Blog Post

AEIdeas

Diplomats and news anchors were running to Wikipedia this past week to figure out just who the Houthis are and what they are doing in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. While The New York Times describes the Houthis as “an insurgent Shiite group,” they are, of course, Zaydis and not the Twelver Shi‘ites prevalent throughout the rest of the region. Indeed, it has only been in the last three years or so that the Iranian government and state-owned press has “rediscovered” the Houthis and begun speaking about them with any frequency as Shi‘ites at all. The same holds true, perhaps, for the Iraqi hawza. Visiting a senior cleric in Iraq this past autumn, a large Houthi delegation was next in the waiting area.

But as the Houthis first marched into Sana’a and now surround the presidential palace and hold the president as a veritable hostage despite a deal meant at defusing conflict, what are their aims? Western diplomats have described their actions as a coup, but do they want to hold power?

The answer may be yes and no. As the Houthis allow themselves to become an Iranian proxy, it is useful to consider the region’s other primary proxy—Lebanese Hezbollah—as a model for their behavior.

Hezbollah may have been founded by Iran, but too many diplomats, academics, and journalists have been willing to accept the fiction that they have evolved into Lebanese nationalists. In 2008, however, Hezbollah proved this nonsense when they marched into the center of Beirut and turned their weapons on fellow Lebanese. Fearing Lebanon’s descent into civil war, regional brokers—and, unfortunately, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as well—rushed to diplomatic efforts to quell the conflict. And they got their deal, the 2008 Doha Accord. It was a bad deal; it handed Hezbollah (and, by extension Iran) veto power over the Lebanese government. Hezbollah needn’t exert the effort to govern or tackle the responsibility, but it could still gain all it wanted: quashing democratic representation, enabling Lebanon to become a playground without fear of government reprisal for Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian intelligence, and generally transforming Lebanon into the Cold War equivalent of Finland. In hindsight, the Doha Accord was more about surrender than it was about peace.

Enter the Houthis. Like Hezbollah, which claims to represent the Lebanese Shi‘ites, Yemeni Shi‘ites are at most one-third the population. They can’t hope to rule over the notoriously fractious country, but they can extract concessions and ensure that the central government doesn’t infringe on their interests. In effect, the Houthis want the same veto power in Yemen that Hezbollah assumed in Lebanon.

Once the Iranians bragged that they played chess while the Americans played checkers. How sad it is that today they play chess while the White House plays solitaire.

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