Well, I didn’t expect that to take three years! With today’s video, “How Yemen Beat Saudi Arabia” I have completed my most epic video project ever, the “Yemen vs. Empire” series. Initially planned as a trilogy, the series ballooned up to six episodes. And the episodes got longer every time. The first episode, covering the conflict with the Ottomans from the 1500s to the early 20th century, was fifteen minutes long. This final episode is 57 minutes long, well over twice as long as any other video I have ever produced. As is the case with most projects, the closer I get to the present day, the more unsettled the story is, and the more I feel compelled to include.
Throughout this series, I’ve been touched to hear from Yemenis who find the information provided unbiased, and even useful for their own understanding. I wonder if that will continue as I bring the story down to the present day, with its very live controversies? Can’t wait to find out. I am so happy to have put this whole project out into the world, and deeply grateful to the patrons who have made it possible.
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click here to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
Over the past two and a half years of ceasefire Saudi Arabia’s complete failure in Yemen has become more and more apparent. The missiles of Yemen’s Houthi government have effectively established deterrence with the Gulf Monarchies. The Saudi ability to bomb Yemen without fear of retaliation seems to be over. Saudi Arabia is now trying to sign a deal with the Houthis that would completely screw over the proxy government the Saudis have kept afloat since 2015. This likely Saudi-Houthi deal is a humiliation for Riyadh, but it does have the silver lining of completely screwing over Saudi Arabia’s frenemy, the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is the only entity that has so far gained anything from the horrific war the Gulf Monarchies launched against Yemen in early 2015.
The complete failure of the Saudi-UAE invasion of Yemen can be hard to understand, if you don’t understand Yemen’s history. Over the past five episodes of this Yemen vs. Empire series I have documented how Yemen’s diverse factions have continually frustrated the aspirations of Ottoman, British, Egyptian, American and Soviet Empire builders.
I have wanted to place Yemen’s history in its full imperial perspective for years now. Back in 2020 I did a deep dive into the way that Britain spent 4 decades undermining Egypt before conquering the place in 1882. As I made those videos, I was struck by how similar the Saudi approach to Yemen has been over the past 60 years. The Saudis and Emiratis have been doing 19th century style imperialism in Yemen, pure and simple. The fact that the Gulf Monarchs don’t happen to be Europeans doesn’t make their colonial project any less grubby or dishonorable.
The big difference today, of course, is that the invading imperialists have lost. In 2014, just like the Egypt of 1881, elements of Yemeni society rose up against decades of foreign influence to try to sweep the invaders and collaborators out. In 2015, like the British of 1882, the Saudis invaded Yemen, expecting to quickly crush all opposition. The British invaders of 1882 won, and they controlled Egypt until the 1950s. But the Saudi invaders of Yemen have lost completely, and history leads me to believe the UAE, which seems to have benefitted at this point, will lose eventually as well.
The roots of this conflict go far beyond the 2015 invasion. Back in 2017, I put out a video claiming that what was really going on in Yemen was not one, but two separate wars of independence. North Yemen’s war to be free decades of Saudi meddling, and South Yemen’s war to be free of the North, with which it has been unhappily unified since 1990. That old video is still worth watching, and there is a link in the description. But my reading since makes me want to revise it a bit. Saudi Arabia hasn’t just been trying to take over Yemen since 2015. Saudi Arabia’s attempt to subjugate Yemen has now lasted over a century. For as long as there has been a Saudi Arabia, it’s been attempting to colonize Yemen. If you want to know more about that 100 year effort, you can watch the first five episodes of this Yemen vs. Empire series.
In part 1, covering the 1500s through the 1930s we documented how the upstart country of Saudi Arabia used British support to take away historic Yemeni land, right before oil money launched the Saudis into the stratosphere economically. In Part 2, taking the story from the 1930s through the 1970s, we illustrated how Saudi Arabia used a Yemeni civil war to win its competition with Egypt. In Part 3, covering the 1960s through the 1990s, we showed how Saudi religious imperialism created new divisions in Yemeni society, leading to the rise of Sunni Jihadists like Al Qaeda, and the Houthis that rose to fight them. In part 4, on the late 1990s through 2014, we showed how the Saudi generated 9-11 era rocked Yemen to its core. And in part 5, on 2010-2017, we documented the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was sometimes Saudi Arabia’s most useful client and sometimes their most irritating enemy.
Today we will finally be covering the most recent decade, when Saudi Arabia’s open attempt at conquest ended in humiliating failure. Starting off with 2011 and the temporary fall of Yemen’s three decade dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh.
2011 boom
Other Arab dictators fell much more quickly during the Arab Spring. Saleh however, was wily and managed to delay the end of his presidency, even surviving an assassination attempt in June. But the opposition could see that they were winning, and finally forced him to resign in November of 2011. Saleh’s prolonged fall from power gave the Gulf countries an opportunity. The US, UN and EU all played small roles in pushing Saleh out. But they let Saudi Arabia and the UAE lead the way. Which introduced the ridiculous spectacle of a couple of Gulf Monarchies trying to lead a democratic transition.
Scholar Alexandra Stark, in her useful book, The Yemen Model, suggests that it might have been a phone call from Saudi King Abdullah that finally convinced Saleh to resign in November 2011. Yemen’s transition framework was known as the Gulf Cooperation Council initiative. Yemen’s political transition quite literally had the Gulf Monarch’s names all over it. The GCC Initiative was driven, of course, by Saudi and Emirati interests and money. Yemen’s democracy was entrusted to a bunch of monarchs who are dedicated to the idea that Democracy doesn’t work for Arabs. I wonder why that didn’t work out?
