Oh good, the fire department’s here, and it brought its own gas can.
On Sunday the regime occupying Iran had its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, phone Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan and offer to help start talks between Riyadh and the Houthis. That call came a day after Houthi attacks on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh killed at least a dozen people, and i24NEWS describes the Houthis, plainly, as backed by the regime. Here’s the advice the regime’s man gave the Saudis, per Amwaj:
insisting on a military approach and disregarding a political solution would only further complicate the situation [I’ll pass that along to whoever’s aiming missiles at the airport]
I read that three times. Then his spokesman, Esmail Baqaei, said the regime “absolutely” doesn’t approve of “war between two Islamic countries.” So who’s backing the outfit that just hit Riyadh’s airport? The regime, by i24NEWS’s account.
A short history lesson is needed: the Houthis have been fighting a Saudi-led alliance since 2015, and in April 2023 Saudi and Omani envoys sat down with Houthi leaders in Sanaa in talks Oman mediated, right after Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to re-establish ties in a deal China brokered, per Al Jazeera. Oman is the sysop of the Gulf. Every BBS I ever dialed into had one guy who ran the board, never picked a side in a flame war, and was trusted by everybody precisely because he never posted. You don’t get to be the sysop while you’re also the one flooding the message base. Anyway.
Hassan Ahmadian, an Iranian academic, says the people calling the offer a power grab are the ones “profiting from the Saudi-Yemeni fighting,” and that the same critics insist the Houthis “moved at Iran’s prompting” and “offer no explanation for this contradiction.” Follow it through: if the regime has that much pull with Sanaa, it’s exactly the number you’d call to make it stop. If it doesn’t, an offer of talks costs Riyadh nothing. Either way somebody’s picking up a phone instead of a launcher.
I don’t buy it. Araghchi’s right that missiles won’t settle Yemen, and I think he’d know better than anybody what keeps them flying, which is exactly why his offer reads to me like a protection racket with letterhead. Ahmadian’s contradiction holds together fine from my chair: a patron can back the Houthis and offer to broker their talks at the same time, and that’s what the leverage is for. The Saudis, for their part, confirmed the call happened and disclosed nothing else, and I laughed out loud at that.
FAIL. If the occupying force really wants the shooting to stop, I hear it already has the Houthis’ number.