Washington’s entanglement in Yemen

The US will regret being lured into multiple Middle East wars on Israel’s behalf

Israel’s success in luring the Biden administration into multiple wars on its behalf, especially in Gaza, Iraq, and Yemen, will inevitably bleed the US politically, financially, and militarily and erode not only its global standing but also the leadership of the Western world, whose throne it has occupied since the end of the Second World War.

Yemen is the latest front in the Middle East to be opened up directly by the US to safeguard Israeli shipping in the Red Sea and Arabian Sea, where most of the occupation state’s trade with Asia transits. That is a strategic mistake that has plunged it into a bottomless pit. It is taking on a people with a history of invincibility and of humbling mighty empires, including the British one, whose heirs are now playing second fiddle in the misnamed ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’ coalition.

The Biden administration aims to achieve a number of objectives in addition to reopening the Red Sea to Israeli shipping. It seeks to intimidate and destabilise Ansarullah-led Yemen by blockading the country and bombing its military facilities, to isolate it by redesignating its government as ‘terrorist’, and to prevent the expansion of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip into a regional war via the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab strait.

This policy is doomed to fail and backfire against its authors. It will face fierce resistance by the Yemenis who have a long legacy of vanquishing invaders. Israel, which duped the hapless US administration into this trap, wouldn’t dare fire a single missile at Yemen itself. It knows what the repercussions would be. That is why it delegated the task to the US and Britain, in the process causing one of the biggest rifts within the Western world for decades.

The US had no trouble mustering a coalition of 36 countries to invade and occupy Iraq. It succeeded in recruiting 65 states to topple Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya. It mobilised more than 75 (the ‘Friends of Syria’) and hundreds of billions of dollars to attack and dismember Syria and depose its regime. But it only managed to sign ten governments up to the cause of controlling the Red Sea, largely members of the Anglosphere (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) plus two islands with flags (Bahrain and Seychelles). Most of the major European countries including France, Spain, and Italy declined to join and opted not to be part of this losing gamble.

Airstrikes on military targets in Yemen will not weaken the Ansarullah movement and its coalition, The US seems to forget that it was subjected to eight years of merciless bombardment — with direct US and British support — and emerged not only undefeated, but as a nascent regional power.

The movement’s spiritual leader Abdelmalek al-Houthi and affirmed on Thursday that US and UK attacks will not affect Yemen’s military capabilities, and retaliatory attacks on American and British vessels, along with Israeli-linked shipping, will continue so long as the Israel assault on Gaza does. Millions of Yemenis took to the streets on Friday to condemn US aggression, support the government’s stance, express solidarity with the people of Gaza, and honour the Yemeni martyrs killed in US attacks at sea and on land.

The US administration, blinded by its Zionist friends, does not understand the Middle East, and certainly does not know Yemen and its indomitable people. The State Department’s explanation that Ansarullah’s terrorist designation will make its officials ineligible for US visas is an illustration of this ignorance. I doubt Abdelmalek al-Houthi will lose sleep over being deprived of his customary shopping trips to New York or winter vacations in Miami.

The US has been entangled in Yemen, and it will regret it.

Washington’s entanglement in Yemen