The Western Powers Are Marching to the Houthis’ Tune

Alarmingly, the West would prefer to be enslaved to the formula according to which only treatment of root causes – i.e, the cessation of the war in Gaza – will result in the cessation of the Houthis' violent disruption of security in international shipping lanes. [...] 1 The immediate result of the Houthi attacks was the forced change of sailing routes from the Far East to the Mediterranean Sea and the rerouting of merchant ships around Africa. [...] The immediate context for the defiant behavior of the Houthis to disrupt freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, to the point of blocking it for international maritime trade, is the open linkage by the rebel leadership in Sana'a to the ongoing war between the IDF and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. [...] He pointed out other fundamental contradictions with regard to international law, including non-compliance with the 1982 UN 6 Convention on the Law of the Sea, and rued that the Security Council's decision did not refer directly to the main cause of instability in the region: the situation in the Gaza Strip. [...] Furthermore, the fact that Yemen's consent (in principle) was not mentioned by the US or the UK in their letters of justification to the Security Council for their attacks on the Houthis indicates that the powers limited themselves from the outset to operating within the narrow legal scope of self-defense and nothing else.