
The tone of the British press coverage that preceded the Anglo-American airstrikes against Ansarallah last night made it seem that an invasion of Yemen was in the offing. It was self-evident that nothing so serious was intended and duly nothing so serious was delivered. This was a continuation of the problem to begin with, namely the underreaction to Ansarallah disrupting international shipping—both allowing this to happen for nearly two months without any reply, and now a lacklustre round of punitive airstrikes. It is a most basic duty of the Empire—or superpower guarantor of the rules-based international order, if you prefer—to keep the sea lanes free of piracy. The laggardness in fulfilling this duty has allowed the creation of a difficult situation that could have been avoided by early and meaningful action.
LAST NIGHT’S STRIKES
Before looking at recent events, a point of clarification is needed because there has been so much obfuscation about what Ansarallah actually is. The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen claimed “the Houthis”, as Ansarallah is also known, are “best” thought of as Iran’s “allies rather than Tehran’s proxy”. Some version of this notion that Ansarallah is an independent local Yemeni actor with “links” to or “support” from Iran is commonplace. It is entirely false. For the full story, check out the work of AIJAC’s Oved Lobel and WINEP’s Michael Knights, but suffice it to say that Ansarallah is, like Hizballah in Lebanon, in conception and practice, an organic extension of the transnational Islamic Revolution that took over Iran in 1979, a wholly integrated contingent of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).1
The U.S. and allies began Operation PROSPERITY GUARDIAN a week before Christmas to try to deter attacks on commercial shipping and issued an open letter on 3 January asking IRGC/Ansarallah to desist from its reckless conduct. When Ansarallah defied all this to launch a ballistic missile at a ship in the Gulf of Aden at 2 a.m. local time on 11 January, it was the twenty-seventh such attack since 19 November, which is to say that over fifty-three days—more than seven weeks—Ansarallah attacked international shipping roughly every other day.
The retaliation, initiated at about 2:30 local time on 12 January (23:30 on 11 January British time), was carried out by America and Britain, supported by Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and Bahrain. Over one-hundred precision-guided missiles were fired from fighter jets, naval vessels, and submarines against sixteen IRGC/Ansarallah targets in five Yemeni cities: Sanaa (the capital), Hudayda, Zabid, Taiz, and Saada (the birthplace of Ansarallah). U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the strikes had “targeted sites associated with the Houthis’ unmanned aerial vehicle [drone], ballistic and cruise missile, and coastal radar and air surveillance capabilities”. It appears ammunition depots were also struck. A second, smaller round of strikes was launched by the U.S. shortly after the first had concluded.
Plenty of warning and ample time was given for the IRGC to move its equipment and weaponry—including an IRGC spy vessel in the Red Sea—out of harm’s way, and no Ansarallah jihadists were even targeted, let alone killed.2 All of which adds up to the U.S. and Britain having used some very expensive weapons of their own to destroy some small fraction of Ansarallah’s equipment and a couple of uninhabited, substantially empty warehouses. This is not to say it was a completely useless exercise. Maybe resetting the logistics that enables the missile attacks buys some time, and maybe this was something of a warning shot—degrading the air defences might be partly about next time.
It is an undoubtable positive that Britain joined the U.S. to do its duty, and notable that it was once again the only one that did. It is also a plus that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak seems to be restoring the traditional British constitutional arrangement, wherein the Executive acts in foreign affairs and reports to the House of Commons afterwards, revoking the disastrous innovation set by David Cameron after he asked for—and was refused—Parliament’s permission to enforce the “red line” against Bashar al-Asad’s regime using chemical weapons in Syria in 2013. The distress of the usual suspects about this counter-revolution is merely a bonus.
That said, the felt need to publish the legal advice for this routine—and minimal: the Royal Air Force hit two Ansarallah targets last night—act of Imperial policing does not augur well for the next time this will be needed. And there should be no doubt that this will have to be repeated.
