The Optimistic Conservative In Yemen, Iran moves to occupy the strategic center

Compulsion to attack – the radical Iranian regime’s version of “responsibility to protect”?

J.E. Dyer, The Optimistic Conservative, January 17, 2024

Another quick-look on the fast-moving events in the Middle East.

This article, like the previous one of 15 January 2024, will mainly quote from other correspondence.  I make this point to explain the informality of the language and composition, which I am not cleaning up.  The points being made are important, and can be made effectively even in on-the-fly format.

To briefly introduce the topic, the political condition of Yemen – reduced as it often is to warring factions, with no central government in control – is a key element affecting the stability of the whole region.  The conditions of today, with the Houthis, backed by Iran, attacking third parties, can be exploited well beyond the level at which Tehran’s regime is currently exploiting them.

That is the main danger of the current situation.  It lies behind the threat to shipping, as it lay for several years behind the threat of Houthi missiles and drones to Saudi Arabia.  As I pointed out in an email excerpted on Monday, the “Yemen” problem needs to be addressed by U.S. and regional leadership with negotiated pacification and unification, at least long enough to neutralize it in the Hamas-Israel crisis.

Though that seems like a towering task and may not strike most readers as the immediate necessity, it will turn out to be indispensable.  It has to be faced.  Merely playing defense off the coast of Yemen, on an indefinite basis, is a situation that can’t be held in stasis.  It will deteriorate.

And the Iran-Houthi cartel is now making the move that clearly signals that point.  The move is, in one stroke, putting the factional disposition of Yemen, and the future of rule and stability in Yemen, in play.  While doing so, it’s angling to force a decision on the powers of the West:  get involved in the factional confrontation, or lose the Bab-el-Mandeb chokepoint to Iran.

The convergence of factors is summarized in my comments on a new article by Seth Frantzman at the Jerusalem Post, and the illustrative map below.  The article is about the Houthis moving missiles, launchers, and drones to new locations in Yemen following the U.S./UK strikes on them since 11 January.

The big information point — if validated in the upcoming days — is where the Houthi assets are being moved.

Here’s the email excerpt (it starts out addressing another aspect of the situation off Yemen – a comparison of it to the Barbary Pirates operation undertaken by the new-hatched U.S. Navy just over 200 years ago):

What Iran is doing (e.g., last 48 hours) is the definition of undeterred escalation.  Expanding and intensifying the provocation (in this case, with missile attacks on the region directly from Iran:  Pakistan, Iraq), in the face of showy but ineffective attempts by the US to deter that behavior.

The Barbary Pirates allusion is interesting, as that whole episode established important precedents for US power in the world.  Jefferson’s beef with the pirates was that they were stopping US merchant shipping to demand tribute, which they did in the name of the Ottoman Empire (whose Sultan had little control of them, but was happy to use them as an arm of maritime power and a source of income).

The point of historical interest is that, for various reasons at the time, the Brits accepted the Barbary scheme and just paid the tribute.  That meant everyone else did too, the Royal Navy being the sheriff of the seas at the time.

Everyone, that is, except the upstart United States.  Though it didn’t happen overnight, the US defiance against the Barbary-Ottoman arrangement established a new hegemony-breaker on the seas.  Where the UK had paid tribute for decades, buying off a nuisance, the US eventually broke the Barbary arrangement.  A decade-plus-long “Second Battle of Lepanto” put Ottoman power in the Med in permanent decline.  Breaking maritime hegemony and forcing open waterways became the US calling card.

In 2024, we’re perilously close to acting like the Barbary-era Brits, stretched to the max across an empire and beset by Napoleon.

[But] I’m thinking perhaps as much or more of Vietnam, Rolling Thunder (the US “deterrence effort”), and the Ho Chi Minh Trail for the Viet Cong (the “Houthis”).  The Trail went through Laos and Cambodia.  Hanoi sponsored it, but the political fiction was that it was a Viet Cong arrangement with third party nations, whose territory must not be overtly violated.

It’s informative to consult the map (below) and observe where the Houthis are moving their antishipping weapons, according to the [Frantzman] article.  It’s well into territory nominally belonging to the Saudi-backed “government” of Yemen (a descendant of the UN-recognized government extant at the time of the big Houthi breakout in 2011), AND the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council.  Neither of the latter has fully effective control of its nominal territory; Al Qaeda and other transnational terror groups still operate in parts of them.  The heights of Taiz and the terrain from there to Aden are especially significant because they’re the geographic- and population-dominating core of Yemen.

To hit the Houthi antishipping assets in that area, the US and UK would have to expand our attacks into territory nominally controlled by the factions our regional, status-quo partners back.  (To the extent we back one, we’ve gone with the Saudis and the PLC.)

Iran and the Houthis are blowing the lid off the political fictions of Yemen, starting with what the control of the “recognized governments” really amounts to.  However intentionally, this Iranian move puts the Houthis right at the center of the big divide in Yemen, and sets an antiship missile fuse to it.  (Full disclosure: I think it’s intentional.  The import of the move is too obvious for Persians to miss it.)

