The Nasrallah strike, now this.
So far, contra the fears of many of us, the country best exploiting the power vacuum in Washington has been Israel.
22 thoughts on “Bombing the Houthis”
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The Nasrallah strike, now this.
So far, contra the fears of many of us, the country best exploiting the power vacuum in Washington has been Israel.
Comments are closed.
The best part of the Nasrallah strike was that not only did they brush off Blinken’s demand for a ceasefire but they used American-built planes and bombs to do it
What we learned from the past 20 years of the Middle East is:
1) Arabs, as Bin Laden reminded us, like the strong horse
2) Most Arabs are Sunni and aren’t crazy about the Shi’ite minorities
3) Arabs don’t like Iran or its proxies
4) Arabs really don’t care that much about the Palestinians
Strangely enough the Biden Administration is on the wrong side of all four of those points and Israel is on the right side.
I think most of the Arab world is loving it… despite the fact that the IDF is not DEI-compliant
The Obama handlers of Biden/Harris must be very annoyed. They have given up any leash they thought they had on Israel. In rebuilding our military after Trump is back in office we may need the help of Israel to “delouse” our officer corps. The service academies are now worthless. For example.
The lesson to take from the last 84 years is that a single airstrike will have, at best, transient effects. Given a determined enemy, even a prolonged campaign rarely achieves more than a fraction of what’s predicted. At best Israel may motivate the Houthis to direct their attention elsewhere. Putting the ball back in our court.
So Israel, when its hands are already full with a 2- or 3- front war (who is counting?), can find the spare time to fly a thousand miles and punish the Houthis — without the aid of an aircraft carrier, but probably with the cooperation of the Saudis. That’s something the combined US, British, French, Norwegians (and who knows who else) navies could not do.
This is not just a power vacuum in the halls of the West — this is a profound reluctance to act.
This is not just a power vacuum in the halls of the West — this is a profound reluctance to act.
Well, yes. The actual people of the West have no interest in blowing up Yemen, including the minority that have heard of the place and the smaller minority that can find it on a map.
The idiot ruling class of the West- who have a bizarre desire to do a lot of stupid things-, including importing endless foreigners, trying to destroy Russia, and convincing their own people to not reproduce- seem to have finally found a stupid thing they don’t want to do: war with Yemen.
If Israel and their Saudi friends want to destroy the Houthis, good luck with that. I expect my tax dollars will still be paying for it, but at least I don’t have to read about Americans dying to defeat… Yemen?
Am I supposed to be in favor of war with… Yemen?
Seriously?
You are OK with an Iranian proxy shooting missiles at ships, including US Navy ships, in the Gulf, increasing shipping costs worldwide, and not paying a price beyond a few intentionally ineffective US airstrikes on trivial infrastructure?
A few things re: Houthis
The main dynamic driving the situation between us and the Houthis is the asymmetry of it all. To put it bluntly they are having the time of their lives. They have engaged in piracy and through missile attacks have basically blocked one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, all in direct and open defiance of the United States and its navy. Not bad for a 4th rate power.
So we (and or the Israelis) cannot seem (or wish to) to impose our will on them and yes air strikes aren’t a great way of doing it, look at how long it took to break the Serbs over Kosovo.
However, things have radically changed over the past few weeks. The Houthis look around and see the Iran’s top-tier militias have just gotten their rear ends handed to them and Iran did nothing about it. Essentially the Israelis just completely severed the nervous system of not only Hezbollah but rendered the Iranian connections to its Ring of Fire as moot. If I’m the Hourthis I am like the rest of Iran’s Arab allies in a state of shock at Israel’s capabilities, like they were a bunch of genies.
I saw Israel’s bombing of the Houthis as a not-so-gentle reminder that they haven’t forgotten about them and that fun time is over, their Iranian patron cannot protect them, and it might be time for them to cut a deal especially with Israel’s new friends the Saudis
Of course such a deal would have the extra benefit of furthering diminishing Iran’s reputation.
This is one those times to quote Lenin ‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.’ Israel has completely disoriented Iran and its allies (for now), time to press the advantage and solidify the gains
Xennady: “Am I supposed to be in favor of war with… Yemen?”
