Tag: yemen

US Mulls Ground War In Yemen Via Mercenaries, Pro-Saudi Factions

Bloomberg reports Wednesday that the United States is currently in talks with Saudi-supported Yemeni forces (who have long fought the Houthi rebels) to cobble together a possible new land offensive to send against the Shia militant group which is allied to Iran.

“Yemeni forces opposed to the Houthis are in talks with the US and Gulf Arab allies about a possible land offensive to oust the militant group from the Red Sea coast, according to people involved in the discussions,” Bloomberg writes.

The report follows with, “The conversations come about a month into a US-led aerial assault against the Houthis ordered by President Donald Trump, an operation yet to achieve its aim of ending the Iran-backed group’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, a vital trade route, and Israel.”

And The Wall Street Journal first reported Monday that the US is considering a ground assault, given the Houthis have proven impossible to dislodge merely through airstrikes, which have been intense and ongoing since March 15.

The group in question is the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) of former Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The PLC is the ‘internationally recognized’ government, but which is now based in Saudi Arabia (in exile), given the Houthis have de fact control over most of the country.

The Saudi-UAE-US coalition had already waged an aerial as well as proxy ground war from 2015 to 2022, which killed hundreds of thousand of people and blocked vital resources for the starved population, but the whole campaign did nothing to oust the Houthis – in fact quite the opposite as they became entrenched in the most important strategic sites.

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Pentagon’s Yemen Operations Nearing $1 Billion Price Tag

Fresh analysis in both the NY Times and CNN have estimated that America’s Yemen operations will soon hit the $1 billion mark. Still, war-planners are admitting only ‘limited success’ in degrading and dismantling the Houthis sophisticated weapons network.

‘Operation Rough Rider’ has seen warplanes and warships in the Red Sea go through at least $200 million in launched munitions alone since March 15, the Times report says. An in total, CNN says the overall operation is “nearing $1 billion in just under three weeks, even as the attacks have had limited impact on destroying the terror group’s capabilities,” according to several US defense officials.

US military assets in the region have utilized JASSM long-range cruise missiles, JSOWs (GPS-guided glide bombs), and Tomahawk missiles – all of which are very costly, advanced munitions.

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Why did Jeffrey Goldberg leave the ‘bomb Yemen’ Signal chat?

With momentum for a strike on Iran building within the Trump White House, Goldberg was apparently summoned to move the neocon message. And he wound up with more access than he could handle.

Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg has won the admiration of his Beltway peers for the conduct he displayed after being accidentally invited into a smoke-filled “bomb Yemen” Signal chat with Trump’s national security honchos and top advisors. “Props to Jeffrey Goldberg for his high standards as a professional journalist,” declared Ian Bremmer, the trans-Atlanticist foreign policy pundit on his Bank of America-sponsored GZero podcast. “When he realized the conversation was authentic he immediately left, informed the relevant senior official, and made the public aware without disclosing intelligence that could damage the United States.”

But what exactly did Goldberg do to deserve such high praise?

With a once in a lifetime opportunity to view and report on high level discussions on the US launching an illegal war on Yemen, Goldberg chose to avert his gaze and leave the scene as soon as he could, apparently because maintaining such unparalleled access would have compelled him to report on discussions that might have complicated a war being waged on behalf of the Israeli apartheid state to which he emigrated as a young man. Instead of exploiting his front row seat to the Trump admin’s war planning – a vantage point that would have yielded countless scoops and a bestselling book for any adversarial journalist – Goldberg bolted and dutifully informed the White House about the unfortunate situation.

From there, the story became a palace intrigue over an embarrassing failure of “opsec,” or operational security, and not one about the policy itself, which entails a gargantuan empire bombarding a poor, besieged country because it is controlled by a popular movement that is currently the only force on the planet taking up arms to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In the fourth paragraph of Goldberg’s Atlantic article about the principals’ Signal group, he strongly implied that he supports the war’s objectives, describing Ansar Allah, or the Houthis, as an “Iran-backed terrorist organization” which upholds a belief system that is (what else?) antisemitic. Given Goldberg’s admission that Waltz first reached out to him at least two days prior to mistakenly adding him to the Signal group, it appears the NSC director had been leaking to the Atlantic editor on behalf of the neocon faction in the Trump White House. And it seems clear why Waltz would have sought to cultivate Goldberg.