If Nixon and Kissinger were working this, they’d perceive that now is the time to settle the question of who controls what in Yemen, and who’s in charge.  Negotiate urgently, engaging all relevant friendly parties.  Flank Iran politically and yank Yemen out from under it. Get in charge – now – of how necessary it may be to bomb “Cambodia,” in order to protect shipping and change the “VC’s” (and “Hanoi’s”) reality.

I don’t see that happening before Jan 2025, at the earliest.

This separate article from December 2023 has an accessibly presented primer on the factional situation in Yemen, for those who could use one.  It’s important to note that factional negotiations are ongoing, though without persistent emphasis, among the Yemeni parties and sponsors.  (The rush to Houthi reactions/distractions after 7 Oct 2023 suggests the timing of Hamas’s attack may have supported an Iranian strategy to preempt the Yemeni negotiations.)  The Arab Monetary Fund committed $1 billion in November 2022 to a three-year economic plan for Yemen, purportedly connected to the political settlement negotiations.

But the whole process, without unifying leadership, is effectively sidelined by the recent developments instigated by Iran.

Again, if it’s not clear, the Houthis are moving their antishipping weapons to a storage and deployment location that would, as things look now, quickly drive the U.S./UK coalition to attack directly into that area – which is not Houthi territory, and would inevitably involve us and our bombs in the uneasy coexistence being promoted by our regional partners in Riyadh and Dubai.

So far, for comparison, the U.S./UK attacks have come as far south as Taiz, already a politically perilous border area for all three major factions.  If the Houthi antishipping operation moves further south, as the Frantzman article indicates, involving the corridor between Taiz and Aden, the ballgame moves to a different level of encroachment and political freight.  (Additional strikes conducted by the U.S. on 17 January —  a few hours ago as this goes to post — were reported to be against missiles on launchers in Houthi-controlled territory.  That would mean they were all north of the area outlined in JPost.)

Instigating a double-down and a coalition reaction into STC and/or PLC territory makes a three-fer for Iran.  We don’t have to sit passively and let it develop, and we shouldn’t.  I wouldn’t bet against that being the approach from Washington, however.

Another update posted today by our diligent shipmate Intelschizo at Twitter/X reinforces the conclusion that the Houthis indeed intend to focus on threatening shipping in the Gulf of Aden.

The Iranian surveillance ship Behshad is confirmed to have moved from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden.  Behshad has been involved for some time in supporting the Houthi antishipping attacks with surveillance and intelligence.  With its outfit of IRGCN fast boats, Behshad has other capabilities to ratchet up the tension east of the Bab-el-Mandeb.

An update just emailed:

Follow-up.

The Iranian ship Behshad, the spy ship near the Bab-el-Mandeb, was most recently located in the Gulf of Aden east of the strait.

That’s a confirmed change, and a significant one:  Behshad moving from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden.  Coupled with Seth Frantzman’s report on Houthi missile and drone movements, it reinforces the evidence suggesting the Houthis are going to shift at least some antiship focus to the Gulf of Aden.

The frigate Alborz [a UK-built Vosper Mk-5 class corvette] is there to protect Behshad, and the supply ship Bushehr to keep them both fueled and fed.  I’m seeing an excellent SEAL-ready mission here.  Waste of time to have 14-man SEAL teams running around attacking dhows.

Iran’s move here (and it’s clearly Iran’s move) will enable the Houthis to affect shipping on both sides of the strait.  It will increase the size and dispersion of the area in which vigilance over shipping protection will have to be increased.

That escalation gives special significance to the move as a form of laying bait.  I’m reminded of a favorite maxim from the German general and strategist, Helmut von Moltke the Elder (statesman Otto von Bismarck’s long-time partner in the 19th-century project of unifying Germany).  The maxim was cited by British analyst B.H. Liddell-Hart in his 1967 book Strategy:  “A clever military leader will succeed in many cases in choosing defensive positions of such an offensive nature from the strategic point of view that the enemy is compelled to attack us in them.”

While the movement of Houthi assets is more than merely defensive, it isn’t actively offensive – yet. But the position involved is unquestionably of strategic import.  And what’s easily foreseeable is that we will be compelled to attack the Houthis in it, if we “FAFO” on a passive, lagging basis.

Iran isn’t waiting for any further signals or developments to set that process in motion.  That’s the wakeup call.  We may have an incremental strategy, but the regime in Tehran doesn’t.  It’s accelerating to a trot, and this current sequence of events is for all the marbles.

We need to get ahead of this right now, and we have everything we need to do it, starting with our partnership with the sponsors of both the major non-Houthi factions in Yemen.  Cutting off the Houthis from a pipeline to Iran would go a long way to talking them off the limb they’re scampering out on.  No one else in Yemen wants to court U.S. coalition bombing more than it wants to find a stable, secure backwater to ride this wiener roast out in.