An End to the Bombing in Yemen?
If this is the end of the campaign, it just drives home how stupid and unnecessary it all was.
Trump claims that the Houthis have “capitulated” and the U.S. will therefore stop bombing. The Houthis have a different interpretation of the truce:
In a later interview with Bloomberg News, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthi Political Council, suggested the group is ready to stop attacking US military ships if the Trump administration halts its strikes, “but we will definitely continue our operations in support to Gaza.”
Houthi operations in the Red Sea and Israel “will not stop regardless of the consequences until the end of the aggression on Gaza and blockade on its people,” al-Bukhaiti said.
The U.S. should never have resumed the bombing campaign in March, so ending it is the right, albeit belated, thing to do. If this is the end of the campaign, it just drives home how stupid and unnecessary it all was. The bombing achieved nothing except to kill and injure hundreds of innocent people. An agreement to stop firing on each other would never have been needed if the U.S. hadn’t started bombing Yemen in the first place. Trump caused all this death and destruction needlessly. The arsonist shouldn’t get credit just because he stops setting things on fire.
When Trump resumed and escalated the illegal bombing campaign, the Houthis had not launched any attacks in months. If the truce takes effect and it holds, it takes things back to the way they were before U.S. bombing started up again on March 15. That means that the U.S. spent the last six weeks waging an air war against another country for no real reason, and that war then ends in a mutual ceasefire.
There is a potential problem if the president thinks that the Houthis have agreed to halt their operations against Israel when they haven’t. There may be some confusion about what the U.S. and the Houthis agreed to through Omani mediation. If the two sides aren’t on the same page, the ceasefire isn’t going to last very long.
The president’s remarks took the military by surprise:
Three separate Pentagon officials said that the military had yet to receive word from the White House to end its offensive operations against the Houthis. The officials were scrambling to figure out how Mr. Trump’s announcement, which caught the Pentagon off guard, had changed military policy.
Trump claims that the Houthis don’t want to fight anymore, but judging from their actions and their statements about Israel and Gaza in the last week that is definitely not true. The Houthis still have not been deterred. In that respect, the bombing of Yemen has to be considered a failure on its supporters’ terms.
If Trump makes good on the commitment to end the bombing, that will be the first decent decision he has ever made in connection with Yemen. The president can also be very changeable and prone to backtracking under pressure from hawks and regional client governments. There will likely be a major effort to get him to change his position while he is on his trip to the Middle East, and Americans should be on guard against that.
The war in Gaza remains the core issue that is not even being discussed. The Houthis’ conflict with Israel has only been intensifying in recent days as the Houthis struck Ben Gurion airport, and then the Israelis did significant damage to the port at Hodeidah and the international airport in Sanaa. If the conflict in the Red Sea is to be settled for good, the war and genocide in Gaza must be brought to an end.