US President Joe Biden has said that attacks on the Houthis will continue even as he acknowledged that the group have not stopped their Red Sea attacks.
The US carried out a fifth round of strikes on Yemen on Thursday after a US ship was struck by a Houthi drone.
White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters that US forces “took out a range of Houthi missiles” that were about to be fired towards the Red Sea.
He said the American attacks took place on Wednesday and again on Thursday.
On Wednesday, a Houthi drone hit a “US owned and operated bulk carrier ship” which later had to be rescued by India’s navy. It came as the US designated the Houthis as a terrorist organisation.
“Well, when you say working are they stopping the Houthis? No,” Mr Biden told reporters in Washington DC on Thursday before he left for a speech in North Carolina.
“Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
What’s with these anti American hot takes that don’t make any sense.
Your proposal is what exactly, to let Iranian backed terrorists to disrupt like 20% of the global shipping?
That would be fucking stupid.
I think your comment illustrates one of the biggest problems with our foreign policy.
We appear to have completely lost our ability to think laterally or strategically. I get why my comment seems crazy when you think our only options are “ATTACK” and “surrender”.
We need a strategic solution. The Houthis WANT a direct confrontation. They’ve said so, and their behavior is consistent with that. To figure out how to get them to stop, we need to ask: why on god’s green earth do a group of Yemeni rebels WANT a fight with the United States??
The short answer is that they hate us deeply for the incredible violence and destruction we inflicted on them and continue to inflict on them and the people they sympathize with. And we’ve destroyed so much of Yemen that they have nothing to lose. We turned it into a hellscape wasteland, so there is nothing more we can really threaten them with, and dying a proud and defiant death is pretty much the best offer on the menu. Plus, they know that if we fight, it’ll hurt us badly, just like all the last few wars have. We’ll spend too much, probably send troops eventually, and ultimately leave having accomplished nothing. And any surviving militants will declare victory and rule over ashes. Afghanistan provided a very appealing model of how to defeat the US.
So, strategically, what if… they had a reason to not want to die? What if … I don’t know, we negotiated with partners in the region to help them grow some crops, and maybe provide them with a new security arrangement where we don’t just sweep in every 10 years and light all their children and grandparents on fire? And concurrently, what if we tried to find ways to reduce their access to weapons?
Violence is not going to work. The region is spiraling out of control, and blowing everything up is easier for all the desperate radicals we’ve created across multiple nations than protecting our shipping lanes is for us. If violence no longer carries deterrence, it’s only utility is extermination. And if we embrace extermination, we radicalize more people. You can’t eradicate out of that situation, and trying just turns you into another of history’s great monsters.
It’s bad. We need to rediscover the concept of strategy.
Okay, our strategy in Yemen was to oppose Saleh, far right dictator who ruled Yemen from 1979 to 2012. The US lent support to plans to organize a popular revolution against Saleh starting in 2011. The people won and Saleh left office disgraced.
Yemen might have been okay, if after democratically electing a new president twice, the Houthi’s had not tried to assassinate him, seized control of the government, and completed a successful coup. Perhaps there would have been no civil war if the Houthis did not have such hatred for democracy and such love of authoritarian theocracy and religious rule. That’s when America came for them. They were already terrorists.
From the position trying to secure the best strategic outcome, though, what does that tell us? That sounds like a lot of opinions on the past, but what guidance do you take from all that?
Direct confrontation still fulfills their strategic objectives, and presents a nearly unwinnable situation. Instead, what would limit their willingness and ability to fight?
One thing would be ending our support for Israel’s wildly unpopular violent occupation. I hear people say that the Houthis are just cynically seizing on this morally and emotionally powerful cause to maintain popularity among the people of Yemen. And even if that’s true, it still serves our strategic interest to take that valuable asset away from them.
The Houthis assisted in the planning and carrying out of the October 7 attack. They’ve been Iranian proxies and ideological allies of all sorts of fundamentalist terrorists since they came into existence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_movement
Nothing will limit their willingness to fight. But drone strikes can end their ability to threaten their neighbors. Push them back into their hole, let them scream “death to America” into an increasingly smaller spit of empty desert with dwindling prospects for continued habitability. Maybe their people will get tired of not having nice things or will realize “death to America” won’t put food on the table. Maybe not, and eventually their neighbor is going to get sick of their bullshit and swallow them up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Saudi_Arabia_proxy_conflict
If you let them do this with no response every idiot nation with a coastline is going to think shooting civilian sailors is a good way to get shit done.
Allowing them to get away with it is escalatory for the world.