Along with the dozens of airstrikes Saudi Arabia has launched into Yemen since the start of its so-called “Operation Decisive Storm” a week ago, it also is delivering some very clear political messages. Unfortunately, most of them have very little to do with Yemen itself.
Saudi Arabia and the dozen or so regional states that comprise the Sunni Arab coalition are sending a clear message to Iran that its interference in the internal affairs of Arab states will no longer be tolerated. Of course, no Iranians are being targeted by these air strikes, which ostensibly are meant to degrade the military capability of the rebellious Houthi militia that has ousted Yemen’s legitimate government, and force the Houthis to the negotiating table. It is not entirely clear to what extent Tehran is even responsible for the destabilizing actions of the Houthis, which are a Zaydi Shia militia from Yemen’s north. The Houthis have swept through the country with breathtaking ease in recent months, seizing the capital in September 2014, holding the country’s president under house arrest, and continuing southward, occupying major cities as the go. There is no doubt that Tehran has provided support to the Houthis: financial and political, to be sure, as well as military aid, although the Houthis have acquired an enormous stock of military-grade weapons on their own as they have seized and systematically looted Yemeni army bases. But it would be wrong to assert that Iran has engineered the Houthi rebellion, a homegrown phenomenon with a long-standing set of political and economic grievances. Tehran has certainly exploited the situation to its own advantage, as it does around the world when it spies Shia brethren seemingly beleaguered by their host governments, but there is a big difference between providing support for the rebellion and orchestrating it. However, the Saudis have chosen to ignore this in their zeal to purge Yemen of any Iranian influence.
The Saudis also are delivering a message to Washington, historically the guarantor of Gulf security but now a much-less trusted ally for a variety of reasons, including U.S. support for the popular revolt in Egypt that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The ease with which the United States abandoned a long-time ally unnerved the Saudi royal family, which began to wonder if Washington would pull the rug out from under it just as easily. Of course, at the moment, the biggest point of neuralgia is the ongoing negotiations over the future of Iran’s nuclear program, which Saudi Arabia (and most of its Gulf neighbors) see as a deeply flawed process that will enable Tehran to re-assert its hegemony in the region, courtesy of the United States.
The Saudis also are messaging their own citizens, and Arab publics more generally, regarding Riyadh’s determination to assume the mantle of leadership in defense of its national interests, and those of its neighbors. The new Saudi monarch, King Salman bin Abdel Aziz, and his defense minister, Mohammed bin Salman – who also happens to be his youngest son – clearly want to re-assert the kingdom’s role as the pre-eminent Arab power, able and ready to tame a region still convulsed by the after-effects of the Arab Awakening.
At the same time, there is a message to the Yemeni people, though it is fundamentally one of disregard for their safety and well-being. This message has not been obscured by the high-minded rhetoric the Saudis employ about restoring Yemen’s legitimate government to power and ensuring “safety and security.” How exactly these two goals are achieved by daily bombing sorties is anyone’s guess and, thus far, they seem to have done little to slow the inexorable march of the Houthis into southern Yemen. In fact, as civilian casualties mount, the bombing campaign begins to look increasingly like a colossal miscalculation, which Washington might have counseled Riyadh against from the outset, if the United States hadn’t stepped back and let the Arab states run this show themselves.
Instead, Washington has chosen to back the Saudi play in Yemen, providing logistical and intelligence support. In doing so, the Obama administration has sent a message of its own regarding how it views Yemen – purely through the prism of counterterrorism and security. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said as much a week ago, when he asserted that, “the measure of U.S. policy should not be graded against the success or the stability of the Yemeni government,” maintaining that is a “separate enterprise” from U.S. counterterrorism cooperation with the Yemeni government, which the administration continues to insist represents a successful model.
In a single, breathtaking sentence, Earnest revealed the massive failure of the administration to understand a fundamental principle of effective foreign policy: All elements of U.S. power – political, economic, development, and security – must be brought to bear in equal measure in countries like Yemen, or surely, the center will collapse and the extremes will be strengthened. For at least the last half-dozen years, Washington’s principal preoccupation in Yemen has been to prevent the al Qaeda franchise there, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, from mounting attacks against the United States or its interests. As it pursued this single-minded effort, Washington became an eager acolyte for a long-winded, process-driven, U.N.-led political transition that ultimately failed to address the widespread discontent of many Yemenis, who were led to believe their country was moving toward a more inclusive, responsive style of government. In the end, however, what the Yemenis got was more of the status quo ante, as power was transferred from one segment of the old guard to another.
The Houthis, in fact, drew much of their legitimacy as a political movement by articulating this deep frustration, which cut across sectarian lines. They then opted to betray this popular support by executing a coup d’etat and profoundly destabilizing a country that seems to forever teeter on the brink of collapse. Persuading the Houthis to give up their grandiose scheme of controlling Yemen and negotiating a political rather than military outcome to this crisis is a noble goal. Trying to achieve this goal via a sustained air campaign over Yemen’s cities would appear to be sheer folly and, in its own right, an invitation to greater regional instability.
It is time for the bombs to stop falling and for every country with influence in Yemen – including Iran – to bring the parties to this conflict to the table. Washington must play a constructive role in this process, and not pretend that this is an issue for regional players to resolve on their own. Nor can the United States persist with the misguided notion that its national security interests in Yemen can be pursued along a track distinct from the country’s political and economic stability.
