[tptacek]

I think they're just saying it'd be hard to disprove the presence of Special Forces on the ground in Yemen, given that both NATO and Israel have cause to be there (Yemen being a declared belligerent to both). That discussion gets mired in speculation very quickly, so: I'm happy to stipulate that someone could be lurking outside the launcher site on the side of the Sana'a-Sa'da Highway waiting to plant explosives or whatever.

My point is just: Ansar Allah fields an army of roughly 200,000 (including the children). That army does not exist to fight Israel or the US (look at a map). What it's there to do is to take Marib, Taizz, and Aden, and to prevent the secession of South Yemen, which has become the stronghold of the ROYG-in-exile and hosts most of Yemen's extractive industry as well as its largest ports.

The basic idea of Khomeinism, which Ansar Allah proudly patterns itself on, is to institute a centralized authoritarian government managed by religious leaders while positioning the country against western imperialism (as a distraction from what's happening within the country). In Iran, this took the form of picking a gigantic fight with the US before losing a half million of its own people in a pointlessly prolonged fight with Iraq. In Yemen, it's a proclamation that Ansar Allah will liberate Palestine while murdering several hundred thousand Yemenis over the course of 12 years.

The current situation is pretty great for Iran. There's an open debate about how reliant Ansar Allah is on the IRGC QF, which creates some deniability. NATO is flying all sorts of stuff over and boating all sorts of stuff around Yemen, so Iran gets to use it as a playground for their new loitering munitions and anti-ship weapons, but with Yemenis pushing the buttons. If Ansar Allah actually managed to strike any kind of real blow against NATO or against Israel, my guess is that it would take less than a couple weeks for the aggrieved power to hit the Houthis so hard you'd need a HEPA filter to collect what would be left of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.

Aside: for anybody not familiar with Socotra: it's an island out in the middle of the Arabian Sea, physically closer to Somalia than Yemen, notable mostly for being a sort of Galapagos of East Africa and a major tourist destination (even during the middle of the civil war, because it's not meaningfully integrated with Yemeni politics). Socotra does not matter.

[wolf550e]

I have a simpler question about the meaning of "country A occupies country B". Does it simply mean "presence of people who work for country A on the territory of country B"? Maybe excluding the official staff of embassies?

Is the UK occupied by Russia due to the botched assassination of Sergei Skripal using Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018?

Is Pakistan occupied by the USA because of the US Navy Seals who killed Osama Bin-Laden in 2011?

I assume US special forces are present in many places from time to time if not continuously, although they are also continuously based in many countries.

I assume all serious countries have spies in every single other serious country. If you exclude small and poor countries, everyone occupies everyone? How is this definition useful in any way?

[tptacek]

There is no portion of the territory of Yemen† that is currently controlled by a hostile foreign power. So far as I know, all of Yemen is currently controlled by the Houthis, the ROYG-in-exile, and AQAP (bearing in mind that the highlands of Yemen are sort of like the Appalachia of Arabia, and are comprised largely of semi-autonomous hollers [wadi] managed by clans [qabila], and so may not be effectively controlled by anything).

† Except maybe Socotra? See above.

[kasey_junk]

I personally would not describe any portion of Yemen as occupied by the US or Israel.

But Socotra being de facto occupied by the UAE is pretty easy to surmise given the airbase they are building there and the lack of air power capability by the STC.

Given that Israeli or US troops at that base, even as advisors, could be considered occupying. It’s not like it’s a rigorously defined term.

Lots of people might have described Berlin as occupied during the Cold War (on either side) and it wouldn’t be out of bounds.

But it’s mostly not salient to the point you were making, which is the point I was trying to make. Whether there is some cadre US or Israeli soldiers in Yemen or if the UAE has built a base there doesn’t change the fact that it’s a civil war.

I clearly failed at redirecting the conversation…

[tptacek]

I think pretty much all of us are on the same page; I was overexplaining that to 'wolf550e.