at all.

In this sense, the case of the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis is exceptional. If we accept, for the sake of the argument, that US-UK attacks against Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen are the most effective way to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, then it would be the UK that would profit more from this. The economic interests of the US are hardly directly affected by the attacks on ships in the Red Sea, whereas the Suez Channel is a key trade artery for cargo either coming from or going to Europe.

Some exceptions notwithstanding, there is a clear general dynamic of British subordination to Washington. As Stevenson argues, this can also be observed in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that comprises the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Whereas the US National Security Agency (NSA) automatically receives the feed from intelligence stations in other countries, the NSA “sometimes withholds what it knows.”[3]

Stevenson discusses the changing character of war from the perspective of the US and the UK. The author is deeply knowledgeable of varied topics such as the overuse of economic sanctions by Western countries, the details of nuclear competition, or the militarization of space, with satellites and space missions becoming increasingly important.

But Stevenson often pushes too far the book’s generally convincing main argument, that Britain has become subservient to American power. For instance, he writes that “one must wonder whether Britain retains an independent foreign policy at all itself.”[4] “Someone Else’s Empire” also tends to overplay the influence of Washington, and by implication London, in the Middle East. Writing about the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Stevenson argues that “since the West installed the monarchs, and its behavior is essentially extractive, I see no reason to avoid describing the continued Anglo-American domination of the Gulf as colonial.”[5]

It is difficult to see how a colonial power would not have replaced Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman following his implication in the murder of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Bin Salman’s role in the assassination of Khashoggi was a huge embarrassment for his Western supporters. Neither would a colonial power have allowed Saudi Arabia and the UAE to impose a blockade on Qatar, a Western ally, between 2017 and 2021.

Stevenson is sometimes hyperbolic about US power. Still, it is true that, for all talk of American decline, “the shadow of American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable.”[6] The UK has been enveloped by this shadow while also contributing to making it larger. From Iraq to Yemen and, once the controversy around Britain’s national drink has been happily resolved, over a cup of tea.

[1] Tom Stevenson, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony” (London: Verso, 2023), p. 4.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.

[3] Ibid., p. 55.

[4] Ibid., p. 234.

[5] Ibid., p. 160.

[6] Ibid., p. 232.

Does that sound like any other armed conflict you’ve heard about recently? What it brings to my mind is, of course, Israel’s response to the October 7th terror assault by the Islamic militant group Hamas on its border areas, which my country and much of the rest of the world roundly condemned.

Many Americans now see the destruction and suffering in Gaza and Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as the crises of the day and I agree. It’s hard even to keep up with the death toll in the Palestinian territories, but you can certainly give it a college try. More than 29,000 Gazans have already been killed, more than 12,000 of them reportedly children. The scale of the loss of civilian life has been breathtaking in what are supposed to be targeted missions. For example, in mid-February, in an ostensible attempt to free two Israeli hostages in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where more than one million civilians are now sheltering under the worst conditions imaginable, Israeli troops killed 74 Palestinians. Between December 2023 and January 2024, four strikes there had already killed at least 95 civilians. And on and on it goes. Anyone with concerns about Israel’s response to Hamas’s bloody attacks has ground to stand on.

But if war deaths among people of color in particular are really that much of a concern to Americans, especially on the political left, then there are significant gaps in our attention. Look at what’s happening in the 85 countries where the U.S. is currently engaged in “counterterrorism” efforts of one sort or another, where we fight alongside local troops, train or equip them, and conduct intelligence operations or even air strikes, all of it in an extension of those first responses to 9/11. Ask yourself if you’ve paid attention to that lately or if you were even aware that it was still happening. Do you have any idea, for instance, that our country’s military continues to pursue its war on terror across significant parts of Africa?

Given Israel’s October 7th tragedy, my mention of that date in 2001, which marked Washington’s first military response to the worst terrorist attacks on our soil, is more than a play on words. Like Israel, the U.S. was attacked by armed Islamic extremists who sought to make gruesome spectacles of ordinary Americans. Some of them, like the Israeli families smoked out of their saferooms only to be shot, flung themselves from their office buildings in New York’s Twin Towers, essentially choosing the least awful deaths under the circumstances. Yet after decades of America’s war on terror, whose benefits have been, to say the least, questionable, our tax dollars continue to fund the longest and bloodiest response to terrorism in our history.

Our own October 7th and its seemingly never-ending consequences suggest that something more sinister may be at play in shaping what violence we choose to focus on and condemn, and what violence we choose to overlook.

An International Smorgasbord of Killings

Too little ink is spilled anymore objecting to the hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen who died in our global war on terror — and, of course, those are just some of the countries where we’ve fought in these years. Consider, for example, how we continue to arm and train Somali government troops in their deadly counterinsurgency war. And remember that the war on terror, as it still plays out, isn’t just President Biden’s war, though he has indeed continued it (though in 2021, he did at least get us out of the longest-running part of it in Afghanistan).

