Trump claims that the Houthis have “capitulated” and the U.S. will therefore stop bombing. The Houthis have a different interpretation of the truce:
In a later interview with Bloomberg News, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthi Political Council, suggested the group is ready to stop attacking US military ships if the Trump administration halts its strikes, “but we will definitely continue our operations in support to Gaza.”
Houthi operations in the Red Sea and Israel “will not stop regardless of the consequences until the end of the aggression on Gaza and blockade on its people,” al-Bukhaiti said.
The U.S. should never have resumed the bombing campaign in March, so ending it is the right, albeit belated, thing to do. If this is the end of the campaign, it just drives home how stupid and unnecessary it all was. The bombing achieved nothing except to kill and injure hundreds of innocent people. An agreement to stop firing on each other would never have been needed if the U.S. hadn’t started bombing Yemen in the first place. Trump caused all this death and destruction needlessly. The arsonist shouldn’t get credit just because he stops setting things on fire.
When Trump resumed and escalated the illegal bombing campaign, the Houthis had not launched any attacks in months. If the truce takes effect and it holds, it takes things back to the way they were before U.S. bombing started up again on March 15. That means that the U.S. spent the last six weeks waging an air war against another country for no real reason, and that war then ends in a mutual ceasefire.
There is a potential problem if the president thinks that the Houthis have agreed to halt their operations against Israel when they haven’t. There may be some confusion about what the U.S. and the Houthis agreed to through Omani mediation. If the two sides aren’t on the same page, the ceasefire isn’t going to last very long.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
