Apocalypse Yemen

Iran dreams of Vietnam. Don't give them one.

There’s nothing more dangerous than drinking in a bar where the drunkest guy is also the one carrying the biggest gun. That’s America without a war to fight. We’ve been fighting them, more or less, since 1776, and when there isn’t some overarching plan to combat this or contain that, we like to sit at the bar and wait for a fight—or start one. I won’t bore you with history, but one period that some boomers still remember is when containing the Red Threat and the Domino Effect took the place of nuclear holocaust in scaring the bejeesus out of Americans.

Photo by Vony Razom 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

On June 9, 1964, the Board of National Estimates sent a memo to the Director of the CIA, to answer the question: “Would the Loss of South Vietnam and Laos Precipitate a ‘Domino Effect’ in the Far East?”

“Peiping has already begun to advertise South Vietnam as proof of its [Page 487] thesis that the underdeveloped world is ripe for revolution, that the US is a paper tiger,” the brain trust concluded. “[And] that local insurgency can be carried through to victory without undue risk of precipitating a major international war.” We had our doctrine. Exactly 54 days later, we had our pretext.

The attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2, 1964, and what didn’t happen two days later (but Congress was told it did), greenlit the first of many of what we now familiarly call an AUMF: President Johnson had full, unilateral, and unchecked authority to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” And boy howdy, we spent ten years in the steaming jungles killing everything before leaving with all the dominoes fallen.

The North Vietnamese and their Russian sponsors were only too happy to indulge America our war, counting on our dedication to “victory without undue risk of precipitating a major international war.” In the midst of this, one Joe Biden became the sixth youngest person to ever take a seat in the U.S. Senate. He’s old enough to remember, as the oldest president we’ve ever had, and the oldest we’re likely to have.

It seems Joe Biden is prepared to walk into the same trap that caught Lyndon Johnson. After 20 years of a War on Terror, then Containing ISIS, we left all the dominoes on the floor, and now we have a new foe, the Houthis in Yemen, fueled by their sponsor, Iran, with Russia and China sitting on the sidelines cheering them on (and selling weapons).

Make no mistake, our attacks on the Houthis were expected, and in fact Iran is counting on our dedication to defend our allies and global shipping without undue risk of precipitating a major international war. It’s not me saying that, it’s the experts who’ve been studying the situation for a living. Cue the Washington Post’s reporting on January 12th:

“They are gaining what they want, which is to appear as the boldest regional player when it comes to confronting the international coalition, which is largely in favor of Israel and does not care for people in Gaza,” [Laurent Bonnefoy, a researcher who studies Yemen at Sciences Po in Paris] said. “This generates some form of support for them, internationally as well as internally.”

The Houthis have been in Yemen for a long time. They overthrew the government ten years ago, and then defeated a Saudi-led, U.S.-supplied force sent to kill them. They are ready for us to come and get them. They’re begging us to find a pretext to get boots on the ground in Yemen. The Houthis’ slogan is “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.” This is the fight they’re looking for.

This is why we shouldn’t fight them.

That being said, I will not deny that freedom of navigation in the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden, is vital to the world’s economy. The United States must defend commercial shipping in these lanes, as the Houthis have effectively closed the best route from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and East Asia. Both Denmark-based Maersk and German Hapag-Lloyd, along with Swiss-based MSC, have “paused” Red Sea shipping, choosing to go around the Horn of Africa, a much longer, more expensive journey. That’s the number one, number two and number five in the list of the world’s largest container shipping conglomerates.

Notably missing from the companies afraid to traverse the Red Sea is COSCO Shipping, along with Shandon International, both based in China. Zim Integrated Shipping is based in Israel, and their stock hasn’t tanked—it’s soared (so have other shipping giants) because they’ve raised their rates to deal with the crisis. (How’s that for your “Jews run the world” conspiracy.)

In any case, it’s intolerable to have the Houthis spewing missiles and drone swarms over the Red Sea, and occassionally lobbing a IRBM toward Eilat in Israel. Israel shoots them down, of course, with its David’s Sling system working as well as Raytheon and Rafael can do.

Throwing a few dozen Tomahawks into Yemen won’t do a thing to stop the Houthi threat, and America’s military knows this very well. All that does is give the American military industrial complex more contracts to replace expended munitions. Things get more touchy when we start losing SEALs, who were reportedly trying to board a ship in an interdiction operation against Iran, who supplies the missiles and drones for the Houthis to shoot at us.

At some point, the Houthis will manage an attack on a U.S. or allied warship, and will damage it, or kill some sailors (versus them being lost at sea). Or Iran will keep poking us in Iraq and other places until the war fire is properly kindled.

If we can’t stop the Houthis, and getting troops on the ground in Yemen is the fast way to a new Vietnam, that raises the question, what should we do?

I say we think like Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was called a war criminal because he thought outside the little box that was Vietnam. He saw the Ho Chi Minh trail and recommended bombing Cambodia to stop the weapons flow. Of course, that would risk a bigger war, and make America into a bad guy, which our government didn’t want, so we did it on the down-low. (And it was horrific.)

There’s no need to be secret about it. I’m sure, right now, our government is spinning up plans to do secret things in Djibouti, Ethopia, and Somalia faster than the top in the final scene of “Inception.” Don’t do that. Just take a big naval task force, with the U.S.S Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group, and blockade a few cities near the Strait of Hormuz. I’d say, Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, Imam Khomeini port, Bandar Shahid Regaie, Amirabad, and Port of Azali, plus a few others ought to do it.

That’s right, Iran: blockade them. Set up a naval cordon, and tell the world we’ll blow to hell anything floating that tries to run it. That will effectively stop most of the weapons flow from Iran to Yemen. It will give the Iranians plenty to think about—do they want to start a big war with America? The imams chant “death to America” but like to fight with other people’s soldiers. I’ve heard it said Iran will fight Israel “to the last Palestinian.” They’ll fight America to the last Houthi. But I don’t believe they’ll go so far as to fight us when it’s personal.

I don’t know how long it will take to choke out the Houthis, or for the Iranians to convince them (i.e. order them) to stop attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. But I do know that any attempt by us to depose the Houthis in Yemen will end about the same as it did trying to depose Hanoi from taking over Saigon (oh, I’m sorry, Ho Chi Minh City), or keeping the Taliban from running Afghanistan.

The dominoes will fall where they fall, and America must pick our wars carefully, though we are drunk and well-armed, waiting for the next one. The Houthis aren’t worth fighting. Iran is the enemy, and they’re not worth fighting either (or paying off). A good blockade ought to do it—maybe a hundred missiles up their back-ends and a few dozen sunk ships. That leaves plenty of time for Wall Street to structure its positions on the major shipping companies so they can bank another billion or two off our insouciant pirates.

Then corporate America can pay the Houthis off with luxury beach resorts while they continue chanting “Death to America!” from the presidential suite of the Four Seasons. That’s the way to win a war.