[tptacek]

Yemen is adjacent to Saudi Arabia. Iran's conflict with Saudi Arabia is probably the most salient in all of the Middle East and Northern Africa, more so than the "west vs. Arabia" conflict we default to thinking about. The Houthis (Ansar Allah), named for a dude who died just a few years ago, were trained in Iran, and are an effort to replicate the Iranian Revolution in Arabia.

The Houthis are often thought of as an arm of the IRGC (Iran refers to them as part of their "axis of resistance", along with Hezbollah and Hamas), but they are their own thing, although Iran is believed to be actively assisting them with spotter ships in the Red Sea.

This is just a shotgun blast of additional details. Nobody really knows what Iran's game plan is here.

[NeverFade]

Iran is using the Houthis to apply pressure on a regional rival, Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis used to be a close American ally against Iran, but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away, and Iran was able to bring them to terms by wielding the Houthis in their backyard against them.

Iran is also using the Houthis to flare up a conflict that will prevent the Saudis from normalizing relations with Israel; Iran used Hamas to execute the 10/7 attack toward the same goal.

Finally, Iran is using one of its proxy (the Houthis) to preserve another proxy (Hamas). The Houthis are disrupting one of the world's most important shipping routes, which will eventually drive up prices (read: inflation) in an election year. Biden doesn't really want to get into an intense military operation in an election year, and his main alternative is to pressure Israel to let Hamas survive - as the Houthis demand.

[walrus01]

> but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away

Autocratic rulers like MBS deciding to cut up journalists/opposition political figures into tiny pieces with bone saws inside Saudi consulates didn't help matters. The whole Khashogghi incident really illustrated exactly what the Saudi regime thinks of rule of law and human rights of their own citizens when it's boiled down to the the barest essentials. US senators, congressmen, foreign service career people have taken note.

It's still worth noting that the Saudi military/air force/other armed forces are extremely large customers of US/NATO spec equipment and UK origin equipment.

It would be worth remembering that something like 85% of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and there were very clear financial/funding connections from wealthy persons within the Kingdom to the pre-9/11 training program. Highly reputable journalists and intelligence sources have also extensively documented the Saudi funding sources that supported (and still support to this day) wahabbist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the "V1.0" of the Taliban in the 1990s, and other fundamentalist salafist jihadi groups.

Invading saudi arabia for regime change instead of iraq in 2003 would have been much more logical if anyone in the US and UK had the fortitude to do it. It would have also been vastly more messy.

It's well known in people who study foreign affairs that Iran funds and arms Shia and shia-adjacent armed groups (Houthis, Hezbollah, etc). But this doesn't happen in a vacuum - to some extent this is the IRGC and Iran's reaction to the well documented and widely known Saudi support for salafist jihadism.

It's also well known and documented that the saudis have been investing vast amounts of their oil wealth in the US stock market, real estate and other equities since the mid 1960s, so the financial and interconnected realtionship between the US and Kingdom would be extremely difficult if not impossible to dis-entangle at this point in 2024.

Despite the Khagoggi affair and other problems descrived above, I think it's pretty clear that US decision makers still consider saudi arabia a much more trustworthy regional "partner" compared to Iran. Ongoing US/UK contractor support of all of their armed forces (and US/UK relationship with Saudi Aramco) and ongoing exports of munitions to saudi arabia back up this theory.

[NeverFade]

Yes, MBS is terrible, and his regime is autocratic.

Also, intelligent mature people make policy based on real-politik and the aggregate sum of its consequences. They don't just respond to whatever moral sentiments they experience in the moment.

The decision to push the Saudis away is destabilizing the whole region and will allow a violent, aggressive, revolutionary Iran to start and escalate extremely bloody conflicts throughout the region.

While it's a shame that one journalist was killed, was alienating the Saudis really worth the many thousands of lives lost as a result?

[JumpCrisscross]

> intelligent mature people make policy based on real-politik

The Khashoggi affair was stupid and incompetent enough to call into question Riyadh’s qualifications as our chief regional ally.

Their subsequent de facto defeat in Yemen underscores that their value is in oil first and maybe geography second.