‘Black Hawk Down’ For Biden in the Red Sea

      by Daniel McAdams | Jan 26, 2024

 

The breaking news that Ansar Allah (Houthi) fighters have fired on the USS Carney in the Red Sea today (Friday, 26 Jan.) underscores the shocking failure of the Biden Administration, which initiated airstrikes on the Houthis this month with no plan for “victory” beyond hoping that the mere presence of US warships would intimidate them into surrendering.

Even a junior Pentagon or State Department analyst could have advised the Administration that, based on everything we understand about the Houthis and their successful defeat of Saudi Arabia (and, by proxy, DC), lobbing a few missiles in their general direction was not going to result in an ocean of white flags raising over Aden.

In other words, it was the kind of doomed operation that, had cooler (i.e. non-political) Pentagon heads prevailed, would never in a million years have been launched. There was simply no possibility of success and 100 percent probability of failure.

How did it all start? In response to the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza (codified as “potential genocide” in today’s International Court for Justice ruling), Ansar Allah announced last month that they would not allow international shipping to service any commerce to or from Israeli ports. They judged the killing of more than 25,000 Palestinian civilians to be a “genocide” and cited obligations under international law to take steps to end the killing.

Whatever one’s view on the legality of the Houthi decision to interdict Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, the fact is by virtue of their unique geography they have the ability to do so. It is also a fact that the Houthis did NOT explicitly target US or US-flagged shipping unless it was headed to or from Israeli ports.

In short, it was not our fight. Until Biden made it our fight.

On January 11th, Biden announced that he was ordering the US military to launch airstrikes against Yemen, but very soon it became clear that far from being intimidated into surrender, Biden’s move was just what the Houthis wanted: a David’s slingshot chance at Goliath.

As it turns out, the Bidens were a Goliath intent on sacrificing the US standing in the world, military deterrence, US economy, and even US servicemembers in its blind support of Israel.

And, as any of these junior analysts (or seasoned analysts) could have predicted, the hits just keep coming for Biden.

Yesterday, the US Navy attempted to escort two Maersk tankers – the Maersk Detroit and the Maersk Chesapeake – through the Red Sea loaded with weapons for Israel. This after nine rounds of US airstrikes on the Houthis. The US show of force backfired into an unprecedented and “Black Hawk Down” kind of moment where after several missiles were launched the Maersk lines reversed course followed by the US Naval warships. It was a massive defeat for the notion of US military superiority – but don’t hold your breath for it to be reported in the mainstream media.

So today the Houthis again fired on US military ships in the Red Sea and have again scored a massive success for “the resistance,” which is a truly global movementagainst the albatross that the Biden Administration has taken on its shoulder.

Here is the main point: an ill-advised US policy of airstrikes against the Houthis has been an enormous gift to them while in no way diminishing their ability to fulfil their mission. What will you do next, Joe Biden? They are immune to your bombs. They have no military-industrial-complex. They just shoot your ships. Are you going to launch a ground invasion? In an election year? Dead Americans in Yemen for Israel? Really?

Even the most comatose US Members and Senators are starting to wake up to the fact that Joe Biden – who seems unable to even speak English – is taking the country to war without any authorization.

Attacks against Biden’s forces in Iraq, Syria, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean will escalate. And he is backed into a corner. What’s next?

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/black-hawk-down-for-biden-in-the-red-sea/

 

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The US-led operation against Yemen's Houthis has exposed a serious gap in the UK Navy's missile capabilities, as per the Telegraph. Ex-UK MP Matthew Gordon-Banks sat down with Sputnik to discuss the issue.

Starting January 12, the US and its allies have carried out several rounds of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. However, it turned out that none of the Royal Navy’s warships can fire missiles at targets on land, forcing the UK to scramble Royal Air Force jets based 1,500 miles away to conduct the mission. Eventually, the US had to carry out most of the strikes on Houthi targets.

While American destroyers can fire Tomahawk missiles, the UK military vessels mostly used Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which were subsequently retired in 2023. As per the Telegraph, the Norwegian-made Naval Strike Missile, which is capable of hitting land targets, "has only been installed on one vessel so far as part of a trial and has yet to be fired."

 

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240128/ex-mp-uk-navys-lack-of-missiles-shows-anti-houthi-op-was-knee-jerk-reaction-1116452910.html

 

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The State of Israel can butcher thousands of innocents but New Zealand would not lift a finger to provide support to its victims. IDF soldiers can gun down old men and women waving white flags, shell lines of refugees queuing for aid and deprive hospitals of power and medicine – and all New Zealand does is a collective shrug. When, however, Yemen’s Houthis disrupt the passage of frozen meat, pizza bases and iPhones through the Red Sea, suddenly New Zealand goes on the warpath. We have declared war on Ansar Allah (the Houthis) and sent a strike force of six men and a dinghy to join Operation Prosperity Guardian, led by the USA.

I think New Zealand’s moral compass is pointing somewhere just south of Hell, while the Houthis, along with South Africa, in their own distinct ways, have become champions for human decency as they confront the genocidal state of Israel and its powerful enablers.

“New Zealand and other nations are suffering from the problems with the Red Sea and the inability to take cargo ships through there – and that is adding a lot of cost… that is affecting every New Zealander,” says Minister of Defence Judith Collins.

Collins had the chutzpah, the incredible cheek, to say she was concerned the Houthi’s actions were impacting people who depended on food imports. Sorry, Judith, that is outrageous hypocrisy at a time when the UN says 500,000 Gazans have already entered the famine stage of food deprivation.

