U.S., British attacks on Houthis deliver strong, needed message

Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024 | 2 a.m.

The outrage over the U.S. and British missile strikes of Houthi bases ignores the nature and the stakes of this particular engagement.

Both the American far left and far right have elbowed their way to the cameras to wildly mischaracterize what happened all while turning a blind eye to the national security importance of the strikes.

The Houthis are radical Islamists bent on destabilizing multiple governments in the region. For years now, they have been at war in Yemen as well as firing missiles at Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Israel. Since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, the Houthis commenced missile attacks on U.S. and British armed forces in the region, including the American warship USS Laboon earlier this week. And they have attacked commercial vessels, including a U.S.-owned cargo ship operating in the Red Sea, which threatens all commerce and, importantly, food supplies coming in and out of an area where food security remains a massive issue.

Currently, the Houthis are an immature version of what ISIS eventually became. Yet they are cut from the same bloodstained fundamentalist cloth. The Houthis are closely aligned with Hezbollah, which never shies from murdering civilians, and they are vocal supporters of Hamas. But the Houthis most important alliance is with Iran, whose repressive regime uses the Houthis and Hezbollah as shadow armies to tear apart the entire Middle East.

In the past, state sponsors of terror funded and supplied relatively small cells of radicals whose terror targets were civilians and usually, notwithstanding 9/11, the attacks were modest in scale. Tragically, that has morphed in modern times as Iran has developed a network of terrorists with the numbers resembling mercenary armies and the means to destabilize entire governments.

Like ISIS, the Houthis target not just the U.S. and Israel, but many Arab nations as well. Indeed, Arab nations in the Middle East view the Houthis and Iran’s proxy armies as malign forces bent on sowing chaos in the Arab world and threatening any efforts at peace.

All of which brings us to last week’s strikes and the woefully hysterical response from the American far right and far left.

The missile strikes on Houthi bases by the U.S. and Britain were not acts of bald, purposeless aggression. Rather, they were a direct response to Houthi attacks on U.S. and British armed forces and commercial shipping in the Red Sea. The strikes followed a month of allied efforts to intercept the Houthi attacks after they were launched. Finally, the two allies decided it was time to target Houthi military infrastructure to prevent the radicals – and Iran – from further inflaming the region with sophisticated attacks.

It was not a declaration of war that required congressional approval as some hair-on-fire members of Congress brayed into the infosphere. It was a military strike against a nongovernmental gang of terrorists actively attacking Americans and many other parties in the region. In addition, the strikes arrived after the Houthis vowed to ignore the warnings to stop and instead threatened to escalate their hostilities.

Certainly, alarm is understandable for Americans who have seen military conflict morph into full-fledged wars in the Middle East – several of them corrosive to global security. But these strikes are nothing like President George W. Bush leading the charge to invade Iraq under false pretenses in 2003.

This is different. Indeed, the strikes suggest we’ve learned from past mistakes.

When ISIS arrived as a savagely cruel genocidal threat to the whole Middle East, many asked: “Why didn’t someone do something earlier, when it was small, before ISIS grew to engulf the region?” That’s what the strikes against the Houthis represent: someone doing something early to stop a force determined to attack multiple countries in the region.

This is fundamental to U.S. national security interests and fundamental to the security of the region.

It also delivers a message to Iran. Simply put, the Iranian government must not continue down this road of birthing mercenary armies to attack its neighbors while trying to keep its nation out of direct conflict.

The domestic critics of the strikes are not serious thinkers about national security. Yes, in the last 25 years, the U.S. has found itself in the middle of intractable conflicts, sometimes by blundering and sometimes with malice. That does not mean any direct engagement with fundamentalist terrorists is wrong. The Houthis would murder much of the Arab world if they had their way. So would the Iranian government. A strike that removes the Houthi capacity to target our troops and civilians elsewhere in the Middle East – both Arab and Israeli — is a reasonable measure.

That said, the Biden administration would be wise to realize sensible Americans are deeply concerned about slippery slopes in the region. The administration must do a better job at communicating with the public about these matters. Shaken by our recent past, Americans are suspicious of actions that aren’t fully explained. It’s that suspicion the far left and the far right seek to exploit.

Everyone today with a beating heart and brain that functions is in agony about the current warfare. Everyone. And yet, there are scenarios that encourage one to believe that on the other side of these dark days a better Middle East will emerge. One with an independent homeland and a thriving future for Palestinians, one where Israeli civilians are secure that their nation will survive and they won’t be killed by terrorists and one where moderate Arab governments no longer fear their nations will be shredded by Islamist fundamentalists. To arrive at that day, the whole world must reject radicalism of all stripes and those people who operate as agents of mayhem like the Houthis must have their ability to harm others removed.