The White House convened senior officials on Wednesday to discuss options for the way ahead in the administration’s evolving response to the Iranian-backed movement, which has vowed to continue attacking ships off the Arabian peninsula despite near-daily operations to destroy Houthi radars, missiles and drones. On Saturday, U.S. Central Command announced its latest strike, on an anti-ship missile that was prepared for launch.
The deepening cycle of violence is a setback to President Biden’s goal of stemming spillover hostilities triggered by Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Underscoring the threat, Iran on Saturday blamed Israel for a strike on the Syrian capital, Damascus, that killed five Iranian military advisers. The Israeli military declined to comment. In Iraq, an attack on Ain al-Asad air base, which hosts Iraqi and U.S. troops, left one Iraqi soldier seriously injured, according to a Defense Department official. An Iran-linked faction there said it was responsible.
The Houthis, one powerful faction in Yemen’s long-running civil war, have framed their campaign, which has included more than 30 missile and drone attacks on commercial and naval vessels since November, as a means of pressuring Israel, bolstering their standing amid widespread regional opposition to the Jewish state. The quickly expanding U.S. response likewise risks pulling Biden into another volatile campaign in a region that has repeatedly mired down the American military, potentially undermining his attempt to refocus U.S. foreign policy on Russia and China.
Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, described their strategy in Yemen as an effort to erode the Houthis’ high-level military capability enough to curtail to their ability to target shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden or, at a minimum, to provide a sufficient deterrent so that risk-averse shipping companies will resume sending vessels through the region’s waterways.
“We are clear-eyed about who the Houthis are, and their worldview,” a senior U.S. official said of the group, which the Biden administration designated this week as a terrorist organization. “So we’re not sure that they’re going to stop immediately, but we are certainly trying to degrade and destroy their capabilities.”
Biden this week acknowledged that the strikes had so far failed to discourage Houthi leaders, who have promised to exact revenge against the United States and Britain, whose military has contributed to the strikes in Yemen.
“Are they stopping the Houthis? No,” the president told reporters. “Will they continue? Yes.”
Officials say they don’t expect that the operation will stretch on for years like previous U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. At the same time they acknowledge they can identify no end date or provide an estimate for when the Yemenis’ military capability will be adequately diminished. As part of the effort, U.S. naval forces also are working to intercept weapons shipments from Iran.
The Houthis, who made an unlikely rise from an obscure rebel movement in Yemen’s northern mountains in the 1990s to ruling large swaths of the country by 2015, previously withstood years of bombing by a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.
“We’re not trying to defeat the Houthis. There’s no appetite for invading Yemen,” a diplomat close to the issues said. “The appetite is to degrade their ability to launch these kind of attacks going forward, and that…
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