A closer look at Yemen

… few doubt that the middle east is in the grip of epoch shaping convulsions. Nothing speaks more eloquently to this truth than the astonishing territorial gains of Yemen’s de facto government, Ansar Allah, and their attendant threat to a century of rule by another Western installed regime, the House of Saud.

Three takes on the ‘middle east’

The Ansar Allah threat goes wider than Saudi Arabia, whose fall would have a domino impact on all the other US dependent monarchies on the Gulf, while thus far all talk of Türkiye and Pakistan helping out Riyadh and its superpower backer by placing boots on Saudi soil has with good reason proved so much hot air. And to the extent the House of Saud and settler colony exist in co-dependence, Israel too is endangered ¹ by these tough, well equipped and motivated fighters; their numbers said to be 30,000 in 2015 when Riyadh set out with Washington/London backing and criminal disregard for civilian lives to destroy them from the air, only to throw in the towel eight years on. As did the US on May 7 last year when, after barely two months, the exposure of its fleet to Houthi missiles had been made all too clear to its naval commanders, ^{2 3} though of course that did not stop the reality-lite 47th POTUS from claiming a stunning victory.

And now? Even that empire mouthpiece, Voice of America, puts the number at 350,000 vastly better equipped and organised fighters. Against such a force a Saudi army structured first and foremost as a praetorian guard for the Western installed House of Saud, its baked in fractions aimed at minimising the possibility of coup d’etat, could expect nothing but annihilation. Hence those appeals from MBS both to an overextended Washington, and to his regional neighbours; appeals thus far falling on deaf ears given on the one hand so daunting a foe, on the other the fears, not just in every Gulf capital but in Ankara and Islamabad too, of waging a war likely to be deeply unpopular with their own citizens.

Meanwhile on the other shore of the Red Sea, President Sisi is similarly caught between a rock and a hard place. To greater extent even than America’s frightened clients in the Gulf, the Cairo regime, its very existence dependent not only on US funding but, in a pattern writ large across the middle east, on protection from its own citizens, can only watch in paralysed horror at what is unfolding across that narrow waterway to the southeast. Sisi shares with equally illegitimate governments on the Gulf a menu of two equally distasteful options: defy a Washington capable of destroying him, or expose the country he rules on US sufferance to Ansar Allah’s long and ever more precise missile reach.

And like those Gulf autocracies, his predictable response is to walk a tightrope of prevarication.

1200 x 1000cm regional map on the east wall of the Control Room at Steel City House

These and related matters were explored in a twenty minute dialogue, featured in my previous post, between Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris at the Duran. But while the epicentre of their discussion was Riyadh and rippling outwards, what of Yemen itself? What of those Shia mountain warriors, their closest parallel the Sunni Pathans of Afghanistan who saw off not one but two military superpowers?

My cue to hand over to two women – one a liberal American, one a US-Yemeni citizen – in the company of Drop Site News host, Ryan Grim.

* * *

1. In a dialogue five days ago on The View from India channel, the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, whom I’d describe as not so much ‘alternative’ as on the outer edge of mainstream discourse, speaks of an Israeli pledge to put boots on Saudi soil – if true an offer, given the low morale of an already overstretched IDF, highly revealing of the stakes – wisely rejected by Riyadh when, for a regime detested by its subjects, overt Zionist support could only pour petrol on flames of MBS’s own making. (One mark of Riyadh’s fragility and desperation here is its risible claim, believed by no one, that the famously devout Ansar Allah had targeted Mecca and Medina in drone/missile strikes.)
2. In that same interview with The View from India, Trita Parsi offers another reason for Trump being antsy about a second round with the Houthis; that the orange narcissist is still pissed at MBS’s (prudent) denial of KSA airspace to US warplanes targeting Iran in the twelve day war last June. Me, I suspect that like all liberal pundits, even the best of them, Trita overstates the agency of US presidents.)
3. More than any previous conflict, the twin wars in the middle east have exposed what the American monthly, Vanity Fair – apropos the sinking by Ukrainian drones of a Russian warship in the Black Sea – called the ‘floating pointlessness’ of aircraft carriers in an age of drones and hypersonic missiles. Though no military expert, I’d draw a distinction Vanity Fair does not: between offensive and defensive engagement. Where the former relies in this context on supply lines now dangerously extended, given the destruction or abandonment of former US bases in a war theatre many thousands of miles from home, the latter does not – hence China’s ongoing commitment to these behemoths. As of October 9 the only carrier still in the region, the USS George Washington, lies in the Gulf of Oman – out of range of Iranian and Houthi missiles, yes, but by the same token too far from the action for its short range attack planes to strike without refuelling, while mid-air and ground refuelling capacity has been crippled by Iranian missiles.