Afrasianet - Ibrahim Alloush - The Yemeni objection to the aggression against Gaza in the Red Sea automatically collided with the organic relationship between imperialism and Zionism, and the weight of the global Zionist movement in that relationship, beyond occupied Palestine.
Of all the battlefronts associated with the battle for the "Al-Aqsa Flood," none is a field in which the Pentagon and the West are more directly militarily engaged on the side of the Zionist enemy than on the Yemeni front. There, the US administration, along with the British, emerges from the shadow of providing support only to the Zionist entity, and from the cloak of playing a defensive role, ostensibly restricted to confronting the missiles and drones that target it, in order to mediate the theater of operations itself and launch continuous offensive strikes on the Yemeni mainland since the beginning of this year, in conjunction with a few direct and major Israeli attacks, after the American role was initially limited to trying to confront Yemeni operations within the Red Sea.
One does not need to strive much to prove the participation of the American administration in the aggression on Gaza and Lebanon, of course, and to confirm that we are facing one American-Zionist party, politically, militarily, intelligence and logistically, but Yemen's victory for Gaza, on the eve of the Zionist aggression on it, was one of its virtues that it imposed on the American side of that one party to reveal its face directly, as much as it was one of its virtues that it put every Arab with a conscience in front of the entitlement to support Gaza, as long as Yemen, which is more away by air. From 2,200 kilometers from Jerusalem, he did not hesitate to support it.
The US administration would not have wished to be drawn into the spotlight like this, because its direct involvement in the fighting drops the distance it pretended to maintain, politically and in the media, from the Netanyahu government and its "belligerent" and escalatory tendency, especially on the eve of the US election season, and against the backdrop of sharp divisions in the Democratic Party's bases on Gaza.
However, the efficient naval blockade that the Yemenis struck in the Red Sea at the beginning, which began to expand and intensify with each stage of the fighting, despite the operations of "Guardian of Prosperity", "Rami Posiden" and "Aspides", posed a major challenge to the US administration and its followers in terms of its economic and moral impact on the Zionist entity first, and in terms of disrupting "freedom of trade" and shipping movement through the Bab al-Mandab second.
Bab al-Mandab remains one of the four most important straits of shipping globally, along with the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca (between Malaysia and Indonesia) and the Strait of Panama (between the north and south of the American continent). This second point, the point of confusion of shipping through the Bab al-Mandab, challenged Western hegemony in our region, the very logic of globalization, and therefore the elites who run it.
If the collective West has publicly exposed its hypocrisy regarding "freedom of trade and investment" and "open space", due to its frequent adoption of sanctions and economic wars as an approach in the face of rising regional and international powers, keeping the Bab al-Mandeb-Suez Canal lane open and running in an area it politically considers within its sphere of influence, and which is militarily under the tutelage of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), was a priority for it within the structure of the hegemonic system that it seeks to protect, and in the context of the aggression on Gaza, which requires control of the The joints of the regional scene are escalation and calm.
It is worth mentioning that Ansar Allah did not fight the Red Sea battle in the beginning except to support Gaza, and that it clearly limited its goals to ships owned by Israel or operating on the lines of the ports of occupied Palestine, meaning that the movement was not the first to open a battle with the collective West in the Red Sea, but its direct military involvement as a striking arm of the Zionist occupation forces on the Yemeni front led to the expansion of the targeting circle to include the ships of the aggressor countries on Yemen.
But the Yemeni move to oppose the aggression on Gaza in the Red Sea automatically collided with the organic relationship between imperialism and Zionism, and the weight of the international Zionist movement in that relationship, beyond occupied Palestine.
The Yemeni move also necessarily collided with the US hegemonic system in our region. Since the local proxies have proven their inability in the past years to contain Yemen and the Ansar Allah movement, and since the entry of these proxies into a direct and declared war with those who support Gaza will greatly embarrass them, the US administration and some of its Western followers had to enter it directly, proving that they are unable to contain the Yemeni power, for reasons that will be detailed later.
It is great and it is a great pitfall that Yemenis are closing a major international trade route as a victory for Gaza, and now for Lebanon. According to Western media, the world's major shipping companies, such as "Marsk", "Overgreen", "COSCO", MSC, CMA, and others, and the British oil and gas companies "Shell" and BP, stopped shipping through the Red Sea.
