The Houthis are just pawns, the coalition must reach their masters

A presidential bodyguard was serving tea to South Yemen’s cabinet members when his colleague opened a Samsonite briefcase, drew a Scorpion automatic pistol, and fired a series of bullets into vice president Ali Antar’s back.

The slain VP’s body gazed emptily from his chair as other ministers’ bodyguards erupted in a shootout, while their bosses rushed to exit doors, leaving behind them two more dead.

The one conspicuously missing was the president, Ali Naser Mohamed el-Hassani, who had plotted his Number Two’s assassination, an emblem of Yemen’s self-destruction ever since its colonial masters left its sorry shores.

It was winter 1986, and the Soviet Union, which sponsored el-Hassani’s portion of Yemen, had yet to vanish. The Yemeni state, by contrast, fell apart almost the day it was born, succumbing to the internal strife that now makes it a thorn in the sides of Israel, Egypt, and the entire world, and a pawn on Iran’s Middle Eastern chessboard – a pawn whose removal will be useless unless it leads to the pawn’s king.

BLESSED with temperate weather, fertile soils, pristine beaches, and clusters of exotic islands, in addition to coffee, iron, and oil, Yemen could be rich. Its location between Africa and India could also have made of it a commercial junction, a role it indeed played under Ottoman and British rule.

That’s not where modern Yemen turned.

Yemen's turning point

For the past 60 years, Yemen’s main product has been civil war, thinly disguising age-old tribal animosities with a succession of ideological masks, once appearing like republicans confronting royalists, another time playing Marxists battling capitalists, and now emerging as a religious war between Houthis and Sunnis.

The result has been devastation, with more than 300,000 killed in the latest war alone, while four million were displaced, famine spread, disease raged, and per-capita product sank to an annual $702.

In itself, suffering is not new to the nation whose civil wars included aerial gas attacks in the 1960s, naval bombardment in the 1980s, missile attacks in the 1990s, and in 1986 also urban tank-battles, in the fighting that the cabinet room shootout sparked.

Nor is Yemen’s emergence in the midst of geopolitical mayhem new, having been previously a flashpoint between colonial Britain and fascist Italy, a bone of contention between the Cold War’s antagonists, and a playball between rival Arab neighbors. What’s new now is that unlike the past, when the world toyed with Yemen, now Yemen – or rather its Houthi part – is toying with the world.

The world, for its part, can be expected to win the military chapter of the approaching confrontation. However, it will doubtfully join the political war, without which the military fight will be pointless.

THE HOUTHIS’ attacks on Israel are obviously revolting – what has any of us done to any of them – but their attacks on Red Sea shipping are not just brazen. They are mad.

Israel-bound missile shots and their stratospheric interceptions are exotic – who would have thought that the first military clash in outer space would be between Yemenis and Jews? – but those salvos can still be presented as gestures of solidarity with Gaza, even if they leave one wondering where this pan-Arab fraternity was when Arabs were killed in far larger numbers in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq.

Targeting Eilat, despite its galactic dimension, is a Middle Eastern affair. Disrupting shipping is a global affair, a difference the Houthis apparently don’t get because they – unlike the Yemeni government they defy – do not understand the outer world.

Bullying ships at the Red Sea’s mouth disrupts maritime traffic not only to Israel but also to the Suez Canal, thus obstructing global commerce and also choking Egypt, which last year collected $9.4 billion in passage taxes from more than 25,000 ships, equal to more than one-fifth of overall Egyptian exports.

In attacking international shipping, the Houthis have thus effectively declared war on Egypt and, by extension, on global commerce, which – if the Houthi provocation is tolerated – will have to reroute all Euro-Asian shipping around Africa, the way it sailed until the Suez Canal’s inauguration in 1869. This would, of course, be an exorbitant price for the international system, both economically and strategically.

That is why the US has gathered fairly quickly an international coalition to fight the Houthi scourge, and that is also why the confrontation the Houthis invited will end in their defeat. That is what happened last decade when Somali pirates disrupted shipping off the Horn of Africa until Indian, Chinese, and European fleets confronted that piracy and brought it to an end.

Now, faced with American, British, and French air power, the Houthi provocation, in its narrow military dimension, can be expected to be quelled. In the political dimension, alas, the root of this affront to global peace is poised to survive and fester.

YEMEN’S REBELS are no international factor. The factor is this puppet’s Iranian puppeteer.

Tehran has cast across the Middle East a broad network of proxies that have planted the ayatollahs firmly in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad. The Yemeni adventure lands the mullahs at the doorstep of Africa, which looms a mere 30 km. west of Yemen’s southwestern tip, the Bab-el-Mandab Straits.

The unfolding clash must therefore be not merely about stopping the Houthis’ attacks but about confronting Iran’s imperial project. It will not be enough to attack the troops, arms, and vessels that the Houthis unleash at global commerce. To be effective, the war on Houthi piracy will have to call to task its political mastermind, by targeting the ports and warehouses that supply the Houthis’ adventure.

That’s when routine will be restored. The Red Sea will bustle with freighters, the Suez Canal will feed Egypt, Iran will deal with Iran, and Yemen will bleed itself white.

www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.