I wonder if treating the Houthis as Iranian agents and retaliating against Iranian assets directly would be more effective than playing whack-a-mole against these missile launchers without addressing the source of the problem. I assume Biden’s advisors are wondering the same thing, but it’s hard to know where the line between deterrence and escalation is…
Iran has enemies. Many of them are even worse than the Iranians, but maybe the thing to do is to find some sympathetic group, arm them, and let them take the heat, just like Iran is doing with the Houthis…
but maybe the thing to do is to find some sympathetic group, arm them, and let them take the heat
Hmm. I wonder if anyone has tried that yet?
Sympathetic guys armed by the US to fuck with Iran include Saddam Hussein, ISIS and Israel.
I don’t think it’s technically correct to say that the US armed ISIS; ISIS seized weapons that the US provided to Iraq.
Israel does a pretty good job of opposing Iran, and we can be confident that weapons provided to Israel aren’t going to be used against the US. I think it’s likely that the Houthis are acting up now not because they’re provoked by Israel but because Israel is preoccupied with something else.
As for Saddam Hussein… He did a very good job of opposing Iran. The threat of eight years of war and hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers dead would be a very effective stick if we still had access to it. It’s ironic that the weak, pro-Iran government that is the result of US intervention in Iraq seems like it’s worse for US interests than Saddam was.
a very effective stick if we still had access to it
We? Who is ‘we’?
The recent US and UK actions can be taken as examples on how to cure the symptom while making the disease worse
Here’s an idea:
The Houthi’s can just not launch missiles at ships
Actually they can’t, they have a legal obligation under the UN Convention on Genocide to take extra-territorial actions in order to stop or prevent genocide. They are acting within international law. The ships going to Israel despite the active genocide are violating international law and complicit in the genocide themselves.
How do the Houthis know which ships are going to Israel? Can you prove they’ve only attacked ships bound for Israel?
Why is there a 39 nation coalition organizing against the Houthis? Aren’t a lot of those nations opposing Israel’s current actions?
Do you know the Houthis slogan of, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Death to the Jews, Victory to Islam”?
You’re fighting for the wrong side buddy
Simple, ships declare their destination and affiliation https://www.newarab.com/news/russia-china-ships-granted-safe-passage-yemens-houthis
Here’s an idea, countries involved in genocide can just not sail ships through Yemeni waters.
What ever happened to talking and reaching an agreement and asking for favors and scratching each other back… like now we resort to uncivilized behavior by attacking the poorest countries.
I don’t think there’s much negotiating with a terrorist organization indiscriminately attacking international shipping
The only terrorist organization here is the “coalition” that the burger empire scraped together. Yemen is interdicting shipping from countries supporting a literal genocide through their sovereign waters. Meanwhile, the terrorists from US and UK are bombing Yemen for this.
US is a terrorist state, plain and simple.