HOW WE GOT HERE
The pattern of Western irresolution and Iranian strategic consistency is what has led us here. President Barack Obama’s regional free pass to Clerical Iran for the sake of the 2015 nuclear deal did lasting damage to any hopes of containing the Islamic Revolution, but his successors have continued the guidelines he set down.
The Arab Coalition—led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—intervened in Yemen in March 2015 to restore the legal government, which had been toppled six months earlier by the IRGC/Ansarallah coup, and by mid-2018 had commenced an offensive to push Ansarallah out of the vital strategic port city of Hudayda, the supply-line through which the bulk of the Iranian weapons and international aid reach Yemen. After a sustained international protest campaign by “humanitarian” organisations—some of them legitimate, many of them pro-IRGC activists—warning of a famine if the operation continued, and demands from the United Nations to “pursue through diplomacy an end to the violence”, President Donald Trump (and the British government) caved, pressuring the Arab Coalition to sign the “Stockholm Agreement” in December 2018 that called off the offensive.
The ceasefire saved IRGC/Ansarallah, and protracted the human suffering in Yemen. Having pocketed the concrete concession of the Arab Coalition halting its offensive and withdrawing pro-government troops from around Hudayda, Ansarallah refused to implement any of the paper promises it had made. Ansarallah would not—and still will not—even allow the free distribution of aid: food and other humanitarian supplies given by the “international community” are taken into Ansarallah’s hands and used as a political weapon—the actual cause of the famine risk in Yemen. In February 2020, once Ansarallah had strung out the Stockholm Agreement “process”—using the time to rest, recruit, and re-equip—it restarted the relentless jihad it has waged since 2004, which is intended to not only extend a savagely brutal totalitarian regime over all of Yemen but has designs on Saudi Arabia.
The Hudayda fiasco that created the crisis the U.S. and Britain are now trying to arrest should be kept in mind when looking at Gaza at the present time, where some of the same narratives—particularly around the risk of famine, which to the extent it exists results from HAMAS’ manipulation of aid, not any lack of aid per se getting into the Strip—are being mobilised to push for an immediate ceasefire that would save the IRGC base so it can be used to restart the war once HAMAS is recuperated. As in Yemen, this outcome is being sought unintentionally by some and wilfully by others.
If this is the background to the IRGC still having positions in Yemen that it can use to conduct its naval jihad, the immediate context in which this is happening is, of course, the war in Gaza that the IRGC started on 7 October with the gruesome pogrom and kidnappings in southern Israel. HAMAS’ relationship to the Iranian Revolution is in some ways more historically complicated than Ansarallah’s, but the outcome—with HAMAS as a component of the IRGC Network—is much the same. Facing the loss of the IRGC enclave in Gaza, Iran has sought to make the best of things by capitalising on the hysteria against Israel—which is by no means limited to the region—to burnish the credentials of the various other IRGC departments, Ansarallah among them, presenting their actions on behalf of Iran’s imperialism as “resistance” activities against the Jews.
A lot of commentary about the strikes last night has worried about “escalation”. This is misplaced. The Iranians have been staging an ever-escalating campaign of asymmetric provocations, encouraged by the feeble response. In just the first month after the 7 October massacre, the IRGC attacked U.S. bases that are keeping the Islamic State down in Iraq and Syria sixty times, wounding sixty soldiers. There have by now been in excess of one-hundred of these attacks by the IRGC, and the U.S. responses have been few and far between, though the most recent, on 4 January, did kill a leader of Harakat Hizballah al-Nujaba (HHN), one of the IRGC-run Shi’a militias in Iraq. The initial reports overnight that the IRGC had responded to the Yemen strikes by attacking the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad were plausible because of this, but proved to be false. HHN’s subsequent statement, threatening revenge against the U.S. and allies over the Yemen strikes, and the claim from another Iraq-based IRGC unit that it had fired at Eilat in Israel, are mostly notable because of the awkward questions they raise for those still insisting Ansarallah does not belong to Iran.
WHAT NOW?