2012-2014
We covered the failure of Yemen’s transitional government at length in the last episode, so today let’s just focus on how important outside influence was in bringing about that failure.
Ali Abdullah Saleh was a famous piece of work, but he at least had experience and some control of Yemen and its institutions. It meant he could push back a little bit on US and Gulf demands. New President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who started his 10 year long two year term in 2012, had none of that power. His weakness led to a vicious cycle where his lack of legitimacy in Yemen meant he needed more outside funding and support, which led him to take actions serving foreign interests that further undermined his legitimacy.
Making things worse, Hadi was a complete doormat for US counterterrorism efforts. He allowed Yemen to be targeted by US bombing much more frequently than it had been under Saleh, building rage among the public.
Hadi’s dependence on Gulf support meant he was constantly handing out sweetheart deals to outside businesses, that Saleh would have at least gotten decent kickbacks for. The United Arab Emirates in particular won favorable deals in Yemeni ports, that Saudi Arabia was reportedly quite jealous of. Most commentators agree that Hadi went far beyond his limited mandate as a transitional figure, signing over important parts of Yemen’s economy to outsiders.
Gulf influence poisoned the attempted transition to democracy with corruption, but also through Saudi Arabia’s dislike, and the UAE’s pathological hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islah party, probably 2012’s most well established political actor, with a more credible commitment to democracy than many other elements on the Yemeni political scene, is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. So Hadi was obligated by his Gulf sponsors to spend as much time working against Islah as he did working against the Houthis that eventually overthrew him.
In early 2014 the national dialogue conference failed to resolve any of Yemen’s problems, and President Hadi celebrated by awarding himself a third year in power. By the end of the year, Yemen’s transitional government had fallen apart, and the Houthis, implacable enemies of Saudi Arabia, were in control of the capital.
2015 boom
2015 saw the end of an era in Yemen’s most powerful neighbor. Saudi King Abdullah had only ruled in his own name since 2005, but had ruled as regent since1996 in the name of his incapacitated brother. Abdallah’s 19 years in power had seen great failures, like Saudi complicity in 9-11, but they had also been rooted in the careful, measured traditions of the Saudi Royal family.
Abdallah had always preferred manipulation to the use of military force. He must have remembered how successfully Saudi Arabia had crushed Nasser’s Egypt, a country that had been stupid enough to send its military into Yemen. In that 1960s war, Saudi Arabia stayed officially off stage, sending money and weapons to the Yemeni forces that ended Nasser’s Pan-Arab nationalist dreams. King Abdallah had no interest in making Nasser’s mistake.
Tragically for Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the world, Abdallah died in January 2015. The 90 year old king was replaced by his 79 year old brother King Salman, who was already suspected of suffering from Alzheimer’s. From the beginning Salman chose to rely on his son, Muhammad Bin Salman, only 30 years old in 2015, who he installed as Defense Minister and deputy crown Prince shortly after coming to power. MBS, as he would come to be known, did not have Abdallah’s wisdom or restraint. He decided he would make his mark, and demonstrate Saudi Power by crushing Yemen’s Houthis in a decisive storm. It didn’t work out so well.
Meanwhile in Yemen, by January 2015, Hadi had realized his mistake in not putting up a fight when the Houthis took the capital the previous September. At the end of the third year of his two year term, he resigned and was promptly put under house arrest. In February he fled to Aden, Yemen’s second city and the capital of the South. When he got to Aden, Hadi attempted to rescind his resignation, and reconstitute Yemen’s government from the South. Unfortunately, all this accomplished was giving the Houthis the excuse they needed to take over the rest of the country.
By March, heavy fighting had reached Aden, and Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia, where he continued his lobbying for a Saudi intervention. It’s really important to understand what Yemen actually looked like in March of 2015 on the cusp of the Saudi-UAE invasion. Yemen had already had a civil war. The civil war was over, and the Houthis had won.
The map can be a bit deceiving. The 2015 Houthis only seem to control the West of the country. But in truth, their then impending conquest of Aden would have been the squashing of the last resistance. The East of Yemen is almost all desert. The people who live in the Oases and port cities of Hadrahmaut and Al Mahra governorates are a tiny percentage of Yemen’s population, and they have usually been isolated from the mainstream of Yemeni politics. In 2015 the Yemeni Civil War was over. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were not intervening to defend a government with any legitimacy, they were invading to correct the results of a civil war that they did not like. So why were they allowed to do it?
The United States had dramatically stepped up its involvement in the Middle East in 1990 to punish Iraq for invading it’s much weaker neighbor. Preventing things like the Saudi invasion of Yemen is supposedly what the US rules based order is all about. Lloyd Austin, later Biden’s secretary of Defense, was the general in charge of US middle East forces in 2015, and he was enraged by the intervention, accurately predicting that it would be a colossal failure that would create massive problems for the US down the line. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/lloyd-austin-and-the-war-on-yemen/
So why did we do it? Well, the Obama administration had bigger priorities. They were putting together a deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear program, which Saudi Arabia hated. Allowing MBS to carry out his idiotic invasion was seen as a trade. This strikes me as a pretty straightforward case of bribery. Saudi Arabia has no real power over the United States, but they do fund a lot of jobs in Washington DC, so we helped them kill a couple hundred thousand people in Yemen.