The massive empathy gap between our government and the Houthis when it comes to the suffering of Gaza is simple. The Houthi have direct experience of a genocidal siege that, along with military strikes and disease, killed 400,000 people (please absorb that number) – the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet from 2015 until recently. Saudi Arabia, supported by US and British intelligence, weapons and bombs, sought to control Yemen and inflict collective punishment on its people. During those years, according to the UN, hundreds of thousands suffered from cholera – a fate that awaits Gazans if Judith Collins and her ilk get their way.

The Yemeni – who rallied in the streets in their millions this month to defy the UK and USA – have empathy born of suffering. They have humanity; our government does not. Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, a spokesperson for Ansar Allah (the Houthis), says their goal is simple: stop the genocide and get fuel, food and medicine into Gaza.

“We cannot allow these crimes to be repeated,” Al-Bukhaiti told Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal this week. He went on to say: “Our war is a war of morality.” Interesting turn of phrase. People ignorant of history and geopolitics, like our own defence minister, can write the Houthis off as “pirates”. I don’t. Nor do people like the great American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein who said this week:

“As a Jew I would have respected any government, any people in the world during the Nazi Holocaust who had done what the Houthis are doing.”

Finkelstein went on to say that what the Houthis have signalled is that there will be no business as usual in the shipping lanes while the US and Israel commit genocide in Gaza. That is a moral stance if I ever heard one. He reminded us that “No Business As Usual” was one of the slogans of the Vietnam War peace movement.

“No Justice, No Peace” was another slogan that echoed a similar sentiment – it first appeared in the USA in the 1980s in response to pervasive violence and discrimination against African Americans. Here in Aotearoa, “Ka whawhai tonu matou, ake, ake, ake” (We will fight on, for ever and ever and ever) originally a riposte to a call to surrender to the British and settler colonial forces at the battle of Ōrākau, was adopted by activists in recent decades as a challenge to the State to address injustice or face Maori resistance.

At Ōrākau, our white forces slaughtered Maori women and men as they attempted to flee – bayoneting the already-wounded as they lay defenceless, which I think helps partially explain the powerful speeches of solidarity I heard in Civic Square Wellington this week delivered by Maori in solidarity with Palestine. Like the Yemeni, like the Vietnamese, like the Palestinians, like the Aborigines, like African and Native Americans and others like we of Irish descent, Maori know all too well what siege, slaughter and famine mean.

We were also very disruptive during our confrontation with the New Zealand state when we opposed sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa. In 1981 we had a National Government fighting for the rights of both white supremacists and Kiwis who loved rugby but lacked human empathy when it came to black people. Now in 2024 we again have a National Government, again indifferent to the suffering of people of darker skin, a coalition government fighting for Jewish Supremacists (as the Zionists state is described by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem).

Today the moral compass points to South Africa and to Yemen. One route is navigated by the legal scholars of South Africa; the other, more immediate and muscular, by the Houthi who know all about the violence the powerful can inflict on them but chose to stand with the oppressed, not the oppressors.

I’ll give the last word to Ansar Allah’s Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, because it’s so rare to hear these people unmediated by some US general or neo-conservative commentator:

“We know the story of David whose slingshot defeated Goliath. We don’t fear the weapons of the enemy. We believe a victory for Yemen will be a victory for morality and the highest values. We believe that a victory on the awareness front is more important than a military one – because the main cause of suffering from wars around the world is due to a lack of awareness.

We know there are a lot of good people around the world – if they found out the truth, their positions would change.”

 

https://johnmenadue.com/houthis-save-the-world/

 

YES THE HOUTHIS SAVED MORALITY FROM THE WESTERN WORLD... MEANWHILE:

 

BBC documentary on Western Death Squad in Yemen: Israeli Security Firm Hired by UAE Paid American Mercenaries to Carry Out Political Assassinations

 

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has funded politically motivated assassinations in Yemen, a BBC investigation has found.

Training provided by American mercenaries - hired by the UAE in 2015 - has then been used by Emiratis to instruct locals, sparking a surge in targeted killings, a whistleblower says.

The findings come as conflict in Yemen has returned to the international spotlight following attacks on ships in the Red Sea.

The UAE government has denied the allegations in our investigation - that it had assassinated those without links to terrorism - saying they were "false and without merit".

The killing spree in Yemen - more than 100 assassinations in a three-year period - is just one element of an ongoing bitter internecine conflict pitting several international powers against each other in the Middle East's poorest country.

 

The deadly atmosphere has discouraged the permanent return of Yemen's internationally recognised government. This, it could be argued, has indirectly helped to embolden the Iran-backed Houthis. Washington has announced that it will now re-designate the group as "global terrorists".

I have been reporting on the conflict in my native Yemen since it began in 2014. The fighting led to the government losing control of the country's north to the Houthis - who over the years have become savvier and better equipped.

In 2015, the US and the UK supported a coalition of mostly Arab states led by Saudi Arabia - with the UAE as a key partner - to fight back. The coalition invaded Yemen with the aim of reinstating the exiled Yemeni government and fighting terrorism. The UAE was given charge of security in the south, and became the US's key ally on counter-terrorism in the region - al-Qaeda had long been a presence in the south and was now gaining territory.

Comment: The 'exiled' Yemeni government was overthrown in a revolution sparked by the Arab Spring. It was another unintended consequence of the 'democratization birth-pangs' fomented by the US and UK. So the US and UK leaned on SA and the UAE to crush that democratic revolution 'lest the same happen to you'...

But instead of this establishing greater stability, during my frequent reporting trips at that time I witnessed a wave of mysterious targeted killings, in Yemeni government-controlled southern areas, of Yemeni citizens unconnected to terror groups.

 

https://www.sott.net/article/488152-BBC-documentary-on-Western-Death-Squad-in-Yemen-Israeli-Security-Firm-Hired-by-UAE-Paid-American-Mercenaries-to-Carry-Out-Political-Assassinations

 

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