It was piracy on the high seas that drove the infant United States into its first foreign war. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to London to negotiate with the Barbary States, which had been kidnapping American sailors. The U.S., they said, was a new nation, and had done the people of North Africa no wrong. The Tripolitanian representative, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, told them in reply: “It is written in the Koran that all nations which have not acknowledged the Prophet are sinners, whom it is the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.”
The Houthis, a tribal coalition of Yemeni Shia insurgents, make a similar argument. Their slogan is “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam!” They claim the right to attack infidel vessels, and have taken to firing missiles, both at Israel and at commercial ships off their coast.
WHY FEW NATIONS ARE ACTIVELY SUPPORTING THE RED SEA SECURITY INITIATIVE
Perhaps 15% of the world’s trade passes through the Bab el-Mandeb straits at the southern end of the Red Sea. If there is one thing that almost everyone can agree on — Europeans, Americans, Chinese — it is keeping those sea lanes open. Britain and the U.S. have accordingly formed a 10-country coalition and sent a task force led by the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
So far, so good. Our vessels can intercept almost any missile the Houthis are capable of lobbing into the air. But what about rooting out the problem at the source? Can the U.S. really tolerate an organization whose motto is “Death to America” controlling the Yemeni capital, and effectively commanding those critical straits?
This is where it gets complicated. The Saudis and Emiratis have spent nine years trying to root out the Houthi movement by force, displaying little of the squeamishness about civilian casualties that Westerners have. Yet the Houthis (Ansar Allah, to give their movement its official name) have not been defeated. On the contrary, they are within reach of becoming the government of Yemen.
Indeed, it is their craving for legitimacy that lies behind their sudden assistance to Hamas who, until an eyeblink ago, were their sworn foes. The Houthis are not just Shia; they are Zaidis, a Shia subsect originally formed by followers of Zayd ibn Ali‘s unsuccessful rebellion against the Umayyad Caliphate in the eighth century. They are thus a minority within a minority.
At first, they existed mainly to defend the interests of the Zaidi Shia against Yemen’s Sunni majority. But, as Yemen became caught up in the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, their conflict became part of a larger sectarian battlefield. The Houthis, nostalgic for the Zaidi Imamate, loathed both Hamas and al Qaeda, which had a military presence in Yemen.
Since October, however, the easiest way to win popularity, whether within Yemen or the wider Islamic world, has been to take up the Palestinian cause. And so, in a bid for domestic support, the Houthis have become Hamas’s new best friends. With friends like these, who needs Yemenis?
The State Department is aware of the wretched precedent of Afghanistan. The Taliban, originally a movement of religious extremists with almost no support among the non-Pashtun half of the population, gained enough legitimacy through their resistance to the West to become the government of the state. Now, by the same token, the West’s support for Israel in Gaza has united opinion against the U.S., not only in Muslim countries, but across the Global South.
How should the U.S. respond to this latest Houthi belligerence? First, and most obviously, it is right to be prepared to deploy massive force, as part of a coalition of the willing, to defend seaborne commerce. But, if the Houthis, like the Taliban, are too embedded in the local population to be removed by military means, the only alternative is to find some way to deal with them.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
That, after all, is the lesson of the Barbary Wars. Although Americans tend to remember that conflict as ending with the first victory of the U.S. Marine Corps (“from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…” as the Marines’ hymn begins), it in fact ended in a compromise, with the federal government shelling out protection money to the corsairs.
One of this column’s constant themes is that a country with as large a fiscal deficit as America's needs to pick its battles carefully. There are conflicts, including that in Ukraine, that call for active U.S. engagement. But there are other conflicts that cannot be won, and where the best policy is therefore to negotiate from a position of strength. Yemen is such a case.
Yemen would be a war too far
3
1
25.12.2023
It was piracy on the high seas that drove the infant United States into its first foreign war. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to London to negotiate with the Barbary States, which had been kidnapping American sailors. The U.S., they said, was a new nation, and had done the people of North Africa no wrong. The Tripolitanian representative, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, told them in reply: “It is written in the Koran that all nations which have not acknowledged the Prophet are sinners, whom it is the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.”
The Houthis, a tribal coalition of Yemeni Shia insurgents, make a similar argument. Their slogan is “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam!” They claim the right to attack infidel vessels, and have taken to firing missiles, both at Israel and at commercial ships off their coast.
WHY FEW NATIONS ARE ACTIVELY SUPPORTING THE RED SEA SECURITY INITIATIVE
Perhaps 15% of the world’s trade passes through the Bab el-Mandeb straits at the southern end of the Red Sea. If there is one........
© Washington Examiner
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