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Houthis Down Second MQ-9 Reaper Drone In 72 Hours

Yemen’s Houthis have claimed another shootdown of a US MQ-9 Reaper drone. The Thursday announcement, if accurate, would mark the second such Reaper drone downing by the group within 72 hours.

The country’s SABA news agency reported that the US drone was intercepted by an anti-air missile over the Hodeidah province, which has been subject of repeat US bombardment since President Trump ordered a renewed air campaign on March 15. 

Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin has offered some confirmation of the latest downing, writing on X “the Houthis shoot down 3rd MQ9 Reaper drone since March 3rd; 2nd since March 15th airstrike campaign began.”

“Another U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone was shot down by the Houthis in Yemen, sources tell Fox News. This is the third MQ-9 Reaper drone shot down by the Houthis in the last month,” she continued.

“It is the second MQ-9 drone shot down over Yemen since U.S. Central Command began daily airstrikes on the Houthis on March 15th. The U.S. military has carried out 20 straight days of bombing, and yet the Houthis continue to fire missiles.”

The Fox correspondent continued in the Thursday statement:

The first MQ-9 drone was shot down on March 3rd. Days later the White House launched airstrikes against the Houthis. The second MQ-9 was shot down on Monday. And today the 3rd one was shot down. Overnight the Houthis said the U.S. carried out 36 airstrikes on Yemen.

The Pentagon has kept silent, offering no confirmation, however. US officials have in the past acknowledged only some drone downings over Yemen, but don’t announce each one lost as they likely don’t want to give the Houthis any acknowledgement of a successful battlefield action.

If accurate, this would mark the 17th Reaper drone shot down by the Houthis since 2023. Still, President Trump is touting ‘successful’ operations in Yemen, also as a second aircraft carrier is en route from the Pacific to Mideast regional waters.

“Many of their Fighters and Leaders are no longer with us,” Trump said earlier this week on Truth Social. “We hit them every day and night — Harder and harder. Their capabilities that threaten Shipping and the Region are rapidly being destroyed. Our attacks will continue until they are no longer a threat to Freedom of Navigation.”

Trump added: “The choice for the Houthis is clear: Stop shooting at U.S. ships, and we will stop shooting at you. Otherwise, we have only just begun, and the real pain is yet to come, for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran.”

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Full Signal Chat Reveals US Officials Celebrated Bombing a Residential Building in Yemen

Mike Waltz said the strike targeted the Houthis’ ‘top missile guy’ when he entered a building where his girlfriend lived

The full Signal chat between Trump administration officials discussing bombing Yemen revealed that top US officials celebrated an airstrike that flattened a residential building, which likely killed many civilians.

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was included in the chat, apparently by accident, and published its full contents on Wednesday after Trump administration officials insisted it didn’t contain classified information. But the chat did include details about when the strikes on Yemen would start on March 15.

After the US bombings started, US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who added Goldberg to the chat, said one of the strikes targeted a “top missile guy” for the Houthis after he entered a building where his girlfriend lived.

“The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building, and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz said.

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The Real Outrage in Yemen

Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”

Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.

The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

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Trump Says He Will Continue Bombing Yemen For A ‘Long Time’

President Trump on Wednesday claimed that the US’s daily airstrikes on Yemen have been “very successful” and vowed the bombing campaign would continue for a “long time.”

The US started bombing Yemen again on March 15 in response to the Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, announcing they would reimpose a blockade on Israeli shipping due to Israeli ceasefire violations in Gaza.

Since the Trump administration launched the bombing campaign, the Houthis have restarted attacks on US warships and resumed firing missiles at Israel, operations they ceased when the Gaza ceasefire went into effect on January 19. Despite this, President Trump claims the Houthis want “peace.”

“The Houthis are looking to do something. They want to know, ‘How do we stop? How do we stop? How can we have peace?’ The Houthis want peace because they’re getting the hell knocked out of them,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

“They want us to stop so badly… They’ve got to say, ‘No mas.’ But I can only say that the attacks every day, every night… have been very successful beyond our wildest expectations… We’re going to do it for a long time. We can keep it going for a long time,” the president said.

The Houthis’ message has been that they will meet “escalation with escalation” and that their attacks won’t stop unless there is a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the Israeli blockade on aid and all other goods entering the Palestinian territory.

“The Yemeni Armed Forces affirm that the American aggression will only increase the Yemenis’ steadfastness and resilience, and that the confrontations over the last few days were only the beginning of what will be a gradual expansion of defensive operations in the coming days,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said on Thursday when announcing new attacks on US warships and on Israel.