It might even have been worth it, if the Iran Nuclear deal had been allowed to stand. With the nuclear issue resolved, the US would be able to finally disengage from the region, Iran would have had broader economic ties that would promote peace, Netanyahu probably wouldn’t be in power, October 7th is unlikely to have ever happened, about 1,000 Israelis, and a couple hundred thousand more Gazans would probably be alive today. But that’s all sunny speculation. Donald Trump killed the deal, creating the current crappy status quo with Iran, and we let Saudi Arabia’s failed and brutal war build a new and much more powerful version of Hezbollah in Yemen. Success all around.
Diplomatically, The US participation in the Saudi invasion went as far as a series of UN Security Council resolutions claiming that Hadi, a president whose term had ended, who had resigned, and who lived in Saudi Arabia was the legitimate, Internationally recognized president of Yemen. This absurd fiction limped on from 2015 all the way up until 2022, the 11th year of Hadi’s two year term in office.
Shamefully, US support for the invasion of Yemen was not just diplomatic. The Saudi war effort would not be possible without US support. First and foremost would be the continued flow of US weapons to the Saudi air force, which became a flood after 2015. If that had stopped at any point, the war would have stopped. But the United States went far beyond the supply of weapons, to helping to pick the targets. The numbers waxed and waned with US politics around the conflict, but at the outset of the war dozens of US intelligence officers were on the ground in Riyadh helping to plan attacks. For much of the active part of the war, the Saudi air force was reliant on US military planes for aerial refueling.
Maybe the worst thing the US did, and continues to do, doesn’t involve any explosions. The Saudi air and sea blockade of Yemen is nominally supposed to just stop weapons, but it has slowed down, and sometimes stopped all import of food and fuel into the country, generating famine, and some of this century’s worst epidemics, of cholera and other diseases. Hungry people have weaker immune systems, so Yemen had an even worse Covid experience than everybody else, primarily at US hands. Saudi bombing has killed tens of thousands of Yemenis. The Saudi blockade has indirectly killed vastly more. The United States, and our British and French vassals, have contributed ships and intelligence support to this deeply evil crime against humanity. I don’t choose to use the word genocide for what happened in Yemen, but the blockade is the main source of evidence for those who do.
The Saudis expected to crush the Houthis in weeks. Almost a decade later their failure is clear. The Houthis are more powerful than they have ever been. Though Saudi failure was already apparent by the end of 2015, the first year of the war.
Aden, Yemen’s second most important city, and the capital of the South, was liberated from the Houthis in July of 2015. That was the last serious victory the Saudi-UAE coalition would win, even though the war dragged on until 2022.
This failure can seem hard to understand. The very top and bottom of Yemen’s power structure, Saleh and the Houthis, made their alliance public in 2015. Saudi Arabia and the UAE had every other element in Yemen’s prewar hierarchy to work with. Tribes, political parties, Ali Mohsen’s factions of the Army, southern separatists and Gulf money and weapons should have added up to a serious rival to the Houthis. Instead, Saudi Arabia and the UAE used all these factions to fight each other.
Like every other Arab country, the most cohesive political party outside of the old regime was an Islamist one with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. This Islah party, had a large electoral constituency, and close links to many traditional Yemeni power bases. Saudi Arabia was willing to work with Islah to beat the Houthis. But the UAE hates the concept of Arab democracy even more than they hated the idea of losing a war. So they have spent the past decade fighting Islah almost as intensely as they have been fighting the Houthis.
In 2018, Buzzfeed broke the story that the UAE was hiring US mercenaries to assassinate highly placed members of the internationally recognized anti-Houthi government that the UAE and Saudi Arabia were supposedly working to protect.
The 53 separate successful and failed assassination attempts against Islah party figures between 2016 and 2018 are probably the most egregious example of the Gulf coalition’s disfunction, but the anti Houthi forces have never been unified in any serious way. Everything we say about the Yemeni conflict in the South is an oversimplification, but speaking generally, the invading coalition tended to be divided along the following lines. The Saudis were more often affiliated with Islah, and the internationally recognized Hadi government that controlled progressively less and less territory as the war went on. The UAE leans more towards Southern separatists and salafist militias that were constantly undermining, and occasionally engaged in open warfare against that Hadi government the gulf coalition supposedly supported. The UAE supported militias tend to be the only non-Houthi forces in Yemen that are capable of taking or holding on to any real territory.
The Saudi inability to put together any kind of serious Invasion force is one of the main reasons they failed. At the outset of the fight, MBS was disappointed to find that the cannon fodder he had been expecting to use, the Pakistanis and Egyptians, had no interest in getting involved. So the Saudis hired the Sudanese. Specifically the Janjaweed militias that had earned worldwide infamy for the Darfur Genocide at the beginning of this century. Quick sidenote, those Janjaweed militias pulled out of Yemen in 2019 to focus on their own country, where they are known as the Rapid Support forces or RSF. The Gulf money the RSF got for fighting in Yemen has a lot to do with why these monsters are currently winning the horrific civil war in Sudan.
2016
When you combine the international cast of war criminals on the ground, with the generalized chaos of the forces on the anti-Houthi side, and the Saudi emphasis on bombing, it’s not surprising that the Gulf invasion of Yemen quickly led to a hideous level of casualties. As early as the fall of 2015, the UN was reporting that two thirds of civilian casualties in the conflict were a result of Saudi allied airstrikes. By the one year anniversary of the war, in March 2016, the Saudis had carried out almost 6000 separate air strikes, to very little military benefit and at great civilian cost. US government efforts to get the Saudis to kill fewer civilians intensified.
