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Striking Yemen From Afar Will Not Achieve Anything
Last night the U.S. launched another strike against Yemen:
The US Central Command (Centcom) has announced that American forces have launched a fresh strike, targeting an alleged radar site used by the Ansarullah movement in Yemen.
The strike, carried out by the USS Carney (DDG 64) using Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, follows previous one on January 12.
Reports from multiple sources indicate that the airstrikes targeted the vicinity of Sanaa airport and its surrounding areas, north of the Yemeni capital. According to CNN, a US official revealed that this strike was conducted unilaterally by the United States and was of a smaller scale compared to previous actions.
Other reports confirm that this second strike in as many days targeted a radar site:
The US launched a fresh airstrike on a Houthi rebel radar installation Friday, in what was described as a follow-up attack to an earlier barrage across Yemen intended to degrade the group’s ability to target commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
The destroyer USS Carney fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at the radar facility, US Central Command said in a statement.
…
Central Command called the strike “a follow-on action on a specific military target associated with strikes taken on Jan. 12.”
The only known radar site near Sana'a is at the airport which the Saudis had bombed several times. It was reopened only in 2022, six years after it had been closed, following a UN brokered truce agreement.
Sana'a is some 100 km (60 miles) from the coastline. Why an air traffic control radar in Sana'a should be relevant for marine traffic in the Red Sea is beyond my understanding.
I also do not understand why the U.S. is hitting Yemen at all. The Houthi, part of the ruling Ansar Allah government coalition, want to fight the U.S. As long as the war on Gaza goes on they can not and will not be deterred from attacking ships related to Israel.
Many experts agree with this opinion:
Analysts who study the Houthis said that the American-led airstrikes could play into the group’s agenda and might be unlikely to stop the group’s attacks.
“This was not a miscalculation by the Houthis,” said Hannah Porter, a senior research officer at ARK Group, a British company that works in international development. “This was the goal. They hope to see an expanded regional war, and they are eager to be on the front lines of that war.”
Within hours of the first wave of strikes, a senior Houthi official, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, said that the United States and Britain would soon realize that they had engaged in “the biggest folly in their history.”
(ARK is one of several companies which clandestine 'regime change' work for the UK's Foreign Office.)
The Houthi have fought the Saudis for eight years and have arguably won that war. Now the Saudis have a truce with the Houthi and continue to negotiate a peace agreement with them. They found that there is simply no other way to handle them.
Many other experts agree:
Laurent Bonnefoy, a researcher who studies Yemen at Sciences Po in Paris, said the strikes were what the Houthis were “looking for.”
“They are gaining what they want, which is to appear as the boldest regional player when it comes to confronting the international coalition, which is largely in favor of Israel and does not care for people in Gaza,” he said. “This generates some form of support for them, internationally as well as internally.”
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Ibrahim Jalal, an analyst with the Middle East Institute, described the Houthis as a nimble militant group hardened by years of guerrilla warfare in Yemen and weathering years of Saudi-led airstrikes.
They have “little in the way of large-scale, permanent military sites,” he said, “and instead use mobile launchpads for rockets and drones in addition to networks of tunnels and caves that makes their targeting highly complicated.”
The strikes Friday, Jalal said, were “surgical, largely tactical and symbolic.” He doubted they work as a deterrent.
“The Houthis have too little to lose,” he said, and much to gain. The war in Gaza has enabled the group to position itself as the defender of the Palestinian cause in the region, winning public support at home and abroad and distracting from domestic discontent.
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As violence in Yemen’s civil conflict declined, opposition to the Houthis has emerged over complaints that include the group’s inability to pay public sector salaries, according to Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, a senior researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies. But the Houthi attacks on Red Sea commerce have struck a chord in a country where support for Palestinians is universal.
“Now everyone is saying, ‘We support the Houthis in this issue,’” she said.
The attacks on shipping bolstered the group’s recruitment efforts, she said, and over the last few weeks — a period including a rare firefight between Houthi fighters and U.S. Navy helicopters — the number of recruits has soared, particularly in Yemen’s northern tribal areas.
Since the Houthis’ beginnings as a youth movement in northern Yemen decades ago, she said, the group had envisioned themselves as more than just a local actor — “they had ambitions of being a regional power.”
Now, as they confront the United States and its allies directly, she said, their wish has come true. They’ve proved their capacity to strike targets far beyond their borders.
“The Houthis will retaliate,” Shuja al-Deen said. “And they can.”
