Smoking the Yemenites

The Houthis Overestimate Their Ability to Withstand American Attacks

Amine Ayoub argues that the Houthis are counting on this administration’s attention deficit disorder to save them from destruction. But Ayoub believes that they have badly miscalculated: “Why the Houthis Think They Can Beat the US — And Why They’re Wrong,” by Amine Ayoub, Algemeiner, April 22, 2025:

Yet the illusion persists — and may even intensify. Faced with growing losses, the Houthis are likely to lean further into psychological warfare. Propaganda will surge. They will publish shaky videos of “downed” drones, stage missile launches, and portray every Western casualty, real or fabricated, as a blow against imperialism. Their goal is not battlefield victory but narrative control. If they can’t defeat the US militarily, they’ll try to erode its political will through a war of images, slogans, and social media virality. In doing so, they hope to sway anti-interventionist voices in the West and rally populist support across the Arab world.

Psychological warfare can be waged by both sides. Those videos of qat-chewing primitives, raising their rifles in the air and Allahu-akbaring, cease to impress. They can publish fake photos of downed enemy drones, and of Houthi missiles being launched (the same videos are used by the Houthis over and over), but when the American military provides its own account of what targets it as hit, and how many Houthi drones it has shot down, whom will the world believe?

And the Houthis are Shi’a; the Shi’a are only 10-15% of the world’s Muslims; there is not an Arab state anywhere that supports the Shi’a Houthis. Their one ally, Shi’a Iran, is despised by the Sunni Arabs. There will be no “rallying of populist support across the Arab world” for the Houthis. Quite the opposite. The Arabs ardently hope for their defeat, and that of their puppeteer, Iran.

Meanwhile, Iran will tighten its grip. The deeper the Houthis get, the more reliant they become on Tehran’s support — not just for weapons, but for expertise. We may see the quiet transfer of more sophisticated drone systems, longer-range missiles, and even the arrival of Iranian advisers on the ground to coordinate more complex attacks. Tehran has every interest in keeping US forces tied up in Yemen and distracted from other fronts like Syria or the Gulf. But that support will come at a cost: it will make the Houthis more vulnerable to becoming a direct target of Western-Iranian proxy escalation.

I disagree with Amine Ayoub here. I don’t see how the Houthis can become more reliant on Iran. How will Iran supply weapons to them, given the damage American bombs have done to the port at Hodeidah, where weapons have been delivered in the past, and also destroying the oil port of Ras Isa, thus depriving the Houthis of desperately needed fuel, and finally, repeatedly hitting several airbases including a major one in Sanaa, thus depriving the Houthis of another way to receive weapons shipments from Iran? The other night the Americans struck 13 Houthi targets, and they show no signs of slowing down. The Houthis can lie about the supposed ineffectiveness of those American strikes, and lie, too, about their own “deadly drones” that have hit only a handful of targets over many months, but no one believes them any more.

The Houthis, in their Yemeni hideouts, including those in the mountain fastnesses in Yemen’s north, think their redoubts are impregnable. They are not. They overestimate their own ability to withstand American attacks, and underestimate American military might. They can’t quite believe that Iran’s weapons deliveries will be greatly diminished because they can no longer be safely delivered by ship or by plane. Meanwhile, in the two-thirds of Yemen that the Houthis do not control, an army of 80,000 men is being assembled, preparing to conduct a ground campaign against the weakened Houthis. The Houthis are in their bluster akin to those frogs that inhale enough air to blow themselves up, like balloons, in order to intimidate their enemies. The Houthi balloons, however, have all been popped, by squadrons of F-16s and F-35s. For the Houthis, the end is nigh.