January 14, 2024: Yemeni Civil War

Good afternoon. Last night, as I was finishing up the post for this week, my area lost power amidst a severe winter storm, something that people all over North America can relate to. The power came back this afternoon, and I am late for this reason. I plan on being back to the usual Saturday schedule next week.

I have been meaning to comment on the civil war in Yemen for a long time, but that hasn’t been a priority until now, when events have brought it to the forefront of our attention. So today I will comment, with focus on events in the Red Sea in the last few weeks.

For an overview of what the conflict is about, I would suggest this freshly updated background piece by the Council on Foreign Relations. The conflict began in 2014 when Shiite Houthi insurgents rose up against the internationally recognized Sunni government. The civil war has been raging at a slower pace in the last couple years, but peace talks have so far not yielded definitive results. See also this piece, also from CFR, about the historical origins of Yemen’s divisions.

The civil war has been seen as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As this piece from the Middle East Institute explains, the Houthis are part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” against Israel and the United States. Iran has acted through proxies to project power while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. However, unlike Hezbollah or some militias in Iraq, the Houthis are not an Iranian creation, and Iran and the Houthis did not cultivate a close relationship until after the Arab Spring, even though the Houthi movement goes back to the 1990s.

As for Saudi Arabia’s role, the aforementioned CFR article argues that the main factor in Saudi reasoning is the perception that the Houthis are Iranian proxies, and a Houthi takeover in Yemen would be a major setback in their geopolitical struggle with Iran. Thus, Saudi Arabia assembled a coalition of Arab states to restore Yemeni president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power and defeat the Houthis. In this effort, Saudi Arabia has received support from the United States and several other countries. American support has come in the form of arms sales and logistical assistance. Saudi Arabia is an American ally, though in many ways a troublesome ally for reasons that I might discuss at another time.

As for the Houthi movement itself, the name derives from Hussein al-Houthi, a cleric who encouraged demonstrations against the government and was killed in 2004, an event that played a major role in radicalizing the Houthi movement. They would best be described as an Islamist movement. Their slogan is as unsubtle as it gets.

ٱللَّٰهُ أَكْبَرُ, ٱلْمَوْتُ لِأَمْرِيكَا, ٱلْمَوْتُ لِإِسْرَائِيلِ, ٱللَّعْنَةُ عَلَیٰ ٱلْيَهُودِ, ٱلنَّصْرُ لِلْإِسْلَامِ

God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.

On September 14, 2019, the Houthis conducted a major drone attack against oil fields and processing facilities in Saudi Arabia. This came after dozens of other Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia.

Before we get into the latest developments in the Red Sea, my predominately American audience might be wondering, why is this relevant to me? There are a few reasons.

First and foremost, the humanitarian aspects of the war have to be discussed. Years of warfare have made Yemen home to one of the world’s most dire humanitarian situations, which entails the breakdown of the food and health care systems. There were an estimated 377,000 deaths as of the end of 2021, mostly due to these indirect causes. The UN estimates that 4.5 million people are displaced and that 21.6 million people, two-thirds of the country’s population, are in need of humanitarian assistance.

Second, it is clear that the Houthis have received considerable backing from Iran, though the full extent is debatable. A few weeks ago I noted this piece from Foreign Affairs, which argues that Hamas in the October 7 attacks did not receive nearly as much foreign backing or direction as it was initially assumed. Thus I want to be careful about jumping to conclusions about Iranian complicity in, e.g. the Abqaiq-Khurais attacks on Saudi Arabia in 2019 or the recent shipping attacks. Nevertheless, Iran has played a malign role in many parts of the world, and it is in the American interest that their influence in Yemen be blocked.

Third, although tangential to the civil war, Americans have a clear counterterrorism interest in Yemen, and wartime conditions are favorable to terrorists. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is considered to be the most formidable branch of Al Qaeda today and since its formation in 2009 has been responsible for an attempt to destroy a Detroit-bound international airliner (2009) and the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris (2015), among numerous other attacks. One of AQAP’s predecessor organizations, Al Qaeda in Yemen, was responsible for the USS Cole bombing in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors. The 9/11 Commission was highly critical of the weak American response to the Cole bombing and has identified this as a major failure that contributed to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The civil war in Yemen, and the American support for Saudi Arabia in their war effort, have come under particular criticism from the anti-war movement, with this piece from the Friends Committee on National Legislation being a fairly typical example. I have my doubts about the appropriateness of American support for the Saudi war effort. The war has been characterized by serious war crimes on all sides. But the anti-war movement needs to be more clear-eyed about the nature of the Houthi movement. For example, the FCNL piece refers to the war as “Saudi-led” and downplays the Houthis’ Iranian backing. Outside of the anti-war movement, there doesn’t seem to have been much interest in the conflict from the American public until the last few weeks.

