Another American War in the Middle East?
by Juan Cole and Tom
Engelhardt
Posted on July 04, 2024
Originally appeared at TomDispatch.
https://original.antiwar.com/juan-cole/2024/07/03/another-american-war-in-the-middle-east/
Though I was never in the U.S. military, my life
experience has been American wars, wars, wars, and more wars. I was born during
World War II. I was in grade school when the Korean War took place. I still
have a faint memory of a photo of a gleaming American soldier’s face from that
unsettled conflict. (It might have been on the cover of LIFE magazine.)
I was a protesting youth in the disastrous Vietnam War years. And that was just
the beginning. Skipping over events like the invasions of Panama and Grenada
and the first Gulf War of the 1990s, in my years running TomDispatch,
I’ve dealt with a seemingly never-ending series of all-American wars (which, by
the way, never – no, never – turn out “successfully”). From
Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa, America’s post-9/11 war on terror proved to be a
genuine hell on Earth. If you don’t believe me, just check out the figures on
deaths, direct and indirect, from those decades of horror that the
invaluable Costs of War
Project has put
together.
And what lessons have been drawn from all of that?
Only that this country should pour ever more staggering sums into a Pentagon budget that’s already larger
than those of the next nine
countries combined and
still rising, support military bases across the planet, and… well, you get the
idea, right?
And it never really ends, does it? In fact, as Tomdispatch regular Juan Cole, creator of the must-read Informed Comment website, points out today, this country could
well be on the verge of – yes! – yet another conflict from hell, this one in –
would you even believe it? – the Red Sea area. After all, almost unnoticed
here, American planes have been unsuccessfully striking at the Houthi rebels in
Yemen for months now, while American naval ships continue to patrol that sea (as the disaster in Gaza only
grows ever worse). As retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian Bill
Astore wrote recently at his Bracing Views substack,
“How would I feel as a Navy officer covering the flanks of Israel so that the
IDF [the Israeli military] can concentrate its forces in murderous assaults on
Gaza?” How, indeed? It’s possible that, if things go as they so often have in
these years, all too many American naval officers will indeed find out. Now,
let Cole take you into another world about which most Americans know next to
nothing where, in the months to come, we might indeed find ourselves at
war. ~ Tom Engelhardt
Turning the Red Sea Redder
Will America’s Backing for Israel’s War in Gaza Torch
the Red Sea Region Too?
by Juan Cole
In mid-June, the Associated Press announced that the U.S. Navy had been engaged in the most
intense naval combat since the end of World War II, which surely would come as
a surprise to most Americans. This time, the fighting isn’t taking place in the
Atlantic or Pacific Oceans but in the Red Sea and the adversary is Yemen’s –
yes, Yemen’s! – Shiite party-militia, the Helpers of God (Ansar Allah),
often known, thanks to their leading clan, as the Houthis. They are supporting
the Palestinians of Gaza against the Israeli campaign of total war on that
small enclave, while, in recent months, they have faced repeated air
strikes from
American planes and have responded by, among other things, attacking an
American aircraft carrier and other ships off their coast. Their weapons of
choice are rockets, drones, small boats rigged with explosives, and – a first! – anti-ship ballistic missiles with which they have
targeted Red Sea shipping. The Houthis see the U.S. Navy as part of the Israeli
war effort.
The Gate of Lamentation
In a sense, it couldn’t be more remarkable,
historically speaking. Modest numbers of Yemenis have managed to launch a
challenge to the prevailing world order, despite being poor, weak, and brown,
attributes that usually make people invisible to the American establishment.
One all-too-modern asset the Houthis have is the emergence of micro-weaponry in our world — small drones and rockets that, at
the moment, can’t be easily wiped out even by the sophisticated armaments of
the U.S. Navy.
Another is geographical. The Houthis command the
Tihamah coastal plain, the eastern littoral of the Red Sea. It stretches from
the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (the entry point to that sea from the Gulf of Aden and
the Indian Ocean) to the Suez Canal, which connects the shipping in those
waters to the Mediterranean, and so to Europe. The Bab el-Mandeb, known for
being treacherous to navigate even in the most peaceable of times, is said to
mean “the Gate of Lamentation,” and these days, it’s living up to its name. Keep
in mind that 10% of world seaborne trade flows through the Suez Canal and, perhaps even
more importantly, 12% of the world’s energy supplies.
What we might call the Battle of the Tihamah has
already lasted seven months and, surprisingly enough, given the opponents, its
outcome remains in doubt. The Associated Press quotes Brian Clark, a senior fellow at the
neoconservative Hudson Institute and a former Navy submariner, as expressing
concerns that the Houthis are on the verge of penetrating American naval
defenses with their missiles, raising the possibility that they could inflict
significant damage on a U.S. destroyer or even an aircraft carrier. Repeated
American and British air strikes against suspected Houthi weapons sites in and
around the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, have so far failed to halt the war on
shipping. Even high-tech American Reaper drones are no longer assured of
dominating Middle Eastern airspace since the Houthis have shot down four of those $30 million weapons so far.
