Edited by Sam Thielman
I CAME HOME FROM MY REPORTING TRIP AT 2 A.M., and then I slept terribly, so this edition is going to reflect a certain amount of exhaustion. But the crisis stemming from Houthi attacks on commercial shipping through the Red Sea have escalated from where they were two weeks ago into a circumstance where a naval confrontation is on the moderate end of the U.S. retaliatory menu. And it doesn’t have to be this way.
As I was packing my bags on Wednesday, President Biden and 12 other governments gave the Houthis an ultimatum. (I note that France, Spain and the Seychelles are no longer part of this coalition, but the group has added Australia, Japan, Germany, Singapore and Belgium.) “The Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways,” reads the operative part. Whatever those consequences will be, the ultimatum justifies them in the name of defending the “international rules-based order,” and we know who that applies to and who it exempts.
A military confrontation in the Red Sea has already happened. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group is in that commercially crucial waterway. Just before New Year’s, U.S. Central Command said, the Eisenhower’s helicopters sank three Houthi ships—with all hands—that were harassing the shipping vessel Maersk Hangzhou. Again, that was before the ultimatum.
Both sides have room to escalate. The Iranian destroyer Alborz has transited the narrow waterway between Yemen and Djibouti, the Bab el-Mandab, to enter the Red Sea, according to official Iranian media, after a Houthi envoy came to Tehran to discuss the crisis. On the U.S. side, pressure is building for the Ike to stop responding to Houthi maritime operations and start taking it to the Houthis—and, alarmingly, not only the Houthis. “[T]he only effective strategy is to strike the entire Houthi missile, drone, and piloted aircraft enterprise, including the Iranian ship and other offensive capabilities that are used by the Houthis to project power far from Yemeni shores,” James Kraska of the Naval War College wrote on Tuesday in the influential “national security” blog Lawfare. (My emphasis)
Something like seven years of U.S.-assisted Saudi airstrikes on the Houthis in Yemen failed to either dislodge the faction or cripple its offensive capabilities, so Kraska has no basis for calling direct U.S. sea-staged strikes on the Houthis “the only effective strategy.” And now the options floated by respectable security analysts include sinking an Iranian destroyer, which is an unambiguous act of war guaranteed to force Iran’s hand either directly or through its “Axis of Resistance” allies. If Houthi attacks in the Red Sea are diverting commercial shipping and driving up the costs of what’s in those containers, imagine what open naval warfare in those shipping lanes will do. Happy New Year!
There is an alternative strategy to all of this, and to borrow Kraska’s words, I daresay it’s the only effective one. It doesn’t risk a confrontation with the Houthis, the Iranians and the rest of their coalition. It will get commercial shipping back to the Red Sea status quo ante, which, remember, is the entire objective here. It has a whole lot of other benefits for many, many people. And I’ll detail it after the paywall, so, you know—subscribe to FOREVER WARS and spread the word to your friends to do the same. We have bills to pay and that’s going to mean more paywalled editions in 2024. Why miss out?
DID YOU GUESS IT? That’s right—it’s the Biden administration stopping the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza! The thing that prompted the Houthis to pull off this shit in the first place! The thing that Biden shows absolutely no sign of looking to stop!
Whether you want to say Israel is committing genocide or is at its threshold—and remember that not all genocides resemble the Holocaust—there can be no more doubt about the Israeli government’s intentions for anyone willing to listen. Last week, its government began taking the mask off. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, wants to seize the “opportunity” to “encourag[e] the migration of the residents of Gaza,” and resettle it with Israeli Jews.
The State Department on Wednesday slammed these calls for unambiguous ethnic cleansing—a risibly hollow objection, since less than a week earlier it approved another sale, this one for $147.5 million, of artillery to aid Israel in its “encouragement” of Palestinian relocation. Furthermore, the State Department is acting as if Smotrich and Ben-Gvir “do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government,” since they’re not part of the war cabinet. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sits atop that cabinet. On Christmas, he told a Likud Party meeting that he is “working” on “the possibilities of voluntary immigration”—the most chilling of euphemisms—and that Gaza “needs to be settled.”
If the Biden administration does not want to see the completion of a genocide in Gaza, it has to stop Israel before it’s too late, and it’s very late. It’s that simple.
Nothing could be worse than ethnic cleansing. But it’s still important to remember that’s not the limit of what the current U.S.-backed Israeli course of action is yielding.
Over the past two weeks alone, Israel has assassinated an Iranian general in Damascus and now a senior Hamas official in Beirut. At the risk of stating the obvious, that Hamas leader, like his colleagues, was not in Gaza, but that hasn’t stopped Israel from killing more than 22,000 people, wounding more than 57,000, and displacing the vast majority of the population. Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah hasn’t yet joined the war in earnest after the Beirut assassination, but it seems like he’s running low on patience. And even outside of “Axis of Resistance” figures, pivotal U.S. ally Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the Iraqi prime minister, is denouncing as “blatant aggression” a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad that happened hours before we published this newsletter. Yes, the U.S. is again bombing Baghdad, now that the “Axis of Resistance” is launching attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria to pressure Washington into pressuring Israel. And now of course there’s the ultimatum to the Houthis.
So there’s two courses of action here. One involves genocide in Gaza and spillover war/acts thereof in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Red Sea—none of which have resulted in the release of a single Hamas-taken hostage, while negotiations during a pause have released something like 100 of them. The other involves stopping the Israeli genocide and thereby removing all the reasons for the other stuff happening.
There is no time to lose. It is already too late for tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. But forcing an end to the Israeli slaughter sure doesn’t seem to be the message Biden is sending the now-hapless Secretary of State Tony Blinken to deliver to the region. And the IDF is settling in for what the Wall Street Journal calls a “long-term” conflict in Gaza.
RIP DENNIS EDNEY. I saw while I was on my reporting trip that Dennis passed away at the age of 77 from dementia. He’s one of the principal reasons that Omar Khadr, who was forced by his parents into being a child soldier in Afghanistan and then tortured at Bagram and Guantanamo, is a free man today. I’ll never forget flying to Edmonton in 2015 for the court hearing that resulted in Omar’s freedom. Dennis let Omar live in his own home, where my fellow reporters and I drove in order to record Omar’s first words as a free man. Cruel demagoguery in Canada had surrounded Omar all throughout the confinement that forced him to grow into adulthood in Guantanamo. None of it intimidated Dennis. May his memory be a blessing. I know it will.
THE PENTAGON’S REVOLVING DOOR isn’t just to the defense industry and Silicon Valley. It’s to venture capital.
YOU CAN HEAR ME TALK ABOUT THE X-MEN on the new episode of Chad Anderson’s Graymalkin Lane podcast alongside X-editor Jordan D. White. Chad was also kind enough to let me talk about WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, which on Jan. 30 will be released in a collected hardcover edition. I got my comps of the hardcover, and it’s gorgeous, and it carries an essay by me that can’t be read anywhere else. Pre-order your copy today. And if you want a set of each individual issue signed by me and certified authentic, Bulletproof Comics, Brooklyn’s finest, has those exclusively.
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