And that takes us to the shipping attacks. For those unaware, Houthi involvement in the Israel-Hamas war began on October 19, 12 days after the war started. Initially, Houthi fighters fired rockets toward Israel, but some missed their mark and landed in Egypt instead. The Houthis then shifted tactics and, a month later, began attacking ships with drones, anti-ship missiles, and piracy, making the Bab en-Mandeb straight dangerous and forcing cargo ships to take a longer and more expensive route around the Cape of Good Hope.

The main Houthi motivation for the attacks, according to this article, is to raise their profile. Opposition to Israel is popular in Yemen, so this might increase their popularity in that country, as well as elevate their status in the Islamic world broadly and as a member of Iran’s Axis of Resistance. The Houthis are evidently calculating that, since they have survived years of Saudi airstrikes, they can handle whatever retaliation is in store with Operation Prosperity Guardian (the name of the American-led operation to protect freedom of navigation in the Red Sea).

In a briefing a couple weeks ago, Biden administration officials stressed the Iranian backing of the Houthis, and the United States has alleged that Iran has provided some tactical intelligence and equipment used in the attacks, but the full degree of Iranian complicity is unclear. If the goal of using proxies is to maintain plausible deniability, then that has certainly succeeded in this case.

On Friday and Saturday, the coalition, led by the United States and United Kingdom, conducted a series of airstrikes which they claim have degraded the Houthis’ ability to conduct more attacks. On Twitter, Ryan Peterson of Flexport said, after the first round of strikes and before the second,

After the US and UK navies launched missile attacks on land-based Houthi targets in Yemen, instead of sending a signal that the Red Sea was now safe for ships, this morning 16 more vessels that had been en route to transit the Red Sea have instead diverted around Africa.

So it doesn’t look like this is over yet.

So far, the biggest debate in the United States has been around the President’s Constitutional authority to launch the strikes. At Reason, Ilya Somin argues that the Biden administration is on solid ground because, while they need Congressional authorization to initiate hostilities, they do not need authorization to respond to a direct attack against an American ship, as is the case here. Article V of the NATO treaty also authorizes the President, in Somin’s analysis, to respond to a direct attack on a NATO ally without explicit Congressional authorization.

As far as the propriety of using the military to defend international commerce, I will leave that question as an exercise for the reader, but it is interesting to note that the First Barbary War, one of the first (maybe the first; an American history buff will have to help me out) overseas military ventures of the United States under the generally pacifist president, Thomas Jefferson, was against piracy from Tripoli, which is in modern day Libya.

Much more could be said, and probably will be said because we are talking about an ongoing war, but I think that is enough for now. For people who have been following this issue, I imagine this post has been elementary, but for everyone else, I hope that it was helpful.

Quick Hits

James Zogby of the American Arab Institute assesses Hamas’ popularity in Gaza. He concludes that the lack of economic opportunity in the region is a major contributor, and that the root of the problem is Israeli blockading of opportunity in the 1990s in the wake of the Oslo Accords. I can’t speak to the blame game, but he is probably right that economics are a major, if not the most important, source of problems.

Michael Magoon from “From Poverty to Progress” wrote a piece on elevated bikeways. This is not a new idea, but one that has not taken off. I don’t see a good reason why not, but based on my analysis of pedestrian skyways last month, I would have to expect that cost will be a major challenge.

Also on the subject of follow-ups to recent posts, Walmart is expanding its drone delivery program to more customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It was also brought to my attention another recent study showing significant cost and emissions savings from drone delivery over other options.

A few months ago, I mentioned this analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations about the overwhelming scale of crime in Ecuador. In the past week, things have taken a turn for the worst with widespread attacks from organized crime and terrorist outfits.

On Twitter, Birth Gauge has released some preliminary data on worldwide birth rates for 2023. The numbers don’t look good. For those who don’t have Twitter accounts, here is the chart. Some of these figures, such as for the Philippines, differ substantially from what is reported by World Population Prospects, which is the most widely used dataset. I don’t know where the Birth Gauge figures come from and cannot vouch for their accuracy, but I have lost confidence in WPP. It is also interesting to note that Hungary, perhaps the country today with the most aggressive pronatal policies, shows very limited evidence of those policies being effective.

This week, I learned that working moms spend as much time in childcare as stay-at-home moms did 40 years ago. That fact and many others can be seen on Ruth Grace Wong’s newsletter, Joyful Parenting San Francisco.