Iran is “very directly involved” in ship attacks that Yemen’s Houthi rebels have carried out during Israel’s war against Hamas, the U.S. Navy’s top Mideast commander told The Associated Press on Monday.
Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the Navy’s 5th Fleet, stopped short of saying Tehran directed individual attacks by the Houthis in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
However, Cooper acknowledged that attacks associated with Iran have expanded from previously threatening just the Persian Gulf and its Strait of Hormuz into waters across the wider Middle East.
“Clearly, the Houthi actions, probably in terms of their attacks on merchant shipping, are the most significant that we’ve seen in two generations,” he told the AP in a telephone interview. “The facts simply are that they’re attacking the international community; thus, the international response I think you’ve seen.”
You might ask why Iran would do this. As it turns out, sponsoring terror is an extremely cost effective form of international diplomacy. Instead of spending billions on defense to attack and intimidate regional rivals, the government of Iran can spend several orders of magnitude less, say a few hundred million in guns and cash for extremist groups.
Iran doesn’t have to recruit or pay the soldiers, because someone else will do it for them; doesn’t have to finance or strategize an invasion, because the militants are already in the enemy’s territory; doesn’t have to face moral culpability on the world stage, because they can claim clean hands.
This is not just ideological for Iran. It is simple dollars and cents (or rials). Persia is a 5000 year old civilization, and they are happy to gradually carve away at their enemies until there’s nothing left.
Indeed, this is why Osama bin Laden had CIA backing in the 1980s. Same thing for the Taleban on Afghanistan.