Buy the Book

Remember as well when you condemn the Israelis for what they’re doing that, thanks to American bombs and missiles, civilians in our own post-October 7, 2001, war zones died as they slept at home, studied, or shopped at marketplaces. Some were run over by our vehicles. Some died in NATO air strikes or in strikes by unmanned American drones, or in fires that erupted in the aftermath of such bombing and shelling. Some were run off the road, gunned down at checkpoints, blown up by bomblets left over from our use of cluster bombs, tortured or executed in U.S.-run prisons, or raped by occupying American troops.

Here are just a few examples: In 2012, an American soldier in Afghanistan shot dead 16 civilians, nine of them children, as they slept in their homes. This was anything but the first such incident of civilian targeting and would be anything but the last. In 2017, after then-President Donald Trump loosened Obama-era air strike restrictions meant to help protect civilians, the U.S. conducted more individually identifiable drone strikes than in any other year except 2012 under — yes! — President Barack Obama.

One January 2017 raid that killed more than a dozen opposition fighters in Yemen also killed Saudi and Yemeni civilians, among them children as young as eight years old. In 2021, two Yemeni families filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for the unlawful deaths of 34 relatives, including nine children, in U.S. drone strikes between 2013 and 2018, seeking recognition of harm done by the U.S. and its allies. Given that the Pentagon lacks a centralized system for tracking civilian casualties in places where our forces fight and no system at all in areas like Israel where the U.S. only provides military aid, recognition of such horrors has been a rare commodity.

Each time I write about such examples of how, in those years, my country slaughtered civilians, I need to do something like pet my cat or hug my children. That’s how much hurt I feel, especially as a military spouse, when I think about it. I always remember scholar Elaine Scarry’s insight that having to explain how war kills people (not “just” opposing forces but civilians, too!) ought to unsettle us. Only recently, just a few months late, President Biden did indeed finally caution that Israel needed to come up with a “credible plan to protect civilians” before sending its troops into the Gazan city of Rafah, and it certainly should have been a laudable message about preserving life. Unfortunately, it ignored the fact that, when they do so, they’ll be using American weaponry and that funding war — anyone’s war — necessarily means endorsing civilian deaths.

Selective Reckoning on Armed Conflict

I wonder sometimes how many of the Americans now protesting Israel’s incursions into Gaza have ever spoken up about our own country’s endless wars in this century and the human toll that’s gone with them. I suspect most Americans don’t even realize that our war on terror is still ongoing (and younger ones may know little or nothing about what we actually did in all those post-2001 years).

Perhaps such apathy can be attributed in part to the sense of righteous purpose that was first associated with launching a war in Afghanistan on that all-American October 7th of ours, while planning to democratize that country and rid women, in particular, of the Taliban’s oppressive rule. Then came our disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, based on President George W. Bush’s spurious claims that its ruler, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction and the initial protests of so many Americans responding to the grim, if flashy, optics of those first air strikes on Baghdad with countrywide protests that soon faded away.

After that, most Americans stopped paying attention to our ongoing mobilization of troops to send abroad, the slow-motion destruction of entire communities in distant lands, and the creation of an estimated 38 million refugees from those conflicts. A case in point: When I do a Google search of the words “Israel, Gaza civilians killed,” I get notice of 13 million articles written on the subject since October 7th of last year. When, however, I search for “War on Terror, civilians killed” without even circumscribing the time range, I get about 850,000 results. Part of the problem undoubtedly lies in semantics and search-engine logistics. After all, in some sense, there was no such thing as the war on terror but instead the war in Iraq, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Syria, and so on. A framing of our foreign wars that called more attention to the specifics might still focus our attention on the policymakers across the political spectrum who continue to vote for bloated military budgets and all the global destruction that goes with them.

Caring About the Costs of All Wars

Is it possible that one factor in the objections of some Americans to Israel’s war in Gaza isn’t just the ongoing nightmare of civilian deaths, but also a distaste for the nation and people prosecuting this particular war? Consider that the incidence of anti-Semitic attacks and threats on U.S. soil has exponentially risen in recent years, spiking especially dramatically in the months following the start of Israel’s war, or consider the recent mealy-mouthed responses of the leaders of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to whether calls for the genocide of Jews should be censured on university campuses, or what is reportedly happening at some of the nation’s most highly ranked social-work schools where certain Jewish students have claimed not to feel safe when some of their peers call them “colonizers.” (When I was in social work school in 2017, I heard a Jewish student told in class that she was demonstrating “white fragility” in speaking up about her family’s experiences of anti-Semitism in this country.)

