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The Biden administration is making plans for a sustained military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen after 10 days of attacks failed to stop the group's attacks on maritime trade, fueling concerns among some officials that an open-ended operation will further undermine the fragile state of the war-torn country destroyed country could derail peace and drag Washington into another unpredictable Middle East conflict.
The White House convened senior officials on Wednesday to discuss options for the administration's way forward as it advances the response to the Iran-backed movement that has vowed to continue attacking ships off the Arabian Peninsula despite nearly daily operations to destroy it from Houthi radars, missiles etc drones. On Saturday, U.S. Central Command announced its latest attack on an anti-ship missile that was being prepared for launch.
The worsening cycle of violence is a setback for President Biden's goal of containing spillover hostilities sparked by Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Underscoring the threat, Iran on Saturday blamed Israel for an attack on the Syrian capital Damascus that killed five Iranian military advisers. The Israeli military declined to comment. In Iraq, an Iraqi soldier was seriously injured in an attack on the Ain al-Asad air base, where Iraqi and US troops are stationed, according to a Defense Ministry official. An Iran-linked faction there said it was responsible.
The Houthis, a powerful faction in Yemen's long-running civil war, have portrayed their campaign, which has included more than 30 rocket and drone attacks on commercial and naval vessels since November, as a way to put pressure on Israel. Strengthening their reputation in the midst widespread regional resistance to the Jewish state. The rapidly escalating U.S. response also risks embedding Biden in another volatile election campaign in a region where the American military has repeatedly bogged down, potentially undermining his attempt to reorient U.S. foreign policy toward Russia and China.
Government officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, described their strategy in Yemen as an attempt to undermine the Houthis' high-level military capabilities to the point that their ability to attack ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to attack, at least to ensure sufficient deterrence so that risk-averse shipping companies can again send ships through the region's waterways.
“We have clear eyes about who the Houthis are and what their worldview is.” a senior U.S. official said of the group, which the Biden administration designated as a terrorist organization this week. “So we're not sure if they'll stop right away, but we're certainly trying to weaken and destroy their capabilities.”
Biden acknowledged this week that the attacks have so far failed to discourage Houthi leaders, who have vowed revenge against the United States and Britain, whose militaries contributed to the attacks in Yemen.
“Are they stopping the Houthis? No,” the president told reporters. “Will they continue? Yes.”
Officials say they do not expect the operation to drag on for years like previous U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. At the same time, they acknowledge that they cannot provide an end date or estimate as to when Yemenis' military capabilities will be adequately degraded. As part of this effort, US naval forces are also working to intercept arms shipments from Iran.
The Houthis, who made the unlikely rise from an obscure rebel movement in Yemen's northern mountains in the 1990s to ruling much of the country in 2015, had previously withstood years of bombing by a Saudi-led military coalition.
“We are not trying to defeat the Houthis. “There is no desire to invade Yemen,” said a diplomat familiar with the matter. “The desire is to reduce their ability to launch these types of attacks in the future, and that includes hitting the infrastructure that enables these types of attacks and targeting their higher-level capabilities.”
The first US official said the initial attacks by the US and Britain had resulted in “significantly weakening” the military assets attacked so far, but also acknowledged that they have an extensive arsenal. “That doesn’t mean the Houthis don’t still have capabilities, but they had a lot of things they don’t have now,” he said.
Western officials believe the most advanced equipment is provided by Iran, which they say has run a years-long smuggling operation that has allowed it to strike far beyond Yemen's borders. The United States hopes the attacks, coupled with its interdiction campaign that produced a shipment of missile warheads last week, will slowly starve the Houthis of their most powerful weapons.
They point out that more sophisticated attacks, such as the large-scale one on January 9, have not been repeated since the US launched them Strikes began. “I remember before the attack we attacked US ships with more than 20 UAVs and multiple missiles in a single attack,” a second American official said, using a military acronym for drone aircraft.
The first official said the Houthis would now receive targeted support from Iran. He described the group's approach to attacks on ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden as “inconsistent”: at times they appear to have clearly identified the nationality and affiliation of the ships they target; in other cases this is not the case.
Officials said ideology, not economics, was a key reason for Biden's decision to launch the current campaign. While the attacks have so far taken a greater toll in Europe than on the United States, which relies more on trade routes in the Pacific than in the Middle East, the Houthi campaign is already beginning to reshape the global shipping map. Some companies have decided to reroute ships around the Cape of Good Hope off southern Africa, while major oil companies such as BP and Shell have halted shipments through the area.
The officials said Biden believes the United States must act as what they called the “indispensable nation of the world,” with a strong military and the ability to organize diverse nations behind a single cause. Nations including Canada, Bahrain, Germany and Japan jointly issued a statement on January 3 condemning the Houthis' actions.