Trump also claimed that the Houthis are being “hit harder than they have ever been.” But from 2015 to 2022, the Houthis faced a brutal US-backed Saudi-UAE war against them, which involved a heavy bombing campaign, a blockade, and a ground campaign. Trump supported the war during his first term in office and vetoed a War Powers Resolution passed by Congress that would have ended US involvement in the conflict.

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‘We Are the Only Ones… Who Can Do This’

The so-called SignalGate scandal centered on the bombing of Yemen is highly revelatory. First, some resources. CNN has a useful annotated account of the chats exchanged at the highest levels of the Trump administration. At their respective Substacks, Lenny Broytman and Caitlin Johnstone have telling dissections of these chats as well. At Jacobin, Branko Marcetic has an important article that reminds us of the illegality of the attacks. As the article’s subheading puts it: The press [mainstream media] is mostly framing the Yemen group chat scandal as a story of incompetence. There’s little attention being paid to the deadliness, illegality, and ineffectiveness of the strikes themselves.

To me, among the most telling “chats” came from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It highlights the “exceptional” nature of America:

Pete Hegseth to Vice President JD Vance: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.

But Mike [Waltz, the National Security Adviser] is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing…

This is precisely the problem for America since the Vietnam War, if not before then. We’ve created a monster military, a “global strike” force, that is capable of destroying any target anywhere around the globe. “Nobody else even close,” SecDef Hegseth correctly says. And because we can do it, because we are exceptional in military force, our leaders believe we should do it, even if it’s only to send a “message” to the world how tough we are, how committed we are to killing others.

Other countries – like those “free-loading” European ones – are PATHETIC because they don’t have America’s military might. Only we can smite evildoers around the globe, only we can do so while also arming Israel to the teeth and covering its flanks while it continues its annihilation of Gaza, and this is something we are immensely proud of.

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Was This ‘Leak’ Accidental or Is It Pro-War Psyops?

There are several curious aspects of this ‘leak’ of internal communication of high ranking members of the Trump administration:

Top national security officials for President Donald Trump, including his defense secretary, texted war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, the magazine reported in a story posted online Monday. The National Security Council said the text chain “appears to be authentic.”
…
The material in the text chain “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported.

The Atlantic is the worst magazine in America. Its editor in chief, ..

.. Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped out of an Ivy League University to volunteer to be an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada. In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that he helped cover up serious prisoner abuse.

Goldberg is a neo-conservative who has yet to see a U.S. instigated war he dislikes. To trust his reporting is dangerous.

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It Wasn’t a Leak, It was a Devious “Charlie Foxtrot”

Charlie Foxtrot is a polite euphemism for a crude military term — Clusterfu*k. That describes the first scandal of the Trump Administration. Somehow, whether deliberate or accidentally, a Zionist journalist by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal chat by Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz, or by someone who worked for Waltz. Goldberg suddenly found himself part of a group chat of Trump’s top defense, diplomatic and intelligence officials. The group included CIA Director Ratcliffe, DNI’s Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, among other luminaries.

If you are not familiar with Signal, you create a group chat by naming a group and then adding members from your list of contacts. This tells us that Goldberg was part of Waltz’s list of contacts. Goldberg is a particularly slimy character, not because he published portions of the chat, but because he behaved as a political hack instead of a journalist. A journalist with that unexpected access, would have written an immediate story announcing that the US was going to start bombing Yemen just to make an example of it. What did Goldberg do? He waited till the bombing happened and then hoisted the Trump gang on its own petard. He made the story about Charlie Foxtrot, which he published on Monday in The Atlantic magazine.

This was not a leak. This was a gift to Goldberg. While the contents of the chat are not officially classified, the information being discussed was operationally sensitive. The chat exposed most of the Trump team as shallow and dismissive of the military and diplomatic implications of the decision to start bombing Yemen.

If Waltz and company wanted to discuss the pros and cons of bombing Yemen, he should have convened a Secure Video Conference, aka SVTC (pronounced, CIVITS).

Pete Hegseth’s remarks to the press, responding to the Goldberg article, makes a solid case that he is not qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense. Instead of admitting that this was a fu*kup on the part of Waltz, he decided to attack Goldberg. Moreover, he pretends that the US was hitting hardened, military targets.

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