In a Middle East Forum (MEF)/American Jewish University (AJU) July 1 podcast (video), AJU’s Rick Richman moderated the seventh of a seven-part series of interviews titled “Israel’s Seven-Front War: Part Seven: Yemen.”
Guest speaker: Michael Rubin, director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. The following summarizes his comments:
The 10 percent of world trade that transits the Bab al Mandeb strait via international commercial vessels has been under missile and drone attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels. The Houthis are “puppets of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which directs its proxy to target Israel and provide the ayatollahs plausible deniability. By attacking and hijacking ships bound for the Israeli port of Eilat, the Houthis have been preventing fuel and other goods from reaching the Jewish state.
The Houthis are “puppets of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which directs its proxy to target Israel and provide the ayatollahs plausible deniability.
Yemen, at the base of the Arabian Peninsula, is divided into North and South Yemen. A series of leaders ran the country trying to bridge, albeit unsuccessfully, the divide between the sparsely populated south and the more populous north to “give a patina of unity.”
The Houthis, “a tribal unit in Yemen” whose religious group is called Zaydis, are “technically Shiite, but their theology is much more like the Sunnis.” In 2014, the Houthis rebelled during Yemen’s civil war and took control of the government in the northern capital, Sanaa, after ousting its president, Abd-Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Saudis intervened at Hadi’s request, “but the Iranians are never wont to let a good crisis go to waste” and “co-opted the Houthis,” promising support and weaponry.
Houthi missiles and drones have struck Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are trying to take over south Yemen and defeat the Houthis, as well as Israel. The Houthis are part of an “axis of resistance” of entities run by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and are tasked with the mission to “help tighten the noose around Israel,” specifically, and the West generally.
The West is making a “conceptual mistake” by not connecting the dots between attacks by an Iranian proxy and its puppet master, Iran. The Biden administration lifted sanctions on the Houthis and revoked the prior Trump administration’s designation of them as a foreign terrorist organization. It has also sent approximately a billion dollars in humanitarian aid to the starving population in Yemen and has expended a similar amount on “retaliatory strikes against the Houthis.”
Yemen’s main northern port of Hudaydah is just above the strategic choke point of the Bab al Mandeb strait and is controlled by the Houthis. The annual humanitarian aid the U.S. is giving to Yemen is actually going to the Houthis, not the people. The Houthis refuse to distribute aid “to those that don’t subordinate themselves to their unrecognized government.” America is basically funding the very entity attacking its ships. The administration’s naivete “is a complete dissonance of policy, and it only plays into the Iranian’s hands. We’re not thinking with strategic clarity.”
The administration’s naivete “is a complete dissonance of policy, and it only plays into the Iranian’s hands. We’re not thinking with strategic clarity.”
The Houthis can be defeated by using Ospreys, the aircraft that lifts off like a helicopter, turns into a plane, and moves faster than any aircraft carrier. Ospreys can depart from a U.S. airfield located in the breakaway region of Somaliland, “but the State Department won’t let us use it because they’re afraid of insulting Mogadishu.” By insisting that America “put Somali national interests above our own,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken is “not understanding the way the world in this region is actually working.”
Oman is an intermediary with the Houthis, but its biases on behalf of America’s adversary means that the U.S. is “choosing the wrong intermediaries.” By not attacking “on day one” the Iranian intelligence ship determining targets for the Houthis to hit, “we aren’t telegraphing seriousness.”
America lacked a strong response to Yemen’s Houthis attacks at the start, and eight months of retaliatory strikes are ineffective. “We need to be focused on Iran. Iran is controlling it. The enemy is the Quds Force,” and applying maximum pressure works.
“What causes war in the Middle East isn’t oil and it’s not water. It’s fundamental overconfidence. And we’re giving every reason for the Quds Force, for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and for the Houthis, to be overconfident. That needs to stop now.”
