The Warmongers Are Out in Force

Going to war with the Houthis is already a horrible idea, so leave it to Stavridis to come up with an even worse option of going to war with Iran at the same time.

James Stavridis rattles the saber against Yemen and Iran:

Third, if the Houthis do not cease their operations after proportional attacks against their maritime assets, we may need to up the ante by striking more broadly at their military capability. In their civil war, they have built up considerable combat power to use against the government of Yemen and its Saudi and Emirati allies. Thus there are plenty of ripe Houthi military targets ashore: fuel and ammunition depots, ground-assault vehicles, training facilities, command-and-control nodes. Striking them would do real damage to Houthi efforts to overthrow the Yemeni government. This would likely be done with ship-fired Tomahawk cruise missiles, which have a range of 1,500 miles and pinpoint accuracy.

A fourth, and highly controversial, level of escalation would be to attack Iranian assets directly.

Going to war with the Houthis is already a horrible idea, so leave it to Stavridis to come up with an even worse option of going to war with Iran at the same time. He makes more of an effort to identify what U.S. forces are supposed to bomb than Steven Cook did last week, but he completely fails to explain how this is going to force an end to attacks on commercial shipping. As Bruce Jones notes in a Foreign Policy article this week, “It would not be too hard for Houthi forces to hide both themselves and a stockpile of drones and missiles from U.S. targeting, so any attacks—from two U.S. carrier strike groups in nearby waters—would have to be pretty wide-ranging and even then are likely to miss pockets of weaponry.”

It is not surprising that military escalation is the only answer that hawks have for this problem, but it is disturbing how quickly this bad option is catching on as the preferred solution in the policy debate. Instead of fighting new wars to provide cover for Israel’s atrocious war in Gaza, the U.S. should be demanding a ceasefire and using every bit of leverage it has to make sure that it happens.