Everything that happens in the Middle East that the U.S. government doesn’t like is supposedly the fault of Iran. Determining who is responsible for what in the Middle East is not an easy thing. The reality is undoubtedly quite a bit different than the U.S.’s blame game. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
In the early morning of December 31, 2023, the commercial freighter Maersk Hangzhou came under attack by Houthi fighters from Yemen who were attempting to board it. U.S. Navy helicopters responding to its distress calls were fired upon by the small Houthi boats, according to the U.S. Central Command, and “returned fire in self-defence,” sinking three of the four boats and killing their crews.
The CENTCOM report identifies the attackers as “Iranian-backed Houthi” boats. In its report the same day, The New York Times repeats that unsubstantiated link, labelling the attackers of the freighter “Iranian-backed Houthi fighters.”
That report joins a flurry of claims that provocatively link Iran to events in the Middle East in a manner that risks widening the war in Gaza. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett opens his December 28 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal with the catalogue that Hamas “backed by Iran” massacred Israelis on October 7, Hezbollah “also backed by Iran” has launched rockets into Northern Israel, “Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen” are attacking ships, and Syrian and Iraqi militias “with support from Iran” are attacking US bases. “Notice a pattern?” Bennett asks. “The Iranian regime is at the center of most of the Middle East’s problems and much of global terror.”
But the claim that Iran is the puppet master pulling the Houthi strings is not one that can be uncritically made without substantiation. The Houthi have never been as under the control of Iran as the Western media has presented.
From the earliest days of the Houthi, the United States knew that then Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s convenient claims of a Houthi-Iran link were weak. In his book Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill reports that in a classified cable, “US officials . . . raised serious questions about the extent of Iranian involvement.” Though Iran does have influence with the Houthi, the Houthi do not simply operate at the will of Iran. Analysts have pointed out that Iran “bandwagons” on Houthi success as often as it causes it.