Xen, we are on the same page there. I am opposed to the US getting involved in far-away wars for no well-defined purpose.
The point is that the “Joe Biden” Administration made a big song-and-dance about gathering up a multi-national coalition (mostly worthless Euros) and sending the military there to keep the sea lanes open (which would mainly benefit those hapless Euros rather than the US). The navies assembled — and achieved nothing! The Houthis still control the sea lanes. The Israelis have different objectives (stopping Houthi attacks on their country), and they may well achieve that goal.
Maybe the “Kamala Harris” Administration will have more humility? Just don’t count on it.
I thought about that Lenin quote too.
Israel has long had the capability to do what it’s now doing to Iran’s proxy armies. What held back Israel until now was the idiots running American foreign policy. The Obama-Biden combine caused this war, and the Ukraine catastrophe, by projecting weakness and then pursuing policies that prevented their ally from winning after it was attacked. The Israeli govt is taking advantage of the current absence of US leadership to cripple Iran’s proxy armies. I agree that now is the time for Israel to press its advantage. The Iranian regime is a house of cards. If it falls, the outlook for the entire Middle East becomes much better and Russia and China will be set back significantly in their worldwide troublemaking.
Jared Kushner has an excellent summary here. Of course this will be how Trump sees it too.
I probably should not have done it, but I went to Google maps to look at the Yemeni port that the IDF just rearranged. One business caught my eye. The Yemeni Company for Flour Mills and Silos.
An unfortunate choice for a name…..
Xen, we are on the same page there.
Apologies, that was venting and I didn’t actually think you wanted the US to go to war with yet another country almost no Americans care about.
…which would mainly benefit those hapless Euros rather than the US.
Bingo. I am extremely weary of watching the globalist cabal expend the wealth and power of the United States to solve the problems of foreigners who generally don’t even like Americans.
I think we’d agree that it’s time for that to end.
You are OK with an Iranian proxy shooting missiles at ships, including US Navy ships, in the Gulf, increasing shipping costs worldwide, and not paying a price beyond a few intentionally ineffective US airstrikes on trivial infrastructure?
Quite. I’ve very much enjoyed watching the flailing incompetence of whomever is clumsily giving orders to what remains of Western naval power and the utter failure of their moronic attempts to force the incipient empire of Yemen to cease tormenting them.
I simply don’t identify with the present regime anymore and its endless travails don’t trouble me. If a US navy ship was hit and took casualties I’m pretty sure I’d feel different- but I don’t even trust the regime to be honest about even that. There were reports that the CVN-69 had been hit and damaged- but who knows? It might be politically ugly if Americans were killed doing something the American public doesn’t support, so why would we be told about it? I suspect we haven’t been told about such things- how many NATO personnel have been killed in Ukraine?- which leaves me rather detached about all of this.
Shrug. About those other ships- foreign flagged and crewed by foreigners- not my problem. Nor is it my problem that the globalists are discovering that offshoring almost everything to far away foreign countries might eventually lead to ugly consequences not only for people like me, but also for people like them.
My solution- the West needs to invest in its own set of countries, not elsewhere. That would cost the globalists money- maybe even threaten their bonuses- so they’ll fight that like they would fight demons from H***.
No, strike that- they’d fight that like they were fighting Donald Trump and his populist supporters.
FYI- I am not on the side of the globalists.
One thing to keep in mind is that historically we are a maritime power and have had a deep interest in maintaining the sea lanes. Anyone remember what the latter part of “….halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” was about?
We can live with the Houthis just as we could live with the Barbery pirates but you don’t engage in piracy and shut down shipping lanes. There’s a price to be paid for that. We have a public interest, as a matter of deterrence, that everyone understands that the Houthis are seen to pay that price
That doesn’t mean we need to engage in a war ourselves, but rather enable those who want them dead. We’re in this position because we have been restraining those who want to fight the Houthis and also because Biden wanted to play footsie with Iran.
The medium-term answer is to go back and enable the Saudis to continue their, yes, brutal war against the Houthis. Our arms deals with them are cash and carry and their enemies are ours. The long-term solution is Iran, the stability of its government has long been overrated.
The short-term solution is to blockade and start taking out key infrastructure targets one-by-one through missile strikes, letting the Houthis know that on any given day the day they can have is average – worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow.