Finally, by the end of 2016, The Obama administration had had enough. They had their Iran nuclear deal, and the Saudi invasion that was supposed to be completed successfully in a few weeks time was dragging through a second murderous year of failure. On October 9, 2016, a Saudi attack on a funeral killed 140 civilians, and the Obama administration dramatically curtailed US participation in the invasion. We withdrew US personnel, publicly condemned the Gulf coalition’s conduct, and suspended some weapons sales. This did not immediately end the war, the Obama administration could have gone much further, but it did slow the pace of airstrikes.
Eight years later, now that the Houthis have basically defeated the Saudis and are threatening Israel, Hawks in Washington, DC, and many anti-Houthi Yemenis are constantly whining about the US’s brief periods of squeamishness. If we had just been willing to murder more innocents back then, surely the Houthis wouldn’t be as powerful as they are today! Now I wouldn’t find that argument particularly persuasive, under any circumstances. We’ve seen, over and over how more brutality has just made the Houthis stronger. But that argument has also been disproven in the kind of natural experiment that geopolitics almost never provides.
2017
When Donald Trump came to power in January of 2017, he decided to give the Saudis an almost completely blank check in Yemen. All of Obama’s last minute limits on Saudi Arabia’s conduct were lifted. For four years Trump and his people did all they could to protect the Saudi invasion of Yemen, in the face of growing outrage internationally, among the US public, and finally, even unprecedented levels of opposition within the US Congress. Trump’s Maximum Pressure, as with Iran, just made the Houthis more powerful. Trump’s justification for all this savagery was the Houthi connection with Iran, which is a little strange.
This is one of the biggest and most consistent disconnects between politicians and academics I have seen in my ten years of geopolitical analysis. Everyone in Washington, DC, Republican and Democrat, insists that Yemen’s Houthis are Iranian proxies. But every academic I have read, that studies Yemen, insists that this is nonsense.
The Houthis are independent from Iran, and frequently act against Iran’s wishes, in ways that say, Lebanon’s Hezbollah never would. There are certainly close ties between the countries, and Yemen owes some of its current missile and drone capabilities to Iranian technology. But the consensus is that the main reason Iran decided to provide this support to the Houthis, is the war that Saudi Arabia launched in 2015.
Let me repeat that. The main result of the Saudi and US war against Iranian influence in Yemen, has been dramatically stepped up Iranian influence in Yemen. In 2022, after seven years of war, Yemen did use Iranian technology to end the conflict. But the main provider of Houthi weapons for most of this war was actually the United States.
Remember that for the first years of the Saudi invasion, the Houthis were allied with Yemen’s old dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. What made Saleh such a valuable ally in this period was his control over the elements of the Yemeni military that he had built up over the course of his dictatorship. And, as we covered in episode 4, the United States poured tons of money and resources into Yemen’s military after 9-11.. So for most of the war against the Saudi invasion, the US provided most of the weapons for both sides. It was only at the end of four years of war with Saudi Arabia that the Yemenis accumulated enough Iranian missile tech to meaningfully change the conflict.
Anyway, back in 2017, the switch from Obama to Trump looked like a big break for the Saudis. But that was nothing compared to what happened in December of 2017. It wasn’t just the end of the Saleh Houthi partnership, it was the end of Saleh, who had been the most important figure in Yemeni politics for just shy of 40 years.
As late as 2017, people were still assuming that Ali Abdullah Saleh was the real power in the Houthi Saleh coalition that controlled the majority of Yemen’s population. Many thought that the battle between the old men that had controlled Yemen for decades was more important than the upstart militia from the North. This mistake was made by many western analysts, and it was made by Saleh himself.
Over the course of 2017, Saleh’s marginalization became clearer and clearer. By August he and his inner circle had been cut out of decision making by the Houthis, and by November his movements in Sanaa had been limited. He decided to execute one of the trademark betrayals he had carried out so many times before, turning on the Houthis and announcing openness to working with the Saudis. This was a mistake. The Houthis killed him on December 4th, 2017.
In 2017, the Saudis got a US president who gave them a completely blank check, and the death of their great enemy Saleh. To the extent that the Saudis had a good year in this war, it was 2017. They utterly failed to capitalize on it. Why? Well there are three main reasons I can see. No Unity, Insane Saudi Leadership and Donald Trump himself.
2018-2019
No Unity
In January 2018 the hope was that the death of Saleh would lead to chaos in the Houthi North. Instead we saw chaos in the South, as open fighting broke out between the Hadi led Saudi proxy government and the UAE sponsored Southern Transition Council. The Saudi proxy government had been installed back in Aden in 2015, but President Hadi had never permanently returned from Saudi Arabia, due to security issues. We hear a lot in the west about how poorly administered the Houthi territories are, with good reason. But the Houthi territories are at least administered by a central authority. There is solidified power, and credible attempts to operate a modern state. The Saudi and UAE proxies have never managed to put that together in the few scraps of territory that they control. For much of the war, especially after 2016, the Saudi and UAE proxies have spent more time negotiating with each other than they have with the Houthis. In January 2018, the Southern Transition Council stopped negotiating and went to war against Hadi’s internationally recognized government. Hundreds died in what is now remembered as the “Battle of Aden”. More negotiations did follow, but by the end of 2019, this conflict resulted in the Hadi government’s ejection from the only large Yemeni city it ever had control of. In the years since, intermittent fighting has usually been followed by deals intended to bring a unified government back to the south. But six years later, the STC faction is still the main power in Aden.