Video shows that after the first strike about a million people took part in a huge pro-Houthi anti-U.S. rally in Sana'a.
All this was obvious to anyone who has followed Yemen a bit. The country can only be controlled from the ground and Yemenis are excellent fighters. The British learned this in the 1960s when they were kicked out of the country even as they ferociously bombed the hell out of it. The Saudis learned this over several wars the fought (and lost) against Yemen.
That is why I do not understand why the White House is doing these strike. Neither do others:
[A] campaign of aerial bombing and cruise missile strikes seems unlikely to deter the Houthis from continuing to try, with whatever resources they retain, to threaten Red Sea shipping. They have other means at their disposal, as well, including uncrewed explosive boats and naval mines.
Fundamentally, any U.S. attempt to intimidate the Houthis seems to suffer from a mismatch between their respective levels of commitment.
The Houthi want to fight while the Biden administration wants to avoid another war during an election year.
When this 'deterrence' action in Yemen fails to achieve any result, as is likely, will it send in ground troops? What is the plan when those fail?
@ Jane
who wrote,
“One thing I don’t get is,
Why aren’t the Houthis’ attack on Israel-related shipping framed as simple tit-for-tat?
Namely, blockade of Gaza in the Med ==>> blockade of Israel in the Red…”
Posted by: Jane | Jan 13 2024 17:51 utc | 53
The Vichy press must stigmatize the Ansarallah (Houthi) independence forces as “rebels” to the western colonized mind. They cannot acknowledge imperialism’s history. They cannot speak or write that Ansarallah, in blocking resupply vessels in the Red Sea headed toward Israel, is enforcing the existing international law on genocide in preventing, hindering, the aggressor from genociding Gaza. Vichy press no parrot imperial narrative, vichy press get no salary or perks, no job.
~~
@ whomever is interested
~~
Collective Waste shippers are dependent on insurance coverage. Their insurance carriers probably will not insure their ships at the same rates now, if at all, if they pass through Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Grief or the Gate of Tears, into the Red Sea even though said ships are not going to Israel and so are free to pass.
And now because USUK attacked Yemen, US and UK ships are probably also targets too? So USUK escalated the situation in attacking Yemen, dividing the world further into two separate blocks, the desperate declining imperial-rules-based collective waste order and the ROW, when all they had to do to de-escalate was to implement a ceasefire in Gaza, simply stop the massacres and disease and starvation driven deaths.
~~
As an aside, I read on AlMayadeen several days ago that a recent hit on a US outpost in Iraq included an 8200 intel group of 7 people, some of which had dual ISUS citizenship.
Also, in testimony in UK by “Lord” Cameron before a committee asking him how many UK citizens are being held by Ansarallah? and how many have been returned to the UK?, some very murky answers were elicited, as though clarity would reveal something untoward. Zero returned and foggy citizenship status of the counted it seems. UK soldiers in Gaza? Izzie nationals working for the UK, whom they view as their own? (Judge Napolitano aired the clips of the hearing with Cameron and sidekick this week.)
Seems like this dog is all tail.
~~
Several weeks ago, perhaps more, 5 people were arrested in UK for selling info on the history of Palestine, a history the author says used to be common knowledge thirty years ago but since has been forgotten or erased or displaced. The pamphlet is, “Imperialism: Decadent, Parasitic, and Doomed — Zionism War and Peace” by Harpal Brar.
Harpal Brar, Joti’s dad, was interviewed by Garland Nixon yesterday.
Link below.
Excerpt: (from auto generated transcript. Please excuse the funky punctuation and errors.)
“…first of all Zionism is not a Jewish Enterprise it’s an imperialist Enterprise.
Zionism is a reactionary racist anti-semitic and reactionary tool of imperialism. I wrote. a small pamphlet only about 100 pages and this is the pamphlet that our comrades were selling at a big demonstration in London where they were arrested and kept overnight in a police cell um for for for 24 four hours and it’s the weakness of imperialism that they cannot allow you to express your views.
everything that is in that pamphlet is historically true. what’s more it was accepted by everybody until about 30 years ago that was the truth and most of the sources that I rely on are Jewish sources like your
compatriot Lenny brener and there are others who are actually
zionists who have given details of what design is for
so it’s a ideology which has got lot in common with fascism because what it says is Jews do not belong to Germany. Jew’s Homeland is in Palestine. why? because God gave Palestine to the Jews.
now this is all myth making. you know nobody has seen God give anything to anybody, to the Christians or Muslims.
it’s a ideology which arose out of anti-Semitism whereby Jews for a whole Millennia were oppressed in Europe and of course the answer to that was to join with other people who were also oppressed and fight against the oppressors and at the time the Zionists did not want to accept that.
their idea was the only way Jews could ever be safe would be to have a homeland of of their own and of course this is something that that fitted the Nazi ideology.
