Red Sea Crisis

[Richey Edwards]

For all their military spending and fancy weapons the USA don't do warfare very well.

[johnnydun]

The whole 'Iran supply weapons to Houthis' line, has just got 'Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction' vibes to it.

[chris1883]

We are talking about the Red Sea in isolation here and that is a mistake. There is a much larger picture here that needs to be looked at.

In the Red Sea specifically: what is the aim of the Houthis'? I would say it is to cause chaos and rile the west. Who are the Houthis' acting on behalf of? Officially themselves, but would it be surprising if it was a wider 'opening act'? I know that is conspiracy theory stuff, but disrupting global trade/ supply is a tactic of war.

On a wider field, how many fronts are sustainable from the West's point of view? I mean, if a wider conflict were to open up fronted by [for simplicities' sake] Russia. You have Russia's western border, which isn't small. North Korea would likely attack South Korea. China (at the very least) would look at Taiwan. Israel could attack Iran (or vice versa). You have also the ongoing conflicts in Haiti, Africa, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. And that's just for starters.

It's must opinion why events such as those happening in the Red Sea need to be dealt with. If you don't quell the uprising, it continues to grow until it is something capable of being bigger. We have a very relevant and recent example of what happens if you turn a blind eye to baligerants from 1939.

If we don't deal with the embers of wide scale conflict now, we will be in a bigger war.

[TxRover]

5 hours ago, johnnydun said:

The whole 'Iran supply weapons to Houthis' line, has just got 'Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction' vibes to it.

Eh, the Houthis aren’t building sea attack cruise missiles, semi-ballistic missiles and drones in their kitchens. This is an easily provable true one, but thankfully it’s only the Rethuglican politicians that are demanding strikes on Iran itself. This is in much the same category as the U.S. is supplying weapons to the Saudi’s, a known fact.

5 hours ago, Richey Edwards said:

For all their military spending and fancy weapons the USA don't do warfare very well.

The problem has become the twitter/X/social media wing of the Republican Party. Anything for clicks, likes, attention is what they demand and scream about. A few soldiers died, so it’s trendy for them to bay at the moon for the blood of some brown people. That causes other, somewhat more rational politicians to position themselves in favour of attacks, because “weakness”.

It all goes back to fear of not looking strong risking another 9/11 attack…which is bass-akwards, as the excessive use of force around the world is what’s raising the risks, not reducing them. The good news is they’re too focused on getting attention to get serious about governing and getting the power to do anything about what they scream about.

[johnnydun]

6 minutes ago, TxRover said:

Eh, the Houthis aren’t building sea attack cruise missiles, semi-ballistic missiles and drones in their kitchens.

No, but they can manufacture these in workshops and factories.

But they don't need to. The Houthis acquired 70% of the Yemeni military weapons cache. As shown in a recent military parade...

There's also 128 guns for every 100 people in Yemen, the 2nd highest guns to residents, behind the US.

[TxRover]

59 minutes ago, johnnydun said:

No, but they can manufacture these in workshops and factories.

But they don't need to. The Houthis acquired 70% of the Yemeni military weapons cache. As shown in a recent military parade...

There's also 128 guns for every 100 people in Yemen, the 2nd highest guns to residents, behind the US.

They have generally modified weapons smuggled in to extend range via reduced payloads. There certainly is some indigenous production, but there's also plenty of fragments recovered from targets showing Iranian manufacturing. Here you get to the "planted evidence" stage of the conspiracy theory, and that's certainly possible in some case, but in far more case, it's clear the Iranian militias, if not the Iranians, are smuggling weapons to the Houthis.

The fact that Yemen is a close second to the U..S. in guns to residents makes it clear why U.S. domestic gun sales need to increase.   

[chris1883]

It's not so much about what weapons they have now... we pretty much know that and what the capabilities are. The question is, who are they willing to align with moving forward. If they become a credible threat/ nuisance to the US/ NATO. I'm sure there are a few countries willing to support them be it subversively or overtly. 

[Freedom Farter]

On the discussion above about whether calling the Houthis Iranian proxies is accurate or not, this was the most interesting take I read: https://merip.org/2018/01/how-the-houthis-became-shia/. It was published in 2018, though, so the authors' assessments are probably different now.

Perhaps the key concluding paragraph from it:

Quote

The Iranians did step up their involvement in Yemen following the Houthi capture of Sana’a, and certainly sharpened their rhetorical attacks on the Saudis from 2015 onward. However, the level of Iranian backing for the rebels is still overblown in media and policy circles. [15] Experts such as Sheila Carapico were still emphasizing in 2016 that the Houthis “get moral support from Iran, but nobody’s ever proven that they get material support from Iran.” [16] Programs to train and equip the Houthis, including by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Lebanese Hizballah, have been limited; the Houthis received the majority of their heavy weapons from Salih’s forces and not from Iran. [17] To the extent that Iran is involved in Yemen, it may be a product of the very tall tales used to conceal the origins of the Houthi rebellion; in other words, the “Iranian-backed” part of the narrative may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[Freedom Farter]

Northern Yemen was ruled by a military dictator, Saleh, for 34 years. That was both while North Yemen was their nation state from 1978 until 1990, then Yemen reunified from 1990 until 2012. The Houthis had attempted violent insurgencies during the 2000s but it wasn't until the Arab Spring of 2011 that a united Yemeni populace acted to force Saleh's removal. He was replaced the following year by his long term vice president (since 1994), Hadi. This lasted a couple of years as the Yemeni protestors were somewhat placated by gaining a change in leadership and Saudi still had a puppet of theirs in charge.

In August 2014, Yemenis conducted another popular uprising. Hadi had been enacting austerity as a condition for a huge IMF loan he'd requested. This had drastically reduced living standards especially for Yemen's poorest. The straw that broke the camel's back was a 90% rise in fuel prices:  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/8/1/yemen-rage-boils-over-unliveable-price-hike

This was when the Houthis came to the fore. They were the main group taking this fight to the Hadi government and the following month they managed to win a concession on the fuel prices: https://archive.ph/x647a

That success gave the Houthis widespread legitimacy among the northern Yemeni working class and support for the group continued growing from that breakthrough moment. By 2015, the Houthis had taken over all key government institutions in Sanaa, themselves becoming the new de facto government. It was at this point Saudi started bombing them.

I mention this because I feel we're led to believe all support for the Houthis just grew out of simple identity concerns. That the Houthis provided representation for a specific ethnic group within Yemen. There's certainly a bit of that but the larger factor was that the Houthis sought to address the material conditions of people. Something the previous (Western-backed) Yemeni government had failed on. Thinking longer term, addressing the economic arrangements at play could be an alternative to trying to bomb our way out of these problems.