How Biden blundered into a war in the Middle East

 NY Times:

From the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war nearly 100 days ago, U.S. President Joe Biden and his aides have struggled to keep the war contained, fearful that a regional escalation could quickly draw in U.S. forces.

Now, with the U.S.-led strikes on nearly 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday and a smaller strike Friday, there is no longer a question of whether there will be a regional conflict. It has already begun. The biggest questions now are the conflict’s intensity and whether it can be contained.

This is exactly the outcome no one wanted, presumably including Iran.

“We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind,” John Kirby, a White House spokesperson, said Friday. “In fact everything the president has been doing has been trying to prevent any escalation of conflict, including the strikes last night.”

Biden’s decision to unleash airstrikes, after resisting calls to act against the Yemen-based Houthi militants whose repeated attacks on shipping in the Red Sea were beginning to take a toll on global commerce, is a clear shift in strategy. After issuing a series of warnings, officials said, Biden felt his hand was forced after a barrage of missile and drone attacks Tuesday were directed at an American cargo ship and the Navy vessels around it.

“This is already a regional war, no longer limited to Gaza, but already spread to Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen,” said Hugh Lovatt, a Mideast expert for the European Council on Foreign Relations. The U.S., he added, wanted to demonstrate that it was ready to deter Iranian provocations, so it conspicuously placed its aircraft carriers and fighters in position to respond quickly. But those same positions leave the United States more exposed.

Over the course of 12 weeks, attacks on Israeli, U.S. and Western interests have come from Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, prompting modest, carefully targeted responses from U.S. and Israeli forces. The United States also issued warnings to Iran, which the U.S. says is acting as a loose coordinator.

What was notable about the retaliatory strikes in Yemen was their breadth: Employing fighter jets and sea-launched missiles, U.S. and British forces, backed up by a small number of other allies, hit a wide number of Houthi missile and drone sites.

Biden is walking the fine line between deterrence and escalation, and his aides concede there is no science to the calculation. Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been careful in their support for Hamas, keeping their actions within limits, to prevent a larger U.S. military response that could threaten Iran’s exercise of power in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria.

But how much control Iran has over its proxies is in question, and its leaders may also be misreading U.S. and Israeli red lines.

The Houthis, a small Iranian-backed tribe in Yemen, have been among the most aggressive in pushing the envelope, trying to block international trading routes through the Red Sea and ignoring U.S. and Western warnings to desist.

Houthi officials say the sole goal of their attacks is to force Israel to halt its military campaign and to allow the free flow of aid into Gaza.

Western diplomats said there had been reluctance to strike back at the Houthis, in part to avoid upending a truce in the Yemeni civil war, and in part because of the difficulty of eliminating their threat entirely. But the Houthis’ repeated attacks on ships, their direct fire on U.S. helicopters and their attack Tuesday on an American cargo vessel left the United States with what officials said was no real choice.

U.S. officials said the Pentagon carried out a second round of strikes Friday against the Houthis, bombing a radar facility in Yemen.
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Taking the Houthis off the terror watch list was one of Biden's first mistakes and the US is now paying the price for its mistake.  While the story indicates the breadth of the US attacks in Yemen they are likely not significant enough to stop the Houthis attacks.  Iran is the country behind most of these attacks and the only way to stop them likely is to take on Iranian mullahocracy.