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“Senior defense officials” speaking on conditions of anonymity with CNN have revealed that Biden’s undeclared war in Yemen is going poorly, with the Pentagon’s near-daily bombings of Houthi positions doing nothing to impede or prevent their ability to strike cargo ships passing through the Red Sea.
The Houthis, officially called Ansar Allah, have continued to strike cargo ships belonging to the UK or US, and most recently scored a direct hit on one, which is now leaking oil and had to be abandoned by the crew. The lack of progress has surprised some, and not surprised others inside the War Department and the White House,
“We know that the Houthis maintain a large arsenal,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said on Thursday. “They are very capable, they have sophisticated weapons,” including submersible drones.
“They continue to surprise us. We just don’t have a good idea of what they still have,” said one of the senior defense officials.
WaL reported last week that the undeclared war was already going bad, and that it’s making the economic impacts of the Houthi activities in the Red Sea even more severe.
Not only have the Houthis continued their attacks on US and UK vessels, along with anything en route to Israel, but on February 11th they went as far as to target Greek-owned shipping en route to Iran, simply because the owner, Star Bulk Carriers, is listed on the New York City-based NASDAQ.
A Houthi military spokesman released a statement following the attack, vowing to “carry out more operations in retaliation to the Zionist crimes against our brothers in the Gaza Strip, as well as in response to the ongoing American-British aggression against our dear country”.
Earlier in the month, reporters asked President Biden if the attacks were working, and his response was “Well, when you say ‘working’ — are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes”.
Nasser Arrabyee, a Yemeni reporter with Yemen Now, recently spoke to American radio show host Scott Horton to explain why the US-UK strikes weren’t accomplishing anything. According to Arrabyee, the strikes are hitting all the empty and bombed-out buildings the Saudi Arabian air strikes of the last 8 years have already destroyed, being that they are located in active military areas or airstrips.
Furthermore, Arrabyee says the Houthis have learned over the long war with Saudi Arabia how to ensure their munitions remain hidden from satellite or other kinds of surveillance.
Never learning
Without editorializing, the bombing campaign is one of many examples since 2002 of US air power being used without any overarching foreign policy. In 2009, before Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan, retired Army Colonel and National Sec. Council staffer Derek Harvey briefed General David Petraeus, set to be in charge of the escalation, that in the war up until that point, major questions had gone unasked. “Who is the enemy? Where are they? What are their motivations?” explained Harvey.
President Biden’s rationale of bombing Yemen to police international shipping lanes may be a reasonable justification to satisfy his political base, but it’s no strategy for achieving military objectives. The reason is that Biden and his national security staff do not, as it happens, get to determine the objectives, motivations, cost-benefit analysis, and other policy goals of the Houthis. Effective foreign policy, whether military or political, addresses both.
“The US campaign against the Houthis appears to bear the hallmarks of many of these highly circumscribed, scrubbed campaigns of the past where we seek to avoid causing them actual pain,” one former US military official told CNN, along this line of reasoning.
If the Pentagon and the White House’s aim is to end Houthi attacks, and the means for achieving this is to bomb weapons and ammunition depots, but with a policy goal of avoiding attacking the Houthis directly, the only chance of this policy succeeding is if it has a chance of carrying a greater force than the Houthis’ motivations, costing too much according to the Houthis’ cost-benefit analysis, or making the Houthis’ objectives impossible to achieve.
Wars in the Middle East are currently very unpopular, and such limited objectives may be the only ways to avoid political scrutiny for the Biden reelection campaign, but that doesn’t matter to the Houthis. If Biden’s goal is to implement his policy desires on a potential enemy, it is the Houthis, not his political base, whose decisions matter.
Addressing key foreign policy needs with military options will only work if there is a military solution, for example, during the joint operations against the Islamic State. Here, the policy objective of improving the security of the Middle East by destroying an enemy was well-addressed by a military solution, because the objectives were killing thousands of soldiers, capturing large amounts of territory including cities, and assassinating political leaders.
In Yemen, US and Saudi Arabia were nearing a diplomatic solution to end the world’s previous humanitarian disaster, as hundreds of thousands of Yemeni citizens, mostly children under 5, were starved or died of disease because of the US/Saudi blockade—which was also a good example of when a non-military solution could have achieved policy aims, since the operations failed to produce a single military accomplishment for the US or Saudi Arabia despite 9 years of warfare.
The Houthis have vowed to continue attacking ships in the Red Sea until the slaughter in Gaza stops. US officials speaking with CNN believed they would honor their word if these circumstances came to pass. They pointed out that the Houthi attacks stopped in November during a 7-day pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas, and during peace negotiations with Saudi Arabia, ceasefires were held for many months in a row. WaL