We can come to such an “agreement” with the Houthis, but it cannot be done by losing the initiative and playing defense in the Red Sea – expending our magazines and running down our readiness by simply reacting.
I would imagine around 5:00 PM on January 20, 2025 Trump will make that offer.
Btw… the idea that we are dealing with binary choices when it comes down to strategy is failure of strategy itself. That”s where you want an adversary, not where you want to be. I’ve long held that for us that we need to ditch the “Pottery Barn Strategy” of you break it, you bought it and instead adopt the concept of the limited punitive expedition…. see “Shores of Tripoli”
Btw even though I think he’s nuts, Ahmadinejad /a> made the claim that the Mossad basically subverted the very Iranian agency tasked with fighting Mossad subversion.
have had a int
J. E. Dyer’s thoughts are worth reading as always. She argues that Netanyahu didn’t wait too long to go on the attack against Hezbollah out of deference to Biden, as some of us feared, but rather timed the decapitation of Hezbollah perfectly, is well positioned to press Israel’s advantage and should do so.
Don’t stop now, Bibi. Destabilize the mullahs and break their nuclear program.
I wonder if one of the reasons we haven’t been doing much is that somebody in the Pentagon has been paying attention to Ukraine and trying to figure how this applies to our capabilities–and discovering that we don’t have really effective options here. Maybe somebody is applying to war the maxim “It’s better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than open it and remove all doubt.”
Deterrence works when you link an opponent’s actions with threats. We should tell Iran that if the rumors of Iranian assassination teams targeting Trump prove to be real, we WILL remove their nuclear weapons production facilities (but this supposes that we have the actual cajones to follow through). We might have to wait until Trump assumes office to make this kind of explicit threat.
One thing to keep in mind is that historically we are a maritime power and have had a deep interest in maintaining the sea lanes.
Historically, we were also a nation under the Rule of Law with a Constitution the government followed- and we had world-leading industry with a robust shipbuilding component.
Today, the US can’t build ships very well, can’t design them, can’t man them, paint them, or even name them in accordance with tradition. That’s a notable problem for a maritime power, I think.
I bet every potential rival including the Houthis knows this- and also knows all about the myriad other problems the US military is having right now.
We’re in this position because we have been restraining those who want to fight the Houthis and also because Biden wanted to play footsie with Iran.
I disagree. We’re in this position because the people ruling the United States have spent the last 30-odd years patting themselves on the back for the accomplishments of people long dead instead of investing in American industry and making new things- that is, aside from the surveillance panopticon needed for a turn-key totalitarian state. I note the US does not yet have a working hypersonic missile despite (of course) spending billions of dollars on the effort, while the Houthis might soon be gifted some by Russia.
Back when we were fighting the Barbery pirates at the very least we had technological parity with our enemies. Today, I doubt it. The US defense industry is focused on shareholder return and not national defense.
We need to back away from the forever wars of the regime and rearm.
Mike: “… adopt the concept of the limited punitive expedition…. see “Shores of Tripoli”
About the “shores of Tripoli” – I had never delved into the details, and had always assumed that it was a heroic moment in the history of the young United States. Then someone – probably David Foster of this parish, the source of a number of fine book recommendations – mentioned the well-researched 1947 book “Lydia Bailey” by Kenneth Roberts. It is an apparently fairly accurate novelized treatment of the revolution in Haiti, also touching on the Barbary pirates.
In October 1803, the US frigate Philadelphia, which had been sent to the Mediterranean to deal with the Barbary pirates, ran aground in Tripoli bay and surrendered without a fight. The American crew were enslaved. A rescue mission was sent; however, it landed not on the “shores of Tripoli” but far to the west in Cyrenaica, with the aim of supporting a Libyan uprising against the Tripoli pirate ruler. In the event, the US forces were quickly withdrawn through the machinations of the US State Department without having accomplished anything effective. Abandoned by the US, the uprising failed. Think Afghanistan, only much lower budget.
The Federal Government has been a disappointment for over two centuries. We citizens of today need to learn this, and then act accordingly.