They compared Biden's decision to confront the Houthis with his stance in support of Ukraine, where he has approved billions of dollars in arms donations to help Kiev defend itself against Russia's violation of its sovereignty, a serious breach of global norms.
In this case, the administration stands ready to safely traverse key waterways and more generally defend the principle of freedom of navigation, officials said. She We hope that the signal sent by the American preemptive strikes will convince shipping companies to return to daily business.
“It is impossible to predict exactly what will happen, especially not [to predict] future operations,” the first U.S. official said. “But the principle that it simply cannot be tolerated for a terrorist organization … with these advanced capabilities to virtually cripple or control shipping through a key international chokepoint is very important to us.”
Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemen expert at Navanti Group, said the Houthis had a strong incentive to continue.
“When the Houthis attacked Abu Dhabi airport, they attracted a lot of attention. When they attacked Aramco, they attracted even more attention,” he said, pointing to attacks in the United Arab Emirates and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. “But the attention they are receiving today due to the attacks on the Red Sea is great unknown, so they love that.”
The government has sought to avoid the perception that it is fueling regional violence by working to build international support, including by finding partners who could sign statements condemning Houthi violence and by ensuring that a UN Security Council resolution was passed a day before the first resolution denouncing their actions US strikes. This week the government imposed a terrorism designation on the group.
State Department spokesman Matt Miller said the nations that joined the United States in countering Houthi violence all played “different roles.”
“There are more than 40 countries that have issued a statement making it clear that they condemn the attacks by the Houthis. “There is a coalition of more than 20 countries that we have put together … to defend ourselves against the attacks of the Houthis,” Miller said.
Some U.S. officials have expressed concerns about the U.S. military's intervention, fearing it could reverse hard-fought diplomatic gains to end the war in Yemen or worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in the Arab world's poorest country.
Some State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development officials remain concerned that the U.S. attack could lead the Houthis to expand their attacks on Saudi assets – particularly oil refineries – and undermine efforts to reach a peace settlement to end the nine-year war in Yemen, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters.
Several steps were still being taken to solidify a peace settlement between the Houthis and the Saudis, including a payment mechanism for former Houthi fighters who now serve in local administrative roles. Given active hostilities between U.S. and Houthi forces, such measures are becoming increasingly difficult to enforce.
U.S. officials also fear that the attack on the Houthis has plunged the United States into a conflict with few exit strategies and limited support from key allies. Remarkably, America's most powerful Gulf partners refused to support the American operation. The prime minister of Qatar, a key U.S. ally in the Gulf, did so warned that Western attacks would not stop violence and could fuel regional instability.
“We need to deal with the central problem of Gaza to defuse everything else… If we only focus on the symptoms and don't deal with the real problems, (solutions) will be temporary,” he said, according to Portal. Palestinian authorities say more than 24,000 people have been killed in the Israeli campaign in Gaza, which the country launched after Hamas' deadly attacks on Israel on October 7.
While U.S. lawmakers broadly supported the attacks in Yemen, they said the administration had not yet laid out a clear strategy or end goal and suggested the strikes had not addressed concerns about an escalating Middle East conflict. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters after meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in recent days that the administration's plan to deal with the threat appeared to be “evolving.”
Lawmakers also expressed concerns that the operation could be costly extended. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted that some of the missiles deployed so far could cost $2 million apiece. “So the question is how long we can continue to fire expensive missiles,” he said.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) noted that the United States has tried to weaken others Groups in the past, such as the Taliban or al-Qaeda, even if they rearmed themselves again. “The Houthis were rebuilding themselves when the Saudis bombed them [for years]. So it’s sobering,” Blumenthal said.
“There is no doubt,” he added, “that we should be clear about the difficulties here.”
Ellen Francis in Beirut, Mustafa Salim in Baghdad and Louisa Loveluck in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
Israel-Gaza war
According to National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, US naval forces launched three more attacks against Houthi forces in Yemen on Friday morning, using anti-ship missiles. Internet and mobile communications have been gradually restored in the Gaza Strip, ending a weeks-long outage that left most of the territory's 2.1 million people cut off amid a war and humanitarian crisis.
Pakistan launched retaliatory strikes against militants in Iran on Thursday, the Foreign Ministry said, as tensions in the Middle East appeared to be escalating.
October 7 attack: Hamas spent more than a year planning its attack on Israel. A Washington Post video analysis shows how Hamas exploited vulnerabilities created by Israel's reliance on technology at the Iron Wall, the security barrier on the Gaza Strip border, to carry out the deadliest attack in Israel's history. Stock traders made millions of dollars in anticipation of the Hamas attack, according to a study.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has a complicated history. Learn what was behind the Israel-Gaza War and read about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.