The Saudi’s war of paranoia
WHY should Americans care about Yemen? Average Americans probably couldn’t find this remote southwestern corner of Arabia on a map. But it’s time for them to learn. Yemen’s civil war concerns Americans because their close but awkward ally, Saudi Arabia, has persuaded them to take part – and, alongside that brutal war, there’s another the US initiated and has no intention of ending anytime soon.
How can the United States ensure the former, Saudi Arabia’s war of choice, doesn’t interfere with the latter? The answer could be to follow the 1953 deathbed advice of King Abdul Aziz, known as Ibn Saud, who supposedly said, “Never let Yemen be united.” Yemen is a problem that probably won’t be solved until it is dissolved.
Paranoia has long been the basis of Saudi policymaking on Yemen. It used to be paranoia about the Yemenis themselves; now it’s about Iranians. Yemen’s Houthi rebels are variously “Iranian-supported”, “Iranian-backed”, or “Iranianinfluenced”. The last is my preferred description since it clarifies that, while they model themselves after Lebanon’s Hezbollah and have adopted the slogan “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, power to Islam”. they ultimately want to be masters of their own fates.
It’s clear the Houthis are a direct threat to the internationally recognised (and Saudi-allied) Yemeni government of President Abdu Rabbo Mansour Hadi. But there is good reason to doubt these rebels pose a direct threat to Riyadh, outside the confines of Saudi paranoia.
Nonetheless, as an apparent quid pro quo for tolerating Washington’s nuclear rapprochement with Tehran, Riyadh has demanded US support for the Saudi-led coalition fighting to re-establish in Sanaa the rule of Hadi.
Fear, if not quite paranoia, could also describe official Washington’s attitude towards Yemen. Its rocky hillsides have been the training areas for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which helped prepare the 2009 Northwest Airlines “underwear” bomber and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris. A terrorist incident in the US with a Yemeni address on it is a realistic possibility, and US officials who know it are prepared to go far to prevent it from being realised. A successful attack on a US naval ship similar to the suicide speedboat that crippled the USS Cole in Aden harbour in 2000, they feel, would be almost as bad.
Until war broke out with the Houthis last year, US Special Forces operated out of the Anad Air Base just north of Aden. Now US operations are conducted from Djibouti, on the other side of the Red Sea, in Africa. As before, drones are a major part of the effort. There are also, semiclandestinely, several dozen US special operations forces on the ground.
There’s a crucial difference in Saudi and US interests that quickly becomes apparent. Whereas Riyadh’s thinking is dominated by Iran’s support for the Houthi rebels, Washington’s anxieties focus on the south, the territory once known as the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.
The southern expanse of Yemen from the Bab el-Mandeb strait to the border with Oman has technically been liberated by the Saudi-led Arab coalition. In reality, forces of the United Arab Emirates did most of the heavy lifting and now have control over the port city of Aden as well as Mukalla farther east. But AQAP continues to find sanctuary in the large stretches of the south where the Yemeni government, and its Arab allies, struggles to maintain control. Fighters claiming allegiance to the Islamic State are also active there.
Washington’s and Riyadh’s separate wars are bound together in a manner not necessarily obvious to outsiders. The Royal Saudi Air Force and the US Air Force are sharing airspace and adjoining, even overlapping, battle space. The two countries have to cooperate and therefore tolerate the behaviour of the other party.
But that tolerance is under strain. Even before the horrendous October 8 bombing of a funeral gathering in Sanaa in which more than 140 were killed and several hundred injured, US concern for Saudi tactics had meant reduced levels of cooperation. Inflight refuelling was curtailed, meaning that Saudi F-15s could not loiter in Yemeni airspace, waiting for targets to present themselves. And cooperation was reduced on “targeting” – the curious technical word meaning what size of bomb to drop, from what height, from what direction, and even at what time of day, the latter so as to reduce “collateral damage” or, more accurately, civilian casualties.
The bombing of a funeral two weeks ago was both a humanitarian catastrophe and a tactical disaster for the overall strategy of the anti-Houthi war. Even though the target was a Yemeni politician allied to the Houthis, bombing such a gathering was contrary to the ethics of the US military. The Saudis only admitted to “coalition aircraft” being involved, a phrasing that suggests the unfortunate reality that they were US-supplied F-15s, carrying US-made munitions. Washington’s power centres – the White House, Congress, and the media – screamed in horror. The blame was spun onto overexcited anti-Houthi agents in Sanaa.
The awfulness of the wakecum-mass-explosive-cremation was overtaken in the news cycle only when the Houthis responded by launch- ing two, perhaps three, unsuccessful missile attacks on the destroyer USS Mason in the Red Sea. The US retaliated by launching missile strikes, pulverising Houthi coastal radar facilities but caused zero collateral damage.
A three-day ceasefire is supposed to come into effect to give a chance for diplomacy by UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed of Mauritania. Yemen is on the cusp of a humanitarian crisis. It is probably too much to expect the Houthis and their supporters to lay down arms. Previous ceasefires have collapsed after Saudi Arabia detected alleged infringements and relaunched airstrikes.
The US strategy should be to maintain a ceasefire that could be brokered into a powersharing arrangement in the north. Hadi, Washington’s and Saudi Arabia’s man, controls from his Riyadh hotel suite the majority of Yemen territory. Unfortunately that land is the empty part of Yemen, with perhaps a population of only 3 million. The Houthi-Saleh alliance controls much less of the ground, but the mountainous part is militarily defensible.
The partition of Yemen should have a clear logic for all sides. The south wants it. Hadi himself may prefer it. The local foreign power in the south, the UAE, is also said to think it is the best option. Even Iran may not oppose it. It may depend on whether Saudi Arabia and, more particularly, its defence minister and deputy crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, can be convinced of the wisdom of his grandfather’s words.
Barring another outrage in Yemen with civilian casualties or a terrorist attack in the United States, Washington’s efforts over the next few months of political transition at home are likely to be limited. But the problem of Yemen, or of the two Yemens, will be waiting for the next US president.