What, exactly, does this terrorist group have to do to be branded a terrorist group?
The Houthis must be wondering what they’re doing wrong. That terrorist sect, which has maintained control of portions of Yemen since late 2014, has made itself a giant headache for the West. When the group is not menacing ships that are transiting through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait toward the vital Suez Canal, it’s attacking Western vessels and firing sophisticated rockets and drones at Israel — some of which find their marks. What, exactly, does this terrorist group have to do to be branded a terrorist group?
When Democrats occupy the Oval Office, the answer is apparently nothing. In early 2015, with Barack Obama mounting a peace offensive with Iran and engaging in outright diplomatic hostilities against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Democrats saw the Houthis as people with whom they could work. Sure, they were funded and backed by Tehran, burned American flags, and threatened U.S. interests on the Arabian Peninsula, but that proved no obstacle to the overtures the Obama administration sent their way.
Those overtures were rejected, and it wasn’t long before open hostilities between the Saudi government and a proxy militia loyal to its longtime Iranian enemies broke out. Throughout that conflict, the Saudis alone drew the attention of American Democrats — all of it negative. The interregnum over which Donald Trump presided put a damper on Democratic efforts to anathematize the Saudis and usher Iran and its proxies into the community of nations, but that was only temporary. When Joe Biden took office, he and his allies did their utmost to alienate the Saudis and punish them for the way they prosecuted that conflict. One of the several and earliest steps the Biden White House took to appease Tehran and irritate Riyadh was to delist the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization.
The Yemen-based terror group was not nearly as grateful for this dispensation as one might expect. Beginning after the October 7 attacks, the Houthis began firing at Western commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden — sometimes hitting their targets, forcing container ships to reroute, and raising the cost of globally transited goods. From the outset of Hamas’s war on Israel, the Houthis joined Hezbollah and the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria — all of which are Iran’s puppets in the region — to fire missiles in Israel’s direction. The Houthis even managed to secure sophisticated technology, likely from their Iranian sponsors, with which they terrorize their targets. In recent weeks, the Houthis fired a hypersonic missile at Israel and delivered a car-sized drone to Tel Aviv, which evaded Israeli air defenses and detonated just shy of its target: the U.S. diplomatic mission.
And yet, despite all this, the State Department continues to “rebuff bipartisan pressure from lawmakers to redesignate the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization,” Jewish Insider reports:
In a letter to Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) on Tuesday, a State Department official said the administration opposes reimposing the FTO designation on the Houthis, saying that doing so could be an impediment to groups that may have to do business with the Houthis to provide basic supplies inside Yemen.
What’s a terrorist gotta do to earn some respect around here? You can terrorize all day long, apparently, and still not manage to provoke this administration to make even the most banal gestures.
Of course, the U.S. Navy, which recently has seen its “most intense running sea battle” since World War II, still conducts pinprick strikes on Houthi targets and intercepts its missiles. The Houthis are not deterred. They’re doing everything in their power to be redesignated as terrorist actors, but Team Biden just won’t give them what they seem so desperately to want.