Idling the Suez Canal
Given how little Americans generally know about Yemen,
some historical background is perhaps in order. The Houthi movement has its
roots in Zaydi Shiism, which took hold in northern Yemen in the 890s. (Yes, the
890s, not the 1890s!). Today’s Zaydis are upset by Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Last December, large crowds of them came out in the Zaydi stronghold of Saadeh
and other northern Yemeni towns to protest Israel’s intensive bombing of that
25-mile strip of land. Waving Yemeni and Palestinian flags, they pledged
support against “the armies of tyranny,” shouting, “We closed Bab el-Mandeb, O Zionist, do not
approach!” and “The Yemeni response is legitimate, and the Red Sea is
forbidden!”
The Houthis have indeed struck commercial container
ships in the Red Sea, even seizing one, the Galaxy Leader (which,
believe it or not, they turned into a tourist
attraction).
They also sank two cargo ships, killing three crew members.
Although they maintain that they are only hitting Israeli-owned vessels, most
of their attacks have, in fact, targeted the vessels of unrelated third parties
like Greece. Their strikes have, however, caused a major disruption in world
trade.
The Houthis have also fired large numbers of ballistic missiles at the
Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat, idling it since November. Some five percent of
Israel’s imports once arrived through Eilat. Now, such trade has been rerouted
to Mediterranean ports at a distinctly higher cost, while southern Israel’s
economy has taken a big hit. Gideon Golber, the CEO of the Port of Eilat, demanded that the United States intervene. And Israel is
anything but the only country to suffer from such attacks. Ports such as Massawa, Port Sudan, and Berbera in the
Horn of Africa have also become ghost towns, while the traffic through the Suez Canal is now so
light that Egypt, which collects transit tolls, is suffering significant
economic damage.
In addition, those Houthi strikes, local as they may
seem, have had an impact on global supply chains. Insurance costs have risen radically, with crushing
war-risk premiums. Ocean container ship rates surged this spring, as companies involved in the trade
between Asia and Europe have been forced to avoid the Suez Canal and instead
take a far longer route around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Atlantic coast
of Africa. Shanghai to Rotterdam rates skyrocketed from $1,452 for a 40-foot container in July of
last year to $5,270 in late May 2024.
Revolutionary Shiite Islam
The present militia commander in Yemen, Abdul-Malik
al-Houthi, considers himself part of a Shiite revolutionary tradition that goes
back a long, long way. So, to truly grasp the dangers of the moment for the
U.S. Navy in the Red Sea, it makes sense, believe it or not, to momentarily
journey deep into history.
Last year, al-Houthi observed the death in battle of the founder of his
tradition, Zayd Ibn Ali, in the year 740. His “movement, renaissance, jihad,
and martyrdom,” he said, “made a great contribution to the continuity of the
authentic Islam of Muhammad… He faced tyranny and had an impact on instituting
change.”
A generation of Americans involved in the Middle East
has come to understand that there are two major branches of Islam, the Shiites
and the Sunnis. Neither is monolithic, with each branch having several
denominations. The division between the two goes back to questions about the
succession to the Prophet Muhammad (who died in 632). One faction of early
believers invested leadership in senior disciples of the Prophet from his
Quraysh clan. Over the centuries, these became the Sunnis.
Another faction, which gradually evolved into the
Shiites, favored Muhammad’s son-in-law and first cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib.
Seeking a dynastic succession, they invested leadership in Ali’s descendants
through the Prophet’s daughter Fatimah. Most Shiites historically acknowledge
12 Imams or leaders of the dynasty. The Zaydis, however, accepted only five
early Imams.
Unlike the Shiites of Iran and Iraq, Yemen’s Zaydis never had ayatollahs. Nor did they curse Sunnis,
with whom they often had good relations. The Zaydi branch of Shiism in Yemen
was led by court judges or qadis, typically hailing from a caste of
putative descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, the Sayyids or Sadah, who emerged
as mediators in tribal feuds. Critics of today’s Helpers of God government in North
Yemen allege that, despite its populist rhetoric, it is dominated by a handful
of clans who consider themselves descendants of the Prophet, including the
Houthis themselves.
Saudi Hegemony and the Rise of the Houthis
Forms of Arab nationalism and a rhetoric of
anti-imperialism are anything but new in Yemen. After World War II, with
European empires weakened, a desire for independence swept the Global South.
Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt emerged as the nationalist leader who
finally kicked the British out of his country, inspiring so many others in the
region. Egyptian-backed young officers in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, staged a coup
in 1962 against a hidebound theocratic leader who had long kept the country in
a state of isolation. In the process, they drew it into a civil war between
republican nationalists and royalists. Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all
backed the royalists, but some 100,000 crack Egyptian troops won the day for
the young officers before withdrawing in 1970.
In 1978, Colonel Ali Abdallah Saleh, a politician in
North Yemen, launched an internal coup within the officer corps there and
appointed himself president for life. His corrupt government, putatively a
secular Arab nationalist one, would receive billions of dollars from the
fundamentalist royalists of Saudi Arabia.
