Iran Tightens Grip on Yemen

National Review Online

Iran, the enemy of the United States that the Obama administration nonetheless regards as a potential ally and stabilizing influence in the Middle East, has seized substantial control of Yemen.

Under the apt headline, “While you were watching ISIS, Iran took Yemen,” Legal Insurrection’s David Gerstman sifts through reports from the Washington Post and Reuters, relating that the Houthi, Shiite jihadists backed by Tehran’s mullahs, have wrested “control of almost all state buildings, from the airport and the central bank to the Defense Ministry.” They have likewise festooned Sanaa with signs proclaiming their mullah-echoing slogan, “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews and victory to Islam.”

As Mr. Gertzman observes, the same chant is routinely heard from Iran’s forward jihadist militia, Hezbollah. Hezbollah means the “Party of Allah” and the Houthi similarly call themselves “Ansal Allah,” the “Supporters of Allah.” And, taking another page out of the Hezbo playbook, the Houthi are blocking the appointment of a new prime minister – just as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon in the terror group’s role as, to quote the Post report, “top down brokers dominating the government and running a virtual state-within-a-state.”

As in Syria, the Shiites are opposed by the combination of the “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood – i.e., the Islah party, whose power-sharing arrangement with the rump of the ousted Sunni government the Houthi reject – and the local al-Qaeda franchise (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), which continues to attack Houthi targets.

Not to beat a dead horse, but we are in a global conflict in which the Islamic State is only one component of the enemy – and not the most significant one. I argued it this way a few weeks back:

The main challenge in the Middle East is not the Islamic State; it is the fact that the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda forebears have been fueled by Iran, which supports both Sunni and Shiite terrorism as long as it is directed at the United States. There cannot be a coherent strategy against Islamic supremacism unless the state sponsors of terrorism are accounted for, but Obama insists on seeing Iran as a potential ally rather than an incorrigible enemy.

It is the height of folly to believe we can degrade and ultimately destroy anti-American jihadist organizations while continuing to turn a blind eye to Iran’s essential support for those organizations, while accommodating the mullahs on nuclear weapons, and while idling as Tehran’s agents seize control of key strategic territory (see Mr. Gerstman’s excerpt from Michael Segall’s analysis of Iran’s goals in Yemen and beyond). Again, we cannot defeat our enemies without recognizing who they are.