Power in Yemen’s non-Houthi regions has now curdled into regional fragments. Remember that as large as these fragments look on the map, outside of Aden there isn’t any real population density. The anti-Houthi factions mostly control big chunks of desert. I don’t doubt that many in the North would love to be rid of the Houthis. But we need to face the fact that the internationally recognized government has never provided a real alternative. The few fleeting victories the Gulf coalition has achieved, like that over Aden, are quickly squandered by infighting between different factions. This is the main reason for Gulf failure in Yemen. Despite all their wealth and power, the only alternative to the Houthis the Saudis and Emiratis are offering is a divided wasteland.
Insane Saudi leadership
The Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman we have today, affably traveling the world wasting his country’s money, is a much different animal from the guy we met in his first years of power. During the first Trump administration, no limits MBS was a lunatic.
In June 2017, he had to be restrained from invading Qatar, a small Gulf state that hosts one of the world’s largest US military bases. In November 2017, He kidnapped the Prime Minister of Lebanon and forced him to resign. That same month he attempted to go beyond the already ruinous blockade of Yemen and starve the country to death with a total ban on food and fuel imports. Starving tens of millions of people to death was too much for even Trump, who forced a reversal of the policy within a month.
In October of 2018, MBS finally went too far and used one of his consulates to murder Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi was a Washington Post columnist, and a personal friend, or at least acquaintance of many elite Washington, DC officials and journalists. It’s obscene that US media and government cared more about this one guy than they did about the tens of thousands that had been bombed and starved to death in Yemen, but that’s the world that we live in. The murder of this one guy had a larger impact on US perceptions of Saudi Arabia than 9-11 did.
MBS, and Saudi Arabia are much more calming influences today, more risk averse, with a much better sense of their own weaknesses. But in those crucial years, 2017 and 2018, when Saudi Arabia had a blank check from Donald Trump, and the Houthi-Saleh alliance was terminated, the anti-Houthi forces were led by a lunatic. Everybody could see it, which fueled the third major force in Saudi failure in Yemen.
Donald Trump
The third reason Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Yemen failed is Donald Trump, and how uniquely hated he was in US politics. Normally, and especially now, US foreign policy is fiercely, horrifically bipartisan.
It’s incredibly rare for there to be any serious pushback against whatever a US president wants to do abroad. We saw this with both Vietnam and Iraq. Two illegal and obviously idiotic wars were undertaken at great cost to the US, in the face of the advice of anybody who knew anything about these countries. It took years and piles of dead US soldiers for any serious steps out of those wars to be undertaken. And despite a complete turn of public and political opinion, we are still in Iraq today.
Yemen shouldn’t be the sort of thing that US politics cares about. US involvement was very important to the invasion, but it was very deniable, and relatively small. As far as I know, we have only lost a single US special forces soldier in a decade of fighting, and most of the money wasted was Saudi money. When the Obama administration soured on the Gulf invasion of Yemen, it was more because of their own lawyers and bleeding heart liberals than the small public pressure campaign that had already started.
But Donald Trump was different. Not just the Democratic party, but the entire bipartisan foreign policy establishment went to war against him. This meant that things that were traditionally off limits for public discussion became plausible weapons against the hated Trump. This meant we got a more powerful public discussion about Yemen than we have had about any other recent US conflict.
There are a handful of tiny nonprofits in Washington, DC dedicated to complaining about most of the evil stuff we do. Their great victories are usually on the order of convincing some low powered congressperson to spend an afternoon introducing protest legislation that never gets voted on, or even discussed. Donald Trump’s embrace of the Saudi war in Yemen created a very different situation.
At the time I found it inspiring. Multiple Congress people, including a tri-partisan set of powerful senators, Chris Murphy Bernie Sanders, and Mike Lee, made Yemen one of their signature issues. Year by year, Congressional votes against the war and Saudi weapons sales got closer and closer to success. The conflict in Yemen became the centerpiece of bipartisan advocacy against the Pentagon’s forever wars. In the end, Congressional opposition was never able to seriously impact US participation or funding of the war through legislation, but I believe it helped to convince the Saudis and Emiratis that their war against the Houthis was hopeless.
By July of 2018, the Saudi and Emirati proxy forces had briefly stopped fighting each other over Aden, and belatedly decided to try to capitalize on the death of Saleh 7 months earlier. The plan was to take the port of Hodeidah. This is the great what if, that DC Hawks and anti-Houthi Yemenis focus on. The invaders and southern forces had finally had some success moving up the coast. Hodeidah remains the Houthi movement’s main outlet to the outside world. If anti-Houthis and their supporters had been allowed to take it, many argue that surely the Houthis would have been quickly defeated!
I don’t buy it. Hodeidah isn’t just a lifeline for the Houthis it’s the main source of food for the majority of the Yemeni population. If the port had been taken by the invaders and their proxies, or more likely destroyed, the Houthis would have just moved their front lines back a bit. Their power would have been minorly impacted, but millions of Yemeni civilians could have starved to death. The UN and most outside analysts agreed that it wasn’t worth the risk.
And because everybody in Washingtona, DC hated Donald Trump, for once, sanity prevailed. Saudi Arabia helped sanity win by murdering Jamal Khashoggi in October of 2018. Congressional pressure led to US government pressure on the Saudis and Emiratis to call the offensive off. The Hodeidah offensive ended in November 2018, with a UN-brokered agreement over the use of the port that nobody ever honored.
The 2018 Hodeidah offensive is now seen as the last chance to defeat the Houthis, with good reason. Nothing since has come close. But even if the offensive succeeded, I don’t think that the desperately divided and disfunctional Gulf coalition would have been able to make any real headway in the Houthi’s North Yemeni heartlands.