Re: Shores of Tripoli, I’m going to go with print the legend, I doubt many people know much of that expedition outside of the fate of the Philadelphia and the Marine hymn. Whatever the actual history, the basic concept of the expedition still holds true in the sense that we (including the Brits and others) know from our history how to deal with pirates.
As far as Jefferson and the Barbary pirates, cut them a little slack. It might have been poorly organized and planned, but the audacity of sending an expedition to the other side of the world back up our sovereign rights is charming.
With a punitive expedition we don’t need to hold ground, heck we don’t even need to put boots ashore in a raiding sense, but you need to project power onto the shore. We can target the high-value areas such as ports and production facilities. The other step is to blockade what remains the ports and prevent resupply from Iran, perhaps even do something through diplomatic channels about that Iranian spy ship. Also we can simply start equipping the Saudis again.
Any such action is of course predicated on political will; however, there is a pretty long history of international law and piracy and the Houthis have no official standing. I’m generally not in favor of incremental use of violence, but my basic assumption is that Houthis are having a lot of fun deciding who does and does not pass by their shores. They are also way out in nowhere land and heavily dependent on outside supply. Give them the whiff of the grape in the form of another 2,000 bunker buster.
The operating maxim of a punitive expedition is to move away from Powell’s doctrine of “You break it you fix it” which is foolish to FAFO
It’s an operational problem that can be solved if the political constraints are loosened, I know a big if.
Attack the problem from 3 sides: declare piracy and project power ashore, fund their enemies, and tell Iran to buzz off. Coincidentally Iran right now is pretty weak as far as backing its proxies.
I forgot one other element, one that is very relevant with the recent killing of Fu’ad Shukr
We have Amphibious groups afloat with Marine expeditionary units for a reason, the ability to project power ashore in an expeditionary manner. We (well our leaders) have squandered the trust involved involved in their use, but the operationally this is why they exist.
The one immediate thing that jumped off the page regarding the Marine peacekeeping force 40 years ago in Beirut was that… it was used as peacekeepers. That’s not what Marines exist for, they exist to wage war and the MEU are a key instrument of policy. You want garrison troops, plenty of those around.
The sad thing is that Navy for the past 30 years worked itself into a dead end by gearing its force structure and ship procurement to fighting in the littoral, which is what we have with the Houthi. So now we have the worst of both worlds, a Navy that cannot fight a peer competitor and one that cannot effectively for the task it was design for.
Mike: “The operating maxim of a punitive expedition is to move away from Powell’s doctrine of “You break it you fix it” which is foolish to FAFO”
We are in agreement that the Powell doctrine is foolishness — the kind of empty stupidity expected from Far Lefties. However, each situation needs to be judged on its merits, always with the perspective of “How does our proposed action benefit the people of the US”.
For example, the French-dominated conclusion at Versailles to WWI — Kick the Germans while they are down — was clearly not in the best interests of the people of the US, or indeed of the world. In contrast, the US-dominated Marshall Plan conclusion to WWII — Assist the defeated people help themselves to get back up on their own two feet — was definitely in the best interests of the people of the US.
As far as the Houthis go, it is worth considering that some fights are not winnable, due to a combination of location, geography, and culture. Yemen has been at war for decades, with no sign of slowing down — fighting Oman, fighting each other, fighting the Saudis. Maybe an analogue is Afghanistan — a horribly poor country which defeated the British Empire at its prime, then defeated the USSR at its prime, and finally defeated the USA at its prime.
Mostly, what we need is to make it much more difficult for Our Betters to get involved in far-away wars for no well-defined purpose. Say, require non-secret voting in a plebiscite of the American people before committing US forces or support to a foreign war — with only those citizens who vote in favor of conflict automatically agreeing to pay higher taxes to support the war and agreeing to volunteer to be sent to the war.
With all that said, when the Houthis reach far outside their borders to attack Israel for no good reason, Israel did the right thing in hitting back hard.
yes Powell made the perfect the enemy of the good, so effectively no one could realistically mount any operation, the Gulf War was meant as a punitive expedition, debates can be posited how successful Reagan’s strike on Qaddafi was reasonably successful Noriega in Panama
the corollary the Wolfowitz principle was also wrong, you would think a student of Wohlstetter would have know that military action is the last option, protracted ground combat one of the worst of those,