I once had a grudging fascination with the scrappiness of the horrendous Houthis. Their idea of military attire is plastic sandals, mismatched camo, a hoisted Kalashnikov, and a right cheek ballooning with unchewed khat. One could imagine them rappelling up the sides of boats with scimitars in their teeth, stealthy merchants of chaos from what historian Simon Sebag Montefiore calls a “dagger-and-iPhone parastate.” Their DNA is forged from fundamentalist fury in the Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen, against its gleaming, fat-cat Saudi neighbor (think South Central LA vs. Beverly Hills).
But with last weekend’s ferocious attacks on Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid airport in which at least 13 people were killed and 300 more wounded, the Houthis can claim to be lo-fi underdogs no more. They now have access to the rapidly changing modern technology of war – cheap drones and ballistic and cruise missiles fitted with warheads that can change direction during flight and dodge Patriot interceptors. Obtained through a sophisticated combination of direct smuggling from Iran, illicit global gray markets, and an expanding domestic assembly infrastructure built on captured military stockpiles, their state-of-the-art lethality makes them a next-level threat in the annals of terror.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman probably never dreamed that the ragtag Houthis would become such a fearsome thorn in his side. In 2015, just two months after being named to his first government post as Defense Minister, the swaggering 29-year-old MBS launched Operation Decisive Storm to push back the marauding Houthis, who’d seized Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, from its Saudi-backed government. MBS touted that it would all be over in weeks (remind you of anything?) but, backed by Iran, the Houthis’ wicked military improv dragged the Saudis into a bloody quagmire. One catastrophe in the Saudis’ protracted bombing of Yemen was the August 2018 obliteration of a Yemeni school bus, which killed 40 children. The temporary patched-up peace in 2022 was really a Saudi capitulation. The Houthis may be short of shiny combat boots, but they have the deadly resolve in the long game for asymmetric war.
Icarus Complex
It’s striking how testosterone-fueled hubris has become a defining feature of our troubled times. Hubris is why Trump, engorged with his success in Venezuela, decided to bomb Iran. Hubris is why Netanyahu, high-fiving the success of Mossad’s exploding pagers in Lebanon, urged Trump that the time was right to unload Operation Epic Fury. (As the Middle East specialist Karim Sadjadpour pointed out to me, Israel somehow believed that their ability to assassinate terrorist leaders in their bedrooms meant they could choose Iran’s next leader.) Hubris is why the royal billionaire MBS miscalculated the endurance of the insolent, impoverished Houthi rebels.
The airport attack could not have come at a worse moment for Saudi Arabia with its galloping budget deficit. It took place just as all the sovereign wealth fund succubi are gearing up to land their private planes in Riyadh for the annual, big swinging dealfest also known as Davos in the Desert. And in just three weeks, the kingdom is hosting the WWE Crown Jewel cage match at Riyadh Season stadium, when the winner will be sheathed in a championship belt bedazzled with 50-carat diamonds.
With Saudi Arabia’s dissidents locked up out of sight and religious police banished behind their beards, the kingdom is supposed to be a friction-free refuge from the rest of the roiling Middle East. All eyes are supposed to be on Vision 2030, the grandmaster plan to make the kingdom slosh with global money from sources other than oil, and multi-billion dollar preparations to host the make-or-break, reputation-maxxing 2034 World Cup. (As much as one detests the glam-washing of Saudi human rights violations, at least MBS has made efforts to liberalize his country, while the Houthis want to return Yemen to the cruel darkness of the Middle Ages.)
History shows that when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. Both the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors demonstrate that massive pain can be sustained when there is no permitted political challenge. Plus they live by a stopped clock. Trump’s Iran-negotiation duo Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have never understood that Iran’s political culture is based on 7th-century grievances and no Memo of Understanding will make them forget about the assassination of their Supreme Leader seven and a half months ago.
Game of Thrones
Responding to the number of CEOs who just bailed from the World Petroleum Congress in Riyadh, Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said on Monday. “The word fear in the Saudi dictionary does not exist,” while behind the scenes, a rattled MBS is being bundled between heavily guarded palaces with bunkers, hoping that his friend Donald Trump will come to Saudi’s aid. After all, the gleam of Saudi gold was alluring enough for Trump to help MBS’s reputation rehab after he ordered the 2018 bone-saw dismemberment of kingdom critic and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. When an ABC News reporter raised the atrocity with MBS in the Oval Office last year, Trump pandered, “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking him a question like that.” But that was then, before Saudi Arabia’s initial refusal to grant Washington’s request to use its bases and airspace to keep ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz. And before Trump had internalized his pre-midterms collapse in the polls, much of which can be attributed to the sky-high gas prices that have come with the Iran war.
Trump, who always wanted to be king, is discovering that, unlike MBS, who will soon be Saudi Arabia’s eighth monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques until he dies, there are benefits to being a term-limited president. Having smashed up the Middle East, as did G.W. Bush before him, Trump, unlike the U.S., has a gold fleece-lined exit strategy from Iran.
As always completely on point. Tina you always make me at least chuckle when I read your excellent pieces even if the subject is horrific and terrifying. The West will never learn its lesson in the Middle East. Maureen Dowd had a great line in one of her pieces years ago when we invaded Iraq. “You’d think someone would have watched Lawrence of Arabia before they decided to invade.” Maybe not an exact quote but close enough.
These guys are so afraid of seeming weak that they simply cannot comprehend that honey is more effective than vinegar in getting people to do what you want. If they had just deployed more carrots and fewer sticks their lives would be so much better right now. Unfortunately for these particular actors it may be too late. They have stoked the banks of hatred and are now stuck with the resulting conflagration. The big problem is that the rest of us are stuck with the conflagration too. A pox on them all.