The Chinese shipping company COSCO also announced the suspension of its dealings with the ports of occupied Palestine. The cost of shipping and insurance to Palestine's ports, when they are available at all, is several times higher.
The British "Russell" research group had published on 13/9/2024 that the shipment of about a trillion dollars of goods was confused by the Yemeni blockade. According to a report by the US Military Intelligence Agency (DIA), published on its official website on 5/4/2024, 29 major energy and shipping companies stopped shipping through the Red Sea, and the movement in total decreased by 90%. It is obvious that ships that are not associated with the Zionist entity or the forces of aggression can sail through the Red Sea as they wish.
Regardless of what the enemies of the axis of resistance say that Ansar Allah took this step to enhance its legitimacy in Yemen and its role regionally, that is, based on a special agenda, and regardless of Ansar Allah's denial of these accusations and its insistence that what it is doing was in support of truth and brotherhood, and in commitment to the teachings of Islam, and to satisfy God Almighty, political analysis is supposed to evaluate objective results, not turn into psychological analysis that dives into intentions.
The objective effects of the Yemeni operations in the Red and Arab Sea and beyond indicate that they succeeded in besieging the Zionist entity by sea, that the port of "Eilat" / um al-Rashrash was declared bankrupt, that the city itself died economically, and that the Zionist entity's trade with the East, especially China and India, was disrupted, including imports of cars, equipment, machinery and supplies, and potash exports from occupied Palestine.
There is a difference between this, of course, and the opening of bridges, by land, sea and air, to ease the impact of the Yemeni blockade on the Zionist entity, and between those who continue to normalize with the Zionist entity in the midst of war, and make its lands, waters and skies a springboard for its defense, and those who pay a heavy price, blood and siege, human and stone, in support of Palestine and Lebanon.
If Yemenis give legitimacy to those who support Palestine, then this is permissible for those who support it, and let this be a lesson for others, because the Arab pulse is the same in this issue.
If the regional weight gain lever is the clash with the American-Zionist side in defense of Gaza and Lebanon, this comes only at the expense of those who are subservient to it, and there is no regret or those who mourn them and their regional weight for what we saw from them on the eve of the Zionist aggression.
What happened simply was that all the Western powers massed in the Red Sea and its vicinity were unable to lift the Yemeni blockade on the Zionist entity, and they failed to eradicate the Sana'a government militarily, which opened the door to interpretations of that failure in two directions:
The direction of the axis of resistance, which sees this as evidence of the courage of the Yemenis, their willingness to sacrifice and their good management of the battle, and their ability to contribute to weakening the American hegemony and showing its military tools as helpless and failing.
(b) Another hostile trend has questioned what is going on, claiming that the United States is taking advantage of Ansar Allah operations to justify its military build-up in the Red Sea and its vicinity, which allows it when necessary to cut off the most important artery of trade between China and Europe, that the American economy has not been affected much by the disruption of shipping in the Red Sea, that American producers and traders do not depend, in general, on the Bab al-Mandab-Suez Canal line, that stopping the shipment of Arab energy carriers to Europe serves their American producers, and that the United States The United Nations is concerned with managing the crisis, not resolving it.
In fact, such "analyses", which enumerate the benefits of the enemy from resistance action, are not limited to the Yemeni case, as we have enough room for entire volumes of them in Palestine, including, for example, the allegations of the "conspiracy" in the "Al-Aqsa flood", under which the Zionist entity allowed the resistance in Gaza to write off the entire Gaza division, between dead, wounded, prisoner and deserter, and to shake the confidence of the settler colonists in their military forces and security arms, and to be strategically exposed by penetrating the territories occupied in 1948 in the Gaza envelope as never before, and by displacing The inhabitants of the Gaza colonies, by the depletion of the Israeli economy and the beginning of the undermining of the most important sector in it, the technology sector, by entering a war of attrition that cost thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of wounded and physically or psychologically disabled, and by burning its image in the media among a section of the Western public itself, for "hidden agreed ends" such as the displacement of Gazans and the reoccupation and settlement of Gaza!
Anyone who calculates things in terms of profit and loss, from the enemy's point of view, and in terms of existential threat with which he deals with the escalation of resistance strength and effectiveness on all fronts, will have little patience to hear such "analyses."
