The Biden administration will undo one of the few good things it has ever done:
The Biden administration plans to put the Houthi rebel group back on one of its lists of terrorist organizations, days after the U.S. launched strikes on its facilities in Yemen in retaliation for months of attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, officials said.
Continue reading “Re-Designating the Houthis Is a Major Error”
Spencer Ackerman is not impressed by defenses of the U.S./U.K. strikes in Yemen:
The respectable set says that once the Houthis started attacking Red Sea shipping, a U.S. reprisal was inevitable. There’s a lazy-person’s truth here, for sure. Like the Royal Navy before it, the U.S. Navy sails under the banner of free trade. Any form of trade requires safe shipping lanes. Suez Canal traffic is down by something like 25 percent. Something like 10-12 percent of global commerce traverses the Red Sea.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that it confuses a justification for a military action with a strategy that produces a desired result. It treats a choice as an inevitability, and then, when convinced there is no alternative, intensifies a losing course of action when the choice doesn’t produce the desired result and instead makes everything worse.
Continue reading “The US Is Choosing Escalation and a Wider War”
The phenomenally stupid idea of attacking the Houthis is getting more support:
Saudi Arabia is among a number of Middle Eastern countries telling the West they back strikes against the Houthis in Yemen whose attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have diminished commercial traffic in the vital waterway.
If this report is true, this is just evidence that the Saudi government is back to its old reckless tricks. One might have thought that almost nine years of failed intervention in Yemen would have been enough to sour Riyadh on more military action there, but it seems that the crown prince and his advisers refuse to learn anything. U.S. attacks on Yemen will be dangerous not only for American interests, but they will also backfire on other U.S. clients in the region, especially if they are seen as supporting the attacks.
It’s January in an election year, so it must be time for the U.S. to assassinate someone in Baghdad:
A U.S. Special Operations drone strike in Baghdad on Thursday killed a senior figure in an Iran-linked militant group that is part of Iraq’s security apparatus, drawing sharp criticism from the Iraqi government, as well as allied groups.
It is absurd that the U.S. is still engaged in hostilities in Iraq almost 33 years after the end of Desert Storm. There are few better examples of the stupidity and futility of our government’s Middle Eastern policies than the tit-for-tat strikes between U.S. forces and Iraqi militias that answer to a government that our military is supposedly there to support. The U.S. is routinely committing acts of war against the security forces of a government that is considered a partner of the United States, and it does so over the vehement objections of the government that is compelled to host our troops. As if this weren’t already bad enough, this also makes conflict with Iran more likely.
Continue reading “Another Pointless Assassination in Baghdad”
Jeffrey Friedman wrote a somewhat interesting essay on how voters judge hawkish posturing from political leaders, but this section is nonsense:
Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 provides a good example of how it is hard to evaluate a policy’s wisdom [bold mine-DL] – but simple to spot resolve. After Trump ordered the strike, many observers accused him of recklessly risking war with Tehran. Others said that the United States should have targeted Soleimani long ago and that the strike would help deter Iran from challenging the United States in the future. Even in retrospect, it is difficult to determine whether Trump’s decision reflected good judgment [bold mine-DL]. Iran’s retaliation for the Soleimani strike was less severe than many people predicted. It is thus possible that Trump carefully analyzed the situation [bold mine-DL] and accurately understood that his choice to kill Soleimani was not as dangerous as critics claimed. But it is also possible that Trump had no idea how Tehran would react and nonetheless opted to roll the dice without good reason – and happily lucked out.
There are few Trump decisions that have been been easier to judge as reckless and unnecessary than the decision to kill Soleimani. By all accounts, Trump ordered the assassination because it was the most aggressive option he was given, and because he was responding to pressure from Senate Republicans whose support he needed at his first impeachment trial. That is based on numerous reports that came out at the time and in the subsequent weeks and months. Alice Friend, Mara Karlin and Loren DeJonge Schulman wrote about the decision a couple weeks after it happened:
According to multiple news reports, policymakers gave Trump the option of killing Qasem Soleimani as one of several choices, perhaps hoping that including such a dramatic measure would push him toward a middle course; instead, he went for it, reportedly with little forethought or preparation [bold mine-DL].
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
The UK Times reports on worsening famine conditions in Gaza. Those in northern Gaza are at greatest risk:
Barely any aid has reached the people in the north of Gaza, who are separated from the rest of the population by the fighting. Phone signals are cut off and large swathes of Gaza City, with its once-bustling beachfront restaurants, are destroyed.
No one knows how many people remain in the north, but charities estimate that it could be in the hundreds of thousands. They have nothing.
