The U.S. military struck five underground Houthi weapons facilities in Yemen yesterday, an attack that included the use of B-2 warplanes and specially built bombs. The strikes come just days after the U.S. said it would send the advanced THAAD air defense system to Israel, along with around 100 military personnel to run it. (New York Times; Reuters)
A year ago, the Iran-backed Houthis’ entry into the conflict between Israel and Hamas was a surprising development that immediately had a significant impact. The group’s attacks on merchant shipping off the coast of Yemen temporarily paralyzed traffic through the trade corridor, and although the U.S. military’s response since then has significantly reduced the impact on shipping, the Houthis have not submitted. The group continues to occasionally attack ships in the Red Sea and launch missiles toward Israel.
The fact that the U.S. targeted the Houthis in such an intense and dramatic faction—deploying a B-2 stealth bomber and specially made explosives—is a reminder that the group is still very much an actor in the expanded conflict. At the same time, it is also a reminder that the U.S. is as well.
In fact, the U.S. has been directly involved in this conflict from the beginning, not only with the punitive strikes against the Houthis but also in working with Israel to defend against Iranian missile and drone strikes. Now, amid reports that Israel has depleted its formidable anti-missile defenses, the deployment of the THAAD air defense system alongside U.S. military personnel underscores this participation in Israel’s wars against Iranian proxies—and Iran itself.
To be sure, current U.S. involvement is still far from the worst-case scenario—a regional conflagration that fully pulls the U.S. military into a high-intensity war—that U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration have worked so hard to avoid. But it is one step further down a slippery slope that may lead to that outcome. And in the meantime, it is a reversal of what Biden wanted to accomplish, namely winding down the U.S. military’s involvement in the Middle East’s conflicts.
Instead, the U.S. military is more actively involved in combat operations in the region than at any time since the end of the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And with the region and the world waiting apprehensively for Israel to retaliate against Iran in their latest tit-for-tat exchange of standoff strikes, the attack against the Houthis yesterday is evidence that Washington is not yet out of the woods in terms of getting drawn in deeper.
Yesterday, Italy banned citizens from seeking birth surrogates abroad, extending an existing domestic ban on the practice of surrogacy. Critics say the law is targeted at same-sex couples, who are already barred from domestic and international adoption under Italian law, leaving gay male couples in particular with effectively no route for starting a family.