In his Commons statement yesterday, Rishi Sunak was right to characterise last Thursday’s strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen as “limited, not escalatory” and a necessary act of self-defence after the unconscionable attacks on civilian and military shipping in the Red Sea.
In addition to the human cost of these assaults, the Islamists’ campaign has threatened one of the world’s most important shipping lanes and forced many vessels to take detours of 5,000 miles. The moral, military and economic case for the action taken by the US, UK and its allies was irreproachable; and, given the attack yesterday on a US-owned ship in the Gulf of Aden it seems regrettably likely that further air strikes will be necessary to degrade the Houthis’ military infrastructure.
The PM was also wise to resist what he called the “malign narrative” — pursued by a number of Left-wing MPs — connecting retaliation against the Houthis directly to the conflict in Gaza. Though the militants themselves have opportunistically insisted upon such a linkage, their attacks on shipping have been wholly indiscriminate. The predicament of Palestinian civilians has not been alleviated even slightly by Houthi maritime violence.
That said, yesterday’s two-hour debate did draw necessary attention to another geopolitical connection: namely, Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” and the nexus of proxy forces that has its global headquarters in Tehran and is overseen by the Quds Force, an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iran provides arms, subsidy and strategy — the regime’s fingerprints were all over the October 7 attacks in Israel
This loose-knit alliance embraces Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the West Bank, the Houthis in Yemen, jihadi forces in Iraq and Syria and terrorist cells throughout the West. It is better understood as a constantly morphing network than as a conventional command-and-control hierarchy.
Tehran provides arms, subsidy and strategy. It may not have given a direct order to Hamas to unleash the unspeakable atrocities of October 7. But the Iranian regime’s fingerprints were all over the pogrom in which more Jews were killed than on any day since the Holocaust; and it bears a heavy responsibility for the terrible loss of life in the past 14 weeks.
In this respect, what is happening in the Middle East — and the angry arguments it has spawned around the world — is really a new and complex chapter in the war on terror rather than merely the latest iteration in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Houthis’ sarkha or slogan is overtly Islamist: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”. Hamas is a theocratic death cult rather than (as many Western progressives fondly imagine) a freedom-fighting movement. Ditto Hezbollah.
As has always been true, Islamism is not a homogeneous force. The Houthis are sworn enemies of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Islamic State opposes Tehran and claimed responsibility for the two suicide explosions in the city of Kerman on January 3. So too does the Sunni Islamist political group Hizb ut-Tahrir which is finally set to be proscribed in the UK.
Yet these divisions and enmities do not mean that Islamism should be treated as wholly disaggregated. On the contrary: the most important lesson to be drawn from all the blood-letting, position-taking and fiery rhetoric since October 7 is that fundamentalist Islam remains a clear and present danger. Joe Biden might have hoped otherwise when he forced the shambolic withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021. But the terrorists have much unfinished business.
This perspective is unsettling to those who prefer the comfortable delusion that calling for an “immediate ceasefire” and a “two-state solution” is the definitive response to the awful conflict in Gaza. To grasp the role of Iran and the centrality of Islamist ideology in what is happening in the region is to bear a much heavier conceptual burden.
Small wonder, then, that some MPs have bristled at Sunak’s failure to ask Parliament’s permission before authorising the strikes on Yemen.
He was absolutely within his constitutional rights to do so (as was Biden in the US). But all such operations bring back difficult memories of the Iraq war.
Twenty-three years on from 9/11, the West may well have had its fill of “forever wars”. But it is no more than collective narcissism to assume that this is all about us. As Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, warned in a speech at Lancaster House yesterday, we are “moving from a post-war to a pre-war world” in which the readiness is all. A direct confrontation with Iran is not imminent. But — in other forms — the war has already begun.