BREAK BRRAK BRAKKKK
2019
2019 is the year the Gulf invasion of Yemen ended. The United Arab Emirates recognized this, and acted accordingly. It took Saudi Arabia another three years to fully get the mesaage.
The effectiveness of the UAE’s armed forces has been greatly exaggerated. They are small, and really not that smart. The chaos in Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia indicates the foolishness of relying on the UAE to run the region, the way the US has for over a decade now. But compared to the sad joke that is the Saudi military and foreign policy apparatus, the “Little Sparta” nickname that the UAE got from Trump’s defense secretary Jim Mattis makes a lot of sense. The UAE failed to make any progress against the Houthis after 2015, but as of 2019 they had won a lot in Yemen. Their money, backed up with actual UAE boots on the ground, which Saudi Arabia never had in the South, built up a dense network of friendly militias. The more powerful elements of the South didn’t agree on much, but they did agree on UAE sponsorship. The United Arab Emirates was happy to deal with the separate powers in each Yemeni port individually, creating a sort of old school Venice- type port-based maritime empire.
In March 2019, the US Congressional campaign against the war in Yemen reached its high point with the unprecedented passage of a War Powers Resolution requiring the removal of US forces from the conflict. Trump vetoed this resolution, one of the few vetoes of his presidency, but the manifest disapproval of the US Congress played a key role in emphasizing to the UAE just how unpopular their war was, not just with the US public, but with the US congresspeople the UAE relies on for protection. Three months later the UAE announced its withdrawal from the war. And why not, they had already won everything they wanted. UAE troops weren’t necessary to maintain relationships with the various southern militias and their ports. UAE money could do that, and it’s still flowing freely today.
This UAE withdrawal didn’t end the fighting, and it didn’t end the humanitarian crisis, but it made the hopelessness of the Saudi invasion apparent. Rather than limit the UAE-sponsored Southern separatists, UAE withdrawal emboldened them to complete their takeover of Aden in August 2019, kicking out the Saudi sponsored government entirely. Saudi Arabia was still bombing, but they had lost most influence on the ground in Yemen. At the time I was ecstatic. The US Congress had finally reasserted itself. The War Powers Resolution mechanism dated back to the 1970s, but it had never been used in so significant a way before. Had we finally turned the corner in the fight against forever wars? Were we in a new era, where the US Congress would rebel against crimes against humanity we were participating in? I believed it. I believed it until October of last year. What Gaza has made clear to me over the past year is no, we did not become a better country over Yemen. The US Congress just really didn’t like Donald Trump.
2019 also taught the Saudis that not even they could rely on Trump. On September 14th, 2019, half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production capacity went up in flames. The destruction was quickly corrected, but MBS’s silly little war in Yemen took 5% of world oil production offline for a day or two. The Houthis had been ineffectually lobbing missiles at Saudi Arabia since the war started, but this drone attack was something completely different. It was such a shocking step up in Houthi capabilities that many believe the Iranians may have carried it out directly and just had the Houthis claim credit.
Regardless, this attack was a watershed in Saudi foreign policy. For decades they had assumed that the US security umbrella kept their oil industry safe. After this shockingly effective attack, they looked to the US for revenge or at least reassurance, and Donald Trump… did nothing. It’s one of the best foreign policy moves he ever made.
For decades the Saudis had willingly partnered with the US to keep Iran a pariah. One of Saudi Arabia’s main delusions about the war in Yemen is that it is a proxy war against Iran. The September 2019 attack finally made it clear to them how dangerous such a war with Iran could be. They finally understood that the broader US-Iranian war they had been working towards for decades would destroy their oil industry and they shifted policy to avoid it. On the regional level Saudi Arabia started reaching out to Iran, a long process that eventually yielded the supposedly China mediated deal of March 2023. Saudi Arabia kept bombing Yemen until 2022, but from 2019 onward they became much more interested in talking to the Houthis. The problem is that the Houthis weren’t ready yet.
The 2015-2019 Gulf invasion of Yemen completely failed to dislodge the Houthis, but it may have managed to permanently break Yemen. In 2015 The Houthis were on the brink of conquering the whole country. The various now heavily armed militias of today, operating on their own southern turf, may have permanently barred that option. The durability of Yemen’s fragmentation has a lot to do with Gulf funding, but it also has to do with the war itself. Wars build their own economies. Wars create large classes of losers, but they also create a small class of winners, who become invested in the continuation of the war. Profiteering war lords are a factor among the Houthis, and across the South. As one example, Yemen’s third city, Taiz, has been divided between the Houthis and multiple Southern factions since 2016. Large scale fighting does occasionally crop up, but all sides of the war seem to be content to sit back and profit off of lucrative smuggling and extortion opportunities.
This is of course horrible for the population of Taiz, and the rest of Yemen, which has to deal with similar dynamics. It’s no doubt frustrating for some of the fighters as well, but their leaders are getting rich off of division, so the war has taken on a life of its own, that makes any real military victory, much, much harder. The Houthis learned this the hard way between 2019 and 2022, when they tried and failed to capitalize on the collapse of the Gulf invasion. The offensive they launched did eventually change the front lines meaningfully, but it did so at immense cost, and with nowhere near the conclusive power that the Houthis had hoped.
Before we move on to the Biden era, it’s important to notice the result of four years of Trump policy. It’s true that Saudi Arabia is not an independent country, and it will always be restrained by US squeamishness. But for four years Trump gave MBS almost completely free reign in Yemen. And in 2020 Saudi Arabia looked weaker, in Yemen and regionally, than it did at the beginning of the Trump period. Maximum pressure on the Houthis has been tried and it has failed.