Despite this, it is vigorously promoted on the eve of every victory or achievement of the resistance, as we heard it, for example, on the eve of the 2006 victory in Lebanon. Despite the report of the Winograd Commission, it continued to circulate thanks to the influence of the yellow media. We are hearing it again about Yemen's triumphant blockade in the Red Sea.
First, there is a debate in the United States itself about why Western military build-ups have failed to break Yemen's blockade in the Red Sea, and about its cost, and in vain. According to the Axios website on 15/6/2024, the value of the ammunition used by the US Navy until last May to intercept Yemeni missiles and drones amounted to only about one billion dollars, a consumption rate that US military production factories are unable to keep up.
In addition, the objectives of US policy in Yemen still include "restoring security to shipping lines, and intercepting Iranian aid to the Houthis," according to an official paper published by the Congressional Research Center CRS signed on 24/10/2024, for the attention of members of Congress.
But the United States has failed to achieve this goal, so the Western media is full of debates about the reasons for the failure. For example, an analysis published in Foreign Policy magazine on 1/7/2024 entitled "Why can't the US Navy and its allies stop the Houthis at their limit?" , including another analysis published on the "Responsive State Craft" website on 29/8/2024 entitled "The US military campaign against the Houthis is still unsuccessful", including an article published on the "The Hill" website, close to congressional circles in Washington, on 30/6/2024, entitled "The United States struggles to deter the Houthi threat as the crisis escalates", and from it a malicious article in the British "The Guardian", on 11/3/2024, calls for the activation of Yemeni tools against Ansar Allah, entitled "The West will not be able to stop Houthi attacks unless it cooperates with the Yemeni authorities, experts say," etc.
The group is in crisis in every sense of the word, just as the Zionist entity is in crisis due to the continued resistance in Gaza and Lebanon. If the damage from the disruption of shipping lines is greater for East Asia and Europe than for North America, then the Zionist entity is the most affected by the Yemeni blockade, and this in itself is a sufficient reason for the United States, at the moment of the "Al-Aqsa flood" in particular, to seek to get rid of it.
The damage to the United States from losing control of a major international crossing is not limited to the economic dimension, exacerbated by the drying up of the Panama Canal for some time, thus creating a need for shipping through alternative channels, but must assess the damage, militarily and politically, from a perspective that has shaken its ability to impose hegemony over the region.
In fact, the most important reason for the inability of Western military build-up to lift the Yemeni blockade on shipping lines is the large area that these crowds must cover by land and sea, which leaves many loopholes from which Yemen's heroes can escape. The central knot is that effectively covering that area, and the 175,000 square kilometers in Yemen run by the Sana'a government, requires the withdrawal of significant powers from the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea.
The US military build-up in the vicinity of Yemen is therefore a drain on its capabilities in the context of the international conflict with China and Russia, meaning that the Yemeni blockade has served them because it is a burden on the Pentagon's resources, according to the Americans themselves, while Russian, Chinese, Indian and Iranian ships sail freely and safely in the vicinity.
As for ships heading to other than the Zionist entity and the countries of aggression, including Arab and other energy carriers, they are not targeted by the Ansar Allah movement. The basis was to activate the Arab oil and gas weapons against the countries of aggression, not for Yemen to impose it.
Westerners admit that they suffer from a great intelligence poverty in Yemen, and have tried to compensate for it by deploying MQ-9 drones that are mainly used for espionage purposes. But Yemenis have dropped about a dozen so far, and the cost of each march is only $30 million.
Western reports say that the Sana'a government's warehouses are full of missiles and drones, and that they are distributed in a way that makes it difficult to target them, and that the Yemeni armed forces are not fighting a conventional war prepared by Western powers on their size, but it is enough to continue targeting ships, even if they hit the target once every ten or twenty times, until shipping lines are disrupted.
Solution? A ground invasion does not seem unlikely, although it is on the table, but most Western analysts rule it out, and the United States is not interested in drowning in a prolonged occupation of Yemen. What I glimpsed between the lines were references to the need to keep Ansar Allah away from the Red Sea coast, effectively meaning keeping them away from the coast of Hodeidah governorate, which is controlled by the Sana'a government.
Hence the continuous targeting, as it seems, of Hodeidah as a governorate, a city and a port, and the Zionist focus on it in particular. This may be a prelude to a relatively large private land operation on the coast, centered in and around the port of Hodeidah, given its importance as a source of income for the Sana'a government and as a strategic location to oversee the Red Sea and neighboring islands.