For a quarter of a century, the USA been telling us to wait for their war against Iran, and we have been telling them that Iran would win. Here we are and though Iran has not won yet they have successfully resisted US air attacks and lunched a few air strikes of their own that have cost the USA dearly. As conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and The Persian Gulf drag pn could this be the tipping point that sets the world on a path to war?
And as anybody with more than one functioning brain cell would have predicted, Iran has weaponised The Strait Of Hormuz, the narrow sea passage at the entrance to The Persian Gulf through which around 25% of the world's petrochemicals (including oil and liquid petroleum gas must be moved by giant ships, vulnerable to attack by Iranian artillery batteries placed on the high ground of Iran's mountainous coastline overlooking the 20 mile wide strait.
Were that the full extent of the situation we could report that Trump's war on Iraq had ended embarrassingly for him, in stalemate. However over the past couple of weeks a new front has opened in the war as Iran backed Houthi militias have reignited a years old conflict with Saudi Arabia, attacked the east - west oil pipeline through which the Saudis had been diverting oil exports ftom the Gulf coast to the Red Sea.
The Houthi, officially known as Ansar Allah are warning western against joining Saudi Arabia in Yemen’s revived civil war, telling The Associated Press on Sunday that the group has assured the Trump administration that it won’t attack U.S. vessels in the Red Sea.
Mohamed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthis’ political bureau, said Washington reached out to the rebels after their rapid advance down Yemen’s western coast to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait earlier this month have then control of the route in and out of Saudi Arabia's oil ports, the alternative route through the Suez Canal being unsuitable for the vast tankers which transport oil and gas.
U.S. President Donald Trump last weekend said his administration has “had discussions” with the Houthis, but did not say when. “The Houthis called us, and they don’t want to fight with us,” he said. “They would much prefer not having us involved, and they’re letting most ships go through.”
Others say the US Government has gone mad.
The more we learn about the Houthis, the less surprising it becomes that the group should have embarrassed the US Navy in 2024 and 2025 (in a foretaste of the second Iran war, Washington simply gave up firing its expensive missiles at Houthi forces), and fought a large Sunni-Arab coalition to a standstill between 2015 and 2019. Despite intense bombardments, and serious battlefield defeats, the Houthis have retained Sana’a, Yemen’s capital which they conquered in 2014.
Only the Israelis, who briefly got into a missile exchange with the Houthis in 2025, have managed to deter them: they went after the Houthis’ oil supplies, energy infrastructure, ports, airports, and, perhaps most important, senior personnel. Sure enough, the Houthis stopped firing at Israel.
Either way, it’s little wonder that the Houthis are now back, seizing land along the Red Sea littoral and the islands of Perim and Greater and Lesser Hanish, thereby putting into jeopardy Saudi Arabia’s capacity to export oil via its east-west pipeline.
Without outside support, Sunni Yemenis would have had no chance on the battlefield against their Shi’ite countrymen. The Houthis have received some support from Hezbollah and Iran — but not nearly on the level that Sunnis have received from foreigners since the Sixties.
Because of the long lasting conflict with the Saudis, Yemen has been one of the worst humanitarian catastrophies in the first quarter of this century.But the poorest Arabs are about to beat the richest, the nerve centre of Islamist terrorism all the way back to 9/11 and beyond. The Saudi alliance with Turkey and Pakistan has failed its first test, the allegation that Mecca and Medina were about to be bombed has been dismissed out of hand by an Islamic world that would have exploded if anyone had believed it.
Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, Ansar Allah controls the Bab al-Mandab, and we either make peace with those facts, or we shiver and starve. This is called defeat, a common consequence of either backing the wrong side or interfering in matters that did not concern one. Never again let the trade unions or anyone else be accused of the latter when we involved ourselves in foreign policy. From the petrol pump to the pumping of blood, we pay the price.
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