Mark Dubowitz
NY Post, Dec. 27, 2023
“These attacks are not just harassment but a well-planned campaign of economic warfare the IRGC has designed to put pressure on Israel and US-aligned Arab states.”
Iran is on the offensive.
On the day after Christmas, in the space of just 10 hours, US forces in the Red Sea had to shoot down 12 suicide drones, three anti-ship ballistic missiles and two land-attack cruise missiles, all of them launched by the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist group in Yemen.
The Houthis are torturers whose official motto is “Death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam.” Subtle they aren’t.
Yet one of President Biden’s first decisions after taking office was to remove the Houthis from the official US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. You can draw a straight line from there to the threat in the Red Sea today. Reward the bad guys for bad behavior and you get more of it.
The White House insisted it was taking the Houthis off the terror list for humanitarian reasons, but the real story is it was one of many concessions to the Houthis’ patrons in Tehran from an administration desperate to avoid trouble in the Middle East.
The predictable result was more trouble, not less.
If Biden wants to protect US and allied naval forces in the Red Sea while keeping its shipping lanes open, he needs to show the Houthis they will pay a heavy price for attacking the United States and its friends. What Biden should not do is order more pinprick counterstrikes, which is how he has handled more than 100 attacks in less than three months on US troops in Syria and Iraq by Iranian proxy forces in those countries.
Pinpricks have little deterrent value, so the attacks on our troops in Syria and Iraq continue.
… [To read the full article, click here]