2020-2022
By 2020 Marib was almost the only part of Yemen that the Saudi proxy government had any control over. Marib is at the edge of the desert, and has a majority Sunni population, making it much easier to protect with a tribesman/Saudi air force combo. Over the course of the war, it has been claimed that the previously sparsely populated province has become home to a million+ internally displaced refugees.
Unfortunately for those refugees, Marib is also the heart of Yemen’s oil industry. If the Houthis could take Marib, they would not just reduce Yemen’s vulnerability to Saudi blockade, they would have knocked one of the Gulf proxy government’s last legs out from under it.
So that’s what the Houthis have tried to do, for ten bloody years. There had been attacks on Marib from the beginning of the war, but before 2020 it was sometimes seen as a place of relative calm. In 2020, it became the Houthis main focus, just as the country was falling into a more war-torn version of the Covid crisis experienced everywhere else. The Marib offensive was a horrific meat grinder for both the Houthis and Marib’s defenders. But it might have ended the war, by showing both sides that they had more to lose than to be gained by further fighting.
10s of thousands died in this battle between 2020 and 2022. Most report that these deaths were disproportionately Houthi, with indoctrinated and perhaps coerced soldiers leading to an even more disproportionate body count than is usual for attacking forces. But by October and November of 2021, the Houthis seemed to be on the cusp of reaching their goal. Then a number of things happened rather quickly.
The Saudis and the Emiratis stepped up their efforts to keep the Houthis from winning the war. A renewal of heavy airstrikes, combined with the re-deployment of the most impressive of the UAE proxy forces, didn’t just stop the Houthis horrifically costly advance, it partially reversed it. In the first months of 2022, UAE sponsored militias successfully pushed the Houthis out of some of their 2021 winnings.
Enraged to find themselves back where they were in 2020, after horrific losses, the Houthis decided to demonstrate the stepped up missile and drone capacities they had developed with Iranian help.
In January 2022, the Houthis managed to strike Abu Dhabi in the UAE. In March they hit an oil facility in Jeddah Saudi Arabia, during an Fomula 1 car race. That absurd little detail, illustrates the new dynamic that ended the war. The Houthis, even today, are incapable of striking Gulf cities with any real volume. But that doesn’t matter, because the reality of the Gulf cities os so fragile. Both countries, and recently Saudi Arabia especially, have marketed themselves as ultra-luxury destinations for Tourism and business. You can’t have missiles falling on your car races if you want to market yourself to oligarchs! And that simple truth ended the war.
In 2022 The Houthis established the principle that if the Gulf bombs Yemen, Yemen can bomb back. And that ended the war, almost immediately. Iran should get the Nobel peace Prize for giving the Yemenis this technology.
Nothing is solved of course. The country is still divided, and low level fighting continues. But for a couple years at least, the Houthis have been too exhausted to push further into the South, and the Gulf air force of the Southern separatists has been too afraid to bomb the North.
April 2022’s UN brokered truce was renewed twice, and expired in October of 2022. But fighting did not restart. Both sides recognized that they had too little to gain. This result is satisfying to no one, but that’s how wars often end.
The Saudis are so uninterested in continuing the fight, that now that the US is bombing the Houthis, the Saudis are counseling restraint and caution. Even though they had desperately wanted US intervention in the 2010s.
The war wasn’t the only thing the Saudis gave up on in Yemen two years ago. On April 7th, 2022, in the 11th year of his two year term, Saudi Arabia finally made fake president Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi resign. It was difficult to let go of the scraps of international legitimacy he still represented, but the invasion had failed, and Hadi’s forces no longer controlled much of Yemen’s small anti-Houthi territory anyway.
Hadi was replaced by an eight-man Presidential Leadership Council. This was a vast improvement over Hadi, including representatives of most of the anti-Houthi forces that mattered on the ground. I would love to give more detail on the fascinatingly diverse personalities of the PLC, but this video is long enough already.
PLC figures range from the heads of UAE sponsored militias that hold significant territory, like the Giants Brigades and the Southern Transition Council, to remnants of the old regime like Tariq Saleh, the nephew of the old dictator, who holds an enclave on the Southwestern coast. There was a lot of hope invested in this council, but two years later, that hope has faded. For one thing, despite being more representative than the Hadi regime, it has even less democratic legitimacy. The council was hand picked in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh, was unveiled in Riyadh, and holds its less and less frequent meetings in Riyadh. Despite this, the situation in the South has continued to get worse for Saudi Arabia, because members of the Presidential Leadership Council continue to take territory from each other.
And once again, it’s the UAE that seems to be the winner in this infighting, just as the UAE seems to have been winning throughout this war. Yemen’s anti-Houthi rebels control very little of the interior of the country, but they do control many of Yemen’s ports. And ports are what the UAE’s maritime neo-empire has always been interested in.
Saudi Arabia has one move left, and it’s a doozy. It would be a repeat of a move they made at the end of Yemen’s last civil war in the 1960s. Having lost the war, they can simply switch sides and start working with the Houthis. This would completely turn the tables on their crappy UAE allies, which would have a real poetry to it. It could even bring real peace and stability to Yemen, though at great cost to the South.
It would be an incredibly risky move though, for both Saudi Arabia and the world. You know who else teamed up with the Houthis, after waging an ineffectual war against them that made the Houthis more powerful? Ali Abdullah Saleh. An alliance with the Houthis could work out just as badly for the Saudis as it did for him.
