Mohammed Ali Kalfood writes:

On his third day back in the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order re-designating Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization. He ordered the Pentagon to start preparing military plans against the militant group and imposed sanctions on Houthi leaders, along with their main backer, Iran. Then, on March 15, Trump announced a new U.S. bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen that has now continued for 10 days.

“YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!” Trump ranted on social media when the U.S. airstrikes began. He described the attack as a response to Houthi “piracy” in the Red Sea, where they have targeted ships with drones and missiles, disrupting a key international shipping lane. Trump made clear who he really blamed for Houthi maritime attacks, saying they “all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN.”

Trump’s vow to use “overwhelming lethal force” against the Houthis has translated into more than 18 waves of intense U.S. air and naval strikes in at least eight Yemeni governorates so far. U.S. strikes have hit residential areas, mostly in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, and Sa’adah, the Houthi bastion. On the first day of the bombing campaign, Yemeni governorates were hit with 47 airstrikes, one of the heaviest days of American strikes on Yemen over the past two years, killing at least 53 people and wounding over 100 others.

The Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping began in late 2023 in response to Israel’s punishing war in Gaza, following the Hamas-led attacks into southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Along with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis also launched missiles and drones at Israel in stated solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza who were under increasingly brutal Israeli bombardment. Houthi missiles and drones hit vessels in the Red Sea linked to Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom, disrupting one of the world’s most important shipping lanes to the Suez Canal over the past 15 months.

A campaign of U.S.-led airstrikes by the Biden administration did not deter the Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, including U.S. naval vessels. The Trump administration has justified the new and expanded round of U.S. bombing as a response to what it sees as Biden’s failures in Yemen. In the extraordinary Signal chat of senior Trump officials who discussed and shared war plans for the Yemen strikes, including apparently unwittingly with an American journalist, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth advocated for the strikes as a way to “reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.”

Yet Yemen experts warn that Trump’s bombing campaign is just as unlikely to deter the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and beyond, or to influence Iran, as Trump claims. The Houthis, who control Sana’a and much of northern Yemen after years of civil war, have endured airstrikes for decades—under the Saudi-led military intervention that was launched 10 years ago this week and, before that, under Yemen’s previous government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, which fought a Houthi insurgency for years in Yemen’s northern highlands. [Continue reading…]