In light of such examples, it’s easy for me to see why a double standard might be applied here to the Jewish state and the U.S. one and, more to the point, in the wake of a rash of anti-Semitic verbal threats, physical attacks, and harassment, it’s striking how readily so many Americans now blame Israelis generally for the war perpetrated by that country’s right-wing government, but not Americans for our wars, which most of us know all too little about. What’s more, we shouldn’t forget that part of what shaped Israel’s very formation was the refusal of the U.S. government to take in Jewish refugees before, during, or after the Holocaust. In the wake of World War II, many Jews needed a safe place to go, so a place needed to be made for them.

Don’t think, by the way, that I’m suggesting we should stop holding Israel accountable for war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. We shouldn’t. Not for a second. But I’m suggesting that if we care about peace in the Middle East, then we need to focus as well on this country’s foreign policy and the racism that shapes it. If we really care about the costs of war, then we need to be equal-opportunity critics and consider not only the most highly reported conflict of the moment but also the chronic ones fought, whether we realize it or not, distinctly in our names.

Among other tasks, that means we need to think through the long-term consequences of policies that began under the Trump administration, which elevated Israel’s standing in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and exacerbated Palestinian-Israeli tensions long before the Hamas attack of October 7th. It’s also important that we ask ourselves what it means for us to agitate for an Israeli ceasefire (as well we should!) when, since our own October 7th, our wars overseas have largely been protected by American silence and so complicity. Otherwise, it’s likely that progressives and moderates alike will continue to be divided by whatever conflict rules the day in our capricious mainstream mediasphere, rather than speaking with one voice about the costs of war and how they drain our economy and our culture.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Tomdispatch.com

On Saturday, the US and Britain had flown a fourth round of bombings, directed at 18 Houthi military targets. The BBC says that they were directed at “storage facilities, drones, air defence systems, radars and a helicopter of the militant movement.”

A Houthi government spokesman downplayed the impact of the bombings and asserted that there was nothing the US could do about the movement’s Red Sea attacks.

If the US Air Force and the Royal Air Force commanders really think that a few bombing raids can knock out the Houthi capabilities, they haven’t been paying attention. The Saudis, the UAE and other members of a coalition bombed Yemen intensively from 2015 until 2021, as Sarah G. Phillips pointed out. At the end of the war the Houthis were still in control of 80% of the Yemeni population of some 33 million, who live on about a third of the land area of the country. They have certainly hidden away most of their munitions, having had to operate under aerial bombardment for almost a decade, and the targets being hit by the US and the UK are likely inconsequential.

Nationalist troops of the internationally recognized government of President Rashad al-Alimi have contained the Houthi forces to the south and the east but were never able to push them out of the most populous regions of the country in the north. I recently published a paper on how the United Arab Emirates worked with southern secessionists to establish control of the littoral of the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but that is a thin sliver of southern territory.

[By the way, broadcast journalists, Houthi is pronounced like “who the” in English — Arabic has a “th” sound. I don’t know why the Americans keep saying Hootie.]

Reuters reports that about $1 trillion of goods is transported through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal annually, on some 19,000 vessels. That is about 30% of global seaborne trade, and it comes to about 12% of total world commerce. About 10% of global energy supplies go through this route.

Hindustan Times Video: “Red Sea On The Boil: American Ship Attacked; Houthis Reiterate Support To Palestinians | Watch”

The volume of goods transported through the Red Sea has fallen between 42% and 66% since the Houthis began attacking container ships. Many ships are going around the Cape of Good Hope and up the coast of West Africa, adding some 10 days to the journey from Asia to Europe, and upping the cost. Countries in the region have taken an economic hit. Egypt has suffered a 40% fall in Suez Canal revenues.

UNCTAD says that “Average container shipping spot rates from Shanghai in early February 2024 more than doubled – up by 122% compared to early December 2023. The rates from Shanghai to Europe more than tripled, jumping by 256%.”

China’s $1.8 billion in investments in Africa has also been placed in jeopardy, and the Chinese portion of Djibouti port has been idled.

The Israeli port of Eilat has apparently been idled, and occasionally has to fend off Houthi ballistic missiles. About 5% of Israel’s imports by sea used to come in through Eilat.

The easiest way to stop this economic disruption, which could have an impact on supply chains and prices that echoes the COVID-19 era of 2021-2023, is for President Biden to cut off arms and ammunition to the mad bomber, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Rising prices and supply chain problems would not be good for Biden’s reelection bid.

The Helpers of God militia is supported by many Yemenis of the Zaydi Shiite persuasion, a form of Shiite Islam that is closer to Sunnism and which does not have ayatollahs or some of the distinctive rituals of the Iranian and Iraqi Twelver Shiism. The militia’s leader is Abdul Malik al-Houthi, who announced this past week an escalation of attacks on Red Sea shipping.

Although the Houthis receive some money and arms from Iran, from all accounts it is a minor factor. They are an Arab, Yemeni movement with their own motivations and they have a weapons-making capacity of their own. The Helpers of God have become the de facto government of most people in Yemen and they tax them for revenue. It is not at all clear that an energy exporter like Iran would want Red Sea shipping disrupted.