The US Is At War Again. Do We Care?

The easier it is for one man (or woman) to carry the most powerful nation on earth to war, the more often it will happen.

I know it’s passé to mention this, but it is actually supposed to be Congress, not the president, that decides when the United States goes to war. And that’s actually an important thing. 

If you missed it - and golly, you could be forgiven for missing it - the US and UK launched a series of attacks on Houthi encampments in Yemen. Which is to say, we (Americans and Brits) have just launched yet another war in yet another Middle Eastern country. And I don’t remember anyone asking me if I was okay with that.

Really, really quick background about what’s happening:

The Houthis are a Shia group, closely allied with Iran, who control between ¼ and ⅓ of Yemen, a country that has been in a state of civil war for some years. The Houthis don’t like the Yemeni government’s closeness with Saudi Arabia (a majority Sunni country) and the fight has become a proxy war between the region’s biggest players: Iran and Saudi Arabia.

As a response to Israel's bombing of Gaza, the Houthis - who are concentrated along the country’s western coastline - have begun attacking Israeli vessels in Red Sea shipping lanes in the hopes of economically pressuring Israel to relent. The Red Sea forms a choke point near the southwest corner of Yemen known as “Bab al-Mandab”. Any ship that wants to get from the Indian Ocean or western Pacific into the Mediterranean or Atlantic has to pass through this choke point on their way to the Suez Canal, unless they want to go all the way around the Cape of Good Hope. 

Bab al-Mandab is tiny, and ships cannot avoid it, so it’s very easy for land-based fighters to target the area. The ships are, if not quite sitting ducks, at least slow-moving ducks that are in a predictable and highly-visible location. 

It is this practice - these attacks - that the US and UK are hoping to stop by bombing Houthi targets on the ground in Yemen. And the Biden administration can justify its quick decision to do this by claiming that the Houthis are a terrorist group. Despite being around since the 90s, they were so designated by the US State Department in 2021. Then, they were off the list for awhile, now, they’re about to go back on.

So, no problem, I guess. If they aren’t really Yemen, then we’re not really bombing Yemen. Or something.  

I don’t really want to get into the merits of this. Having their ships in Bab al-Mandab attacked is obviously bad for Israel, and it’s in their interest to do whatever they can to stop it. If you’re a supporter of Israel, you’re probably okay with our taking their side on this. If you aren’t, or if you just don’t want to see US involvement in the Middle East ramp up, you’d probably rather we left it alone. 

I will say though, that it’s an act of definition-stretching to describe what the Houthis are doing right now as “terrorism”. That word gets messed with a lot. American government types often use it to mean “people we don’t like doing any kind of violence.” But the word has a meaning, and it should matter that we preserve it.

The October 7th attack on Israel that began the current conflict in Gaza was plainly an act of terrorism. Targeting civilians in order to frighten other civilians into doing something - like leaving their country - is about as textbook as terrorism gets. Targeting enemy shipping lines, even targeting non-military crafts* - as anyone who’s ever seen a WWII movie knows, is a part of war. It’s horrible and ugly, but war is horrible and ugly, and Israel itself made crystal clear that what they’re doing in Gaza is making war. Once you get into one of those, you don’t always get to control where it goes.

*I’m on shaky ground, invoking what is and is not normal in war. If you’re curious, the 4th Geneva Convention, which was drafted after WWII was over, attempts to lay out ground rules for attacking merchant vessels. This is so far outside my area of expertise, I hesitate even to discuss it, but as to the question of whether what the Houthis are doing is a war crime, the answer would seem to be, “it depends.” Ships under flags of neutral-to-the-war countries may not be attacked, but may potentially be boarded and their cargo, confiscated, if it can be determined that said cargo is intended for the enemy. Of course, the Geneva Convention applies only to state actors, so the question is academic as it pertains to the Houthis anyway. Besides all that, as far as Uncle Sam is concerned, and to paraphrase Captain Barbossa, [The Geneva Convention] is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

These distinctions and definitions all matter though. Because if all the Biden administration is doing is attacking terrorists, then that’s regular order. That’s just an extension of what’s been our foreign policy stance for more than 20 years: we kill terrorists. But if the Houthis aren’t engaging in terrorism, but simply defending an ally by attacking their enemy, then our bombing of their encampments represents an entrance into what our ally has already said…is a war.

The absolutely massive protests that have broken out in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, make pretty clear how Yemenis feel about this. And make pretty clear that the semantic nuances at play in the western press aren’t convincing them that this is anything other than a foreign power attacking their country. Of course, that’s when the western press acknowledges that this is happening at all. 

The reason American presidents, since the end of WWII, have always used workarounds to avoid asking Congress to declare war is that getting Congress to do that is very hard. Which is…kind of the point! Wars are supposed to be hard to get into. There is supposed to be a high bar to clear before entering them. And we are only supposed to get into conflicts when a consensus of Americans thinks we should. 

I know. That’s naive, and doesn’t reflect real world conditions. In the real world, American presidents must be empowered to kill poor people at a moment’s notice, anytime they want, and cannot be burdened with such niceties as morality, public opinion, or the US Constitution. God, grow up, Dave.    

It’s probably fine. The Houthis can’t do much. At least not to us. Not at home. So for most Americans, this isn’t going to matter. That is unless you’re getting on a bus 10 years from now, and the guy sitting next to you has a pipe bomb in his backpack because we killed his dad when he was 11. Then it might matter. Blow on your dice, folks. 

I understand why we have a military and I understand that there are times when we have to use it. I also understand that targeting non-combatants at sea isn’t something we want anyone doing. But now, it’s the Biden administration’s turn not to be naive. Trying to take out enemy supply lines, even those not under military escort, is a tactic as old as war itself. Using loaded terminology to describe it might be a useful way to justify our intervention, but it doesn’t change the fact that what the Houthis are doing is a relatively standard practice in war fighting. Incidentally, another relatively standard practice in war fighting? Using loaded terminology to paint your enemy’s actions in the most barbaric possible light.

Which is my point. With these missile strikes, the US is no longer maintaining a support role in this conflict. We are engaged now. I wasn’t being glib when I used the example of a bus bomber. One more thing that happens in the course of war fighting: civilians get hurt. 

Indeed, since I wrote the first draft of this, Houthi fighters struck a US-owned ship, flying under a Marshall Islands flag in the Gulf of Aden. Thankfully, no casualties were reported. A Greek ship, en route to Israel, was also targeted and suffered minor damage.

If you’re an American, your president just painted a target on your back. Now, maybe you’re okay with that. I’m sure a great many of you are. Some of you would, probably quite happily, risk your own life to support our Israeli allies if asked. But you weren’t asked. None of us were.

Maybe you figure that any target on your back is blurry enough that you’ll probably be okay, and so will your kids. I hope so. But somebody else’s kids might not be. That’s why we’re all supposed to have a say. That’s why no matter how many times an American president bends the rules to take us to war, it should matter. And it’s why we should demand, every time, that it be the last time.