The Helpers of God party militia, or the Houthis,
arose among the Zaydi Shiites of northern Yemen in the 1990s as a backlash against the inroads that neighboring, wealthy
Wahhabi Saudi Arabia had made. That country’s Wahhabism had arisen as a puritan reform of Sunnism in the
eighteenth century. Saleh allowed its missionaries to proselytize the Shiite
Zaydis, provoking the anger of the latter.
Under the influence of the anti-Saudi Houthi family,
Zaydi militiamen based in Saadeh in Yemen’s hardscrabble north turned radical,
coming into frequent conflict with the Yemeni army. When the Arab Spring youth
revolt overthrew Saleh in 2012, the Houthis’ political wing sought influence in
the new government. But in September 2014, impatient with an interminable
reform process aimed at drafting a new constitution and electing a new
parliament, the Houthis marched into the capital, Sanaa, and took it over. Behind
the scenes, they had allied with the deposed president, Saleh, before his
death, and the army faction still loyal to him, which gave them access to
billions of dollars in American-supplied weaponry. By early 2015, the Houthis
had expelled Saleh’s successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, from the capital and
made an unsuccessful bid to take over all of Yemen from Saadeh in the north to
Aden in the south.
Meanwhile, their dominance of North Yemen proved
unacceptable to the Saudis and the allied United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose
secular potentate, Mohammed Bin Zayed, had long despised such Islamic political
movements. As a result, those two countries launched an
air war against the
Helpers of God in the spring of 2015. The ruinous Seven Years War that followed
would displace millions and endanger even more millions with food insecurity
and disease. It failed, however, to dislodge the Helpers of God and, by 2022, a
truce was finally agreed to. Perhaps thanks to that painful experience, the
Saudis have declined to join the Americans this year in the Battle of Tihamah.
And in some fashion, the Houthis’ experience of the intensive aerial bombing
tactics of Saudi Arabia and the UAE years ago undoubtedly left them with
particular sympathy for the Palestinians under incessant Israeli air assault in
Gaza.
An Alliance of Resistance
Both the Saudis and the Emiratis saw the Houthis as a
mere cat’s paw for Iran. Although the Iranians did indeed offer them some
support, this was a distinct misreading of the relationship between Sanaa and
Tehran. At the very least, Iranian aid was dwarfed by the billions of dollars
in weaponry Washington provided to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in
those years.
In reality, the Houthis are homegrown Yemeni
nationalists, having even attracted some Sunni tribes into their coalition.
Still, their current leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, has clearly been influenced
by aspects of Iran’s political radicalism and chants “death to America” and “death to Israel” just
the way Iran’s clerical leader Ali Khamenei does. Like the regime in Iran, the
Houthi government has no respect for domestic human rights or dissent. Although
there is no command line from Tehran to Sanaa, the Houthis do loosely form part
of Iran’s “alliance of resistance” against Israel and the United States. However, it’s
not clear that Iran, closely allied with Russia and China and covertly exporting its U.S.-sanctioned petroleum to China, ever
wanted international shipping costs to double, thanks to the Houthi attacks in
the Red Sea, something which hurts all three of those countries.
Despite the Houthi appeal to religious identity, it’s
also mainly a movement of Arab nationalists, which helps to explain its deep
sympathy for the Sunni Palestinians as fellow Arabs. In an interview at the
beginning of June, Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi condemned Israel for its genocide against the Palestinian
people in Gaza and its targeting of the West Bank and Palestinian East
Jerusalem. He similarly denounced Washington as an imperial partner of Israel
and an enabler of its crimes, as well as a hypocrite in theoretically promoting
respect for the rule of law, while dismissing or even threatening international courts and
supporting crackdowns at American colleges and universities when their students
protested Israeli policies. He also praised the resistance of the vaguely
allied forces of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Shiite militias. In the
process, he vowed that however intense American (and British) air attacks on
Yemen became, he and his movement would never back down from their support of
the Palestinian people.
At the moment, the situation in the Red Sea remains
militarily muted, but it has the potential to become one of the most dangerous
in the world, rivaling those in Ukraine and Taiwan. In the meantime, it remains
a drag on the global economy, while helping to contribute to stubborn inflation
and supply-chain problems.
Significant Houthi damage to a U.S. naval vessel at
any point in the future could plunge Washington into warlike acts that might
risk direct conflict with Iran. President Joe Biden could, of course, lower the
temperature by moving far more strongly to end Israel’s total war on Gaza, an
intolerable affront to norms of international humanitarian law that only
strengthens the vigilantism of the Houthis and their like. While the ongoing
Israeli assault should be ended to prevent further death and looming mass starvation
in Gaza, it should also be ended to forestall yet another ruinous American war
in the Middle East.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s
new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands
series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has
a Story, and
Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation
Unmade by War, as
well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows
of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent
American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were
Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.
Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of
history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian and Muhammad:
Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace
Movements in Islam. His
award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for
Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy for the Arab World
Now (DAWN).