The Houthis are terrifyingly effective. 20 years ago they were living in caves, losing tribal negotiations. In 2024, they have spent the past six months humiliating the US Navy, likely the most powerful military force humanity has ever constructed.
I consider myself a defender of US empire, and the current order, even if I’m currently appalled by our ongoing genocide in Gaza. I’m also a student of history, so I am constantly looking out for that unheralded threat that comes screaming out of the wasteland, like the 7th century Arabs, or the 13th century Mongols, to overthrow complacent societies. I have been looking for that threat for decades, and the Houthis are the only group I have seen that make me legitimately worried.
I am not saying it’s likely that these guys will be in control of Islam’s two holy cities by the 2040s, but they are much more likely candidates than the Saudi royal family that controls them today. Our cultivation of the weakest possible leaders in the oil-rich Arab world, combined with our merciless bombing and occasional genocide campaigns on the Gulf monarchies borders have produced a truly toxic mix of justified anger, and virulent antisemitism.
I don’t use the term antisemitism lightly. What the US colony of Israel has done and is doing in the Middle East is terrible, and policing the language of Arabs as they are being bombed to death has always struck me as pretty ridiculous. But the Houthis put their antisemitism on their fucking flag.
My contrarian nature compels me to point out that the Houthis are less antisemetic than the government of Israel. The Houthis at least acknowledge that Israel and the Jewish people are two different things, which Israel does not. But that’s beside the point. Outside of Ukraine, the Houthis are probably the most impressive new military organization in the world right now and they are marching under a banner of hatred. And unlike the Palestinians or the Lebanese, the Houthis attacked Israel before Israel attacked the Houthis. The Houthis chose antisemitism as a brand to organize around, it wasn’t forced on them.
I will confess to being impressed with the Houthis in the past. They are an indigenous Yemeni resistance movement that beat an outside invasion. Also, it was fun to see the Saudi architects of 9-11 get humiliated. But now that the war is over, and the Houthis are successfully building their brand abroad, it’s time to nip this thing in the bud.
It’s clear that military force is useless against the Houthis. The strategy of attempting to crush them has taken them from the caves of Northern Yemen to negotiating from a position of strength with the richest countries in the world. What we need now is a strategy of alternatives. Supporting a secular, modern Arab democracy like Tunisia would have been nice, but we let that slowly die after ten years of doing nothing to support it. In the next round of regional discord, let’s identify and support those democratic alternatives instead of supporting regional partners that are so bad (the gulf monarchies) that it makes radical hate mongers like the Houthis look more legitimate by comparison.
The most important weapon against the Houthis is peace. The year and a half between April 2022 and October 7th, 2023 is commonly recognized as one of the most dangerous periods in the Houthi movement’s history. The fighting was over, and without their messianic mission against Saudi imperialism, governance all of a sudden got very hard. They were looking shaky until Israel gave them a new mission.
The Houthis did Yemen a great service by defeating the Saudis and Emiratis. But over the past year they have demonstrated that they care more about making themselves look cool than they do about the Yemeni people. Their crusade against red sea shipping is far more likely to destroy Egypt than it is to slow down Israel at all. Even if you believe that it is heroic to fight against Israel’s genocide the way the Houthis are, it’s a tremendous burden to put on the Yemeni people that have just survived a decade of war. And the Yemeni people were never asked.
Is it really worth it to make protests as pointless as the Houthis have been making? On July 19th, 2024 the Houthis gleefully reported that they had sent a drone all the way to Tel Aviv, and managed to kill a single Israeli citizen. The next day Israel destroyed an entire oil refinery, unleashing great suffering on the Yemeni people.
This refinery was in the Hodiedah port that the UN and the US Congress had protected from the Saudis back in 2018. It was true back then, and true today, that any interruption to the flow of petroleum into Yemen would have horrific humanitarian costs. And the Houthis invited the Israeli attack, without saving a single Palestinian life. Unlike Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, the Israeli airstrikes on Yemen aren’t even illegal. They may be cruel and disproportionate, but they are self-defense. Yemen’s Houthi government fired first.
Regardless, Israel’s Gaza genocide supercharged the Houthis. It gave them a mission that not only made them more popular than ever across Yemen, it made them heroes across the Arab world, and the global South In general. The US and Israel’s laughably ineffective attempts to bomb the Red Sea blockade open have only n mmadded to Houthi prestige. The first step to defeating the Houthis is taking their shiny new cause away from them. We need a ceasefire in Gaza.
Recall that the Houthis failed to take Marib, after two bloody years of trying. Without the added recruits and local and international legitimacy that Israel’s genocide is giving them, the Houthis have probably hit their natural limit. If the anti-Houthi rebels can stop fighting each other and present a United front for like, a year, real negotiations might be possible. Ending Gulf management of Yemen’s opposition, while preserving the Gulf funding, is probably a necessary first step to a unified anti-Houthi front. Even with US bombs raining down on it, As of this writing Yemen is more peaceful than it has been in a decade. We need to build on that.
What we really don’t need is a broader US and Israeli war against Iran. Such a war is likely to lead to millions of deaths, a new and angrier government in Tehran, and it might just result in an Israel that directly borders enlarged and enraged Turkish and Houthi empires.
Or perhaps I’m overemphasizing Yemen’s importance, because I’ve been looking at it for too long. Regardless, this tour of Yemen’s history should make it clear that you do not want to mess with Yemen. Yemen has seen off empire after empire, for over a thousand years. If I were running the world, or the region, I would be working as hard as I possibly could to leave Yemen alone.