The Allied messaging over the Yemen strikes has shown an interesting variance. The immediate statements from President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Sunak, and the other States supporting the strikes very pointedly did not mention Iran, while the statements after that from CENTCOM and especially NATO were very clear that Iran was holding the strings behind Ansarallah. Doubtless, this rhetorical ambiguity is part of the attempt to avoid “escalation” and a “wider war”, which is a perfectly laudable goal; this is just exactly the wrong tactical route to achieving it.
The danger of a wider war becomes more real if Tehran keeps finding only mush. The Iranian regime has always backed down when it encounters steel.3 Had the U.S. and Britain delivered a devastating round of military strikes against Ansarallah’s infrastructure after the first attack on an international vessel, and conveyed to the Iranian regime that the retaliation for the next attack on a ship would fall in Tehran, this issue could have been nipped in the bud. As it is, the problem was allowed to fester, the Islamic Revolution was allowed to become emboldened, and now, having survived a brush with Western power, IRGC/Ansarallah is incentivised to continue with its attacks, able to frame simply its ability to persist as a “victory”. It is quite likely this will be allowed to go on until either the IRGC does something excessive that draws too much attention or the cumulative effect once again becomes so politically embarrassing to the Biden administration that it has to launch another round of punitive strikes. At best, it might be that the U.S. becomes more proactive and Yemen becomes for the U.S. something like what Syria is for Israel. Solutions are rare beasts in the Middle East, but this does not even rise to the level of management.
A strategic course correction would begin by recognising that all of this—the threats in the international waters off Yemen, the harassment of the Allied troops in the Fertile Cresent, the war in Gaza—is Iran, and making that the return address. The Iranian regime is neither physically capable nor doctrinally prepared to wage a conventional war; the threat of such a thing is as unrealistic—and generally proffered in as bad faith—as the threat of “World War Three” if Russia is prevented from conquering Ukraine. Iran’s asymmetric options are all it has, and denying the Islamic Republic the “deniability” this is supposed to bring it—inflicting the full costs on it for its misbehaviour—would have a salutary effect all around.
This change would rein-in Ansarallah in the short-term, which would be a start. If there is a solution over the longer term, it is to dislodge the IRGC from its control of the key areas of Yemen, a task now all the more difficult after the IRGC has had another half-decade to entrench itself and to politically weaken the Arab Coalition. Left alone with this fight, the Saudis have more or less given up, as they showed in their response to the strikes, and are looking for a fig-leaf to cover their surrender to Iran. Perhaps the chance is gone and the price of Western neglect will be a permanent menace to international commerce. In either event, the U.S. could at least call this menace by its right name and restore the terrorist designation against Ansarallah that Biden incomprehensibly revoked in his first weeks in office.
FOOTNOTES
The BBC slanting its reporting over Yemen to defend Iran is not a surprise. Since HAMAS, another component of the IRGC network, initiated the war against Israel on 7 October, the Corporation, including Bowen personally, has persistently disseminated misinformation that supports the IRGC/HAMAS messaging strategy.
Ansarallah claimed five people were killed and six wounded in the strikes. It is to be hoped there will not be a Yemeni edition of the media disaster in reprinting the propaganda from HAMAS’ “health ministry” in Gaza.
After then-President Donald Trump killed IRGC-Quds Force chief Qassem Sulaymani in January 2020, the Iranian system responded with a carefully choreographed round of token missiles at a U.S. base, which remains the full extent of Tehran’s “revenge”. Even in the face of less direct pressure, the Islamic Republic has caved. During the Iran-Iraq War, the U.S. got involved in the “tanker war” to protect commercial vessels from the Iranian Revolution and the U.S.’s accidental shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988 convinced the Iranian elite that the U.S. had fully entered the war against them: after six years of the Iranians refusing a ceasefire, one was reached the next month. In 2003, after watching the downfall of Saddam Husayn, Clerical Iran temporarily paused its nuclear-weapons program and thereafter proceeded with greater caution—miniaturised aspects, more concealment, and so on.