Occasionally, US President Donald Trump’s instincts may be right. Last month, he declared victory in ending a bombing campaign against Yemen’s Houthis that originally had been planned as a six-month-or-more intensive bombing campaign, but was shut down after just one month. The Houthis were said to have agreed to stop firing at US vessels in the region which supposedly would allow shipping to venture back into the Red Sea rather than take the long and expensive Cape route between Asia and Europe. That has yet to happen for most shipping lines as the cost of insurance and the continued threat of resumption of attacks on non-US ships (the vast majority) still deters most shipping.
So was this a victory for the US? A defeat? Or the rare triumph of common sense? US planes had carried out about 1,000 sorties against a variety of Houthi targets. Still, there was scant sign that it had done much more than kill a lot of people and reduced but by no mean eliminated the Houthi capacity to harass. A much-prolonged bombing campaign as originally intended might have done so. But at what cost to the US in terms of hardware? And might not the Houthis then be able to rebuild their capacity to harass?
What Trump and his advisers had clearly noted was that even a one-month campaign had been at a heavy cost to US hardware, the loss of several expensive advanced drones and two fighter jets involved in carrier accidents – quite a blow for a US military supposedly more focused on keeping China at bay than engaging with the forever underestimated Houthis. Far from being the extremist rebel group of western imaginations, the mostly Shia Houthis have controlled most of the densely populated parts of Yemen since 2014 and long resisted a costly attempt by Saudi Arabia to defeat them on behalf of the officially recognized Republic of Yemen, which controls only about 30 percent of the population. The Houthis thus have under their control about 19 million people, about the same number as there are Saudis in Saudi Arabia. While some US strategists talk of land-based alternatives to the Red Sea and Suez Canal via the Gulf, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, these may make sense on the map but little in terms of the region’s volatile politics.
Typically, the West blames the Houthi troublemaking on Iran, which is certainly the supplier of most of its weaponry. But that misses the point that the Houthi attacks only began after Israel’s invasion of Gaza. They have always said they will cease when Israel stops its war. For sure, that most recent war was started by Hamas, but Gaza has, in effect, been an outdoor prison. Now, a tiny strip of land into which are crowded 2 million Palestinians is seen by many in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet as ripe for takeover by Israel for good.
If Trump is serious about bringing peace rather than simply limiting US losses in an aerial campaign against negligible enemies, he should go back to the basics: Gaza and the West Bank. Giving the cold shoulder to Netanyahu as he sought to win the favors of Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf states on the recent presidential trip through the region is one thing. Continuing to give blanket military and diplomatic support to what are regarded by most of the world as Israeli war crimes ensures that conflict in one or many forms will continue. Following the Israelis in supporting the use of assassination puts the US into the same category as Putin’s Russia and its poisonings. The mass killings of women and children in Gaza makes 9/11 look like a minor event but one now probably destined to be repeated.
Meanwhile Israeli settlement of the West Bank not only deprives Palestinians of their lands and livelihood, but it is also completely contrary to the international rules and UN resolutions which the US and the West generally are supposed to support. Only last week, the Netanyahu government announced 22 new such illegal colonizations. Objections to Israeli behavior are met with cries of “anti-Semitism,” yet the main sufferers are Palestinians whose Semitic origins, linguistic and historical, are at least the equal of Israeli Jews, who are mostly migrants and their descendants since 1918.
Extending the so-called Abraham Accords by persuading more Arab states to recognize Israel will do nothing to bring lasting peace while Israel’s seven million Jews are permitted to treat seven million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel as they have been doing. As for competing with China for friends in the Middle East, only huge US subsidies can keep Egypt and King Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan onside, while the mutual enmity with Iran is more to do with the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 than current mutual interests.