Nazis also believed that the Jews did not belong to Germany or anywhere else and they had they had to go. so because of this convergence of views on their part this of course for a number of years after the coming to power of the Nazis laid the basis for collaboration between the zionists and the Nazis.
and that collaboration did not end till 1938 and the Zionists regarded
assimilationism as the biggest danger to them. they don’t regard Nazism or fascism as being a danger to them. the danger to them is assimilationism and when Hitler came to power they greeted with joy his coming to power because now they said it puts paate to the secular Zionist ideology of collaborating with other people and assimilating.
Jews were very assimilated in Germany. The only places where they were not assimilated was the zhar Empire which at the time included included Poland as well
and so from the oppression you can either fight against oppression by joining with workingclass people or you can be a separatist. the Zionists chose separatism and this separatism is what laid the basis for Zionist ideology
and the sick thing about that is 1917 the October Revolution freed the Jews of Russia in every possible way. literally overnight they got all their political
civil and social social rights. in fact people of Jewish origin were very
disproportionately represented in the party, in the Central Committee…
European people of Jewish origin …precisely because … the majority of the Jews in the world, overwhelming majority, didn’t want a separate homeland. they didn’t want to go with Zionism and there were special circumstances under which they were able to do that. but this project of zionism …is a religion which has got nothing to do with the political ideology of Zionism.
British imperialism was the first one to start the ball rolling. they recognized that in Palestine they did not, unlike the Catholics and the Orthodox Russian Church, they did not have any Representatives.
Palestine was very important not only as a religious place which was you know Common to Muslims Christians and Jews but also it was at the heart of the of the route to India which was really the jewel in the crown. it was the most important BR British colony and they wanted somebody there who will protect them and this became particularly important with the
coming into being of steam shipping which required coal for being
powered and they needed coaling stations all across in Aiden hence the
Aiden Colony this in southern Yemen
and they encourage Jews to have that ideology but they didn’t really succeed and Britain did everything possible that it could to Zionize the European West European Jews.
it didn’t succeed so they turned their attention to Russia and they sent a
special missionary by the name of willhelm Hasler and hasher went went to
Russia and met the predecessors of Fel um who had written about Jews wanting to have a separate Homeland and one of them was Leo pinsker and hashar meets Leo pinsker and having met him he said I’ve read your pamphlet [about] emancipation.
haven’t you forgotten one thing? so pinska said, what but you have forgotten to put in it that God gave this land, he promised this land to the Jews and only to the Jews and nobody else.
and then he moved to Vienna that is where he struck up a rapport with Herzl who was a Hungarian Jew. he was a journalist. he was at the time in in Vienna and Harel wrote his book, The Jew State Juden … in which he expresses The View that Jews could never
be safe…he was very depressed by the trial…
but Herzl was not religious. he regarded religion as a con to to fool the people. he was not particularly keen on Palestine. he would have any place, one of the places he would have is Uganda…
to have somewhere in in Latin America but in the end the zionists were were able to fix on Palestine
the zionists have a conference once a year and that
conference did not agree to have Palestine as the place where the homeland of the Jews would be settled
and hasher was very disappointed and as a result it’s only later on that
Palestine was brought brought into the picture.
but the people who were very much behind that were the British
it’s British imperialism that really is the chief culprit in
zionism and if you like judaizing Zionism and conflating the two as though
if you are a Jew you’re automatically a Zionist or if you’re a Zionist you are automatically a Jew in fact to begin with and even now the majority of the zionists are not Jews as you know in your own country the evangelicals are
zionists and Export Zionism to the hilt even if they convoluted ideology says
well because the Bible says You must convert the Jews to Christianity you must take them to Israel and on the day of the Judgment some of them would be redeemed and who don’t convert would be destroyed that that is the philosophy
hardly an incentive for the Jews to go to Palestine
so that that is really what what was happening and even long before Herzl, long before Hasler, there were people, very prominent British from earlier on, …lord Shaftsbury but Lord pstone who was for years the foreign Secretary of Britain a big imperialist and who was prime minister also for four or five years they were pushing this ideology
but here religious obscurantism is mixed with Imperial interest…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKDAxP8Jl4
Posted by: suzan | Jan 13 2024 20:09 utc | 112
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