US, Israel Not Winning Their War On Yemen

These Yemeni attacks have provoked massive assaults on Yemen's already fragile infrastructure-including an Israeli attack on Yemen's port city of Hodeidah in July and punctual missile attacks by the United States.

When US President Joe Biden was asked if the US airstrikes and missile strikes on Yemen were working, he answered bluntly:“When you say 'working,' are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”

In other words, Yemen's government-erroneously called the Houthis after the Zaydi tradition of Islam followed by a quarter of the Yemeni population-is not going to cease its attacks on Israel just because the US and the Israelis have been hitting their country.

Yemeni opposition to the Israeli genocide exceeds the Zaydi community, the Ansar Allah movement and the Yemeni government. Even Tawakkol Karman, who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2011 and is a critic of the Yemeni government, has been vocal in her criticism of Israel.

Biden's admission that the US missile strikes will not stop Yemen from its attacks has been accurate. Yemen faced a murderous bombardment from Saudi Arabia from 2015 to 2023, with the Saudis destroying large parts of the infrastructure in Yemen.

And yet, the Yemenis have maintained the ability to strike Israeli targets. In October 2024, the US military deployed B-2 Spirit bombers to hit what the Pentagon called,“five underground targets.”

It was not clear if these weapons depots were destroyed, but it does show the increasing desperation of the US and Israel to stop the Yemeni attacks. The names of the US missions (Operation Prosperity Guardian and Operation Poseidon Archer) sound impressive.

They are backed by a roster of carrier strike groups to protect Israel and to hit Yemen as well as groups that attempt to deter Israel's genocide. There are at least 40,000 US troops in the Middle East and at any given time at least one carrier strike group with aircraft carriers and destroyers.

According to the US Navy , there are two destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea (USS Bulkeley and USS Arleigh Burke) and two in the Red Sea (USS Cole and USS Jason Dunham), with Carrier Strike Group 8, anchored by the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman, en route to the Mediterranean as USS Abraham Lincoln goes off to the Pacific Ocean.

There is a considerable amount of US firepower in the area around Israel.

Biden is not the only person to say that the US attacks on Yemen have failed. US Vice Admiral George Wikoff, who leads Operation Prosperity Guardian, addressed an audience in Washington, DC from his headquarters in Bahrain in August.

Wikoff said that the United States cannot“find a centralized center of gravity” for the Yemenis, which means that it cannot apply“a classic deterrence policy.” If the United States cannot strike fear into the leadership of the Yemeni government, then it cannot halt the Yemeni attacks on Israeli shipping or infrastructure.

“We have certainly degraded their capability,” Wikoff said referring to the drones and missiles shot down by the US weapons. Wikoff did not mention that each of the Yemeni missiles and drones cost about US$2,000, while the US missiles used to shoot them down cost $2 million.

In the end, the Yemenis might be the ones degrading the US military (the Wall Street Journal reported in October that the US is running low on air-defense missiles, and the same paper reported in June that the US had spent $1 billion on its war on Yemen since October 2023).

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Like Biden, Wikoff reflected:“Have we stopped them? No.” In an interesting aside, Wikoff said,“The solution is not going to come at the end of a weapon system.”

As far as the Yemeni government is concerned, the only solution will come when Israel ceases its genocide. But even a ceasefire might not be sufficient. In early November, the United Nations official Louise Wateridge posted a video on X of the desolation in northern Gaza, and then wrote,“An entire society now a graveyard.”

The ability of the Yemeni government to cease shipping to Israel and to pin down the United States off its coast might embolden it to continue with this if Israel continues its illegal policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

Both Wikoff and Biden agree that the US policy has not worked, and Wikoff even said that the solution is not going to be through military force. It will have to be political.

This article was produced by Globetrotter and is republished with permission.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research .

He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations . His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle , Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism , and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power .

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