March 17: Trump Bombs Houthis, Threatens Iran

Trump deports Venezuelan gangbangers; Brown's Hezbollah professor; British intelligence knew of lab leak in 2020

---

---

The Big Story

On Saturday, the United States launched a new series of air and naval strikes against the Houthis, the Iran-backed militia group that has attacked commercial shipping and American military assets in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait on more than 300 occasions since October 2023. “We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social in a Saturday post announcing the campaign. Trump also issued a warning to the Houthis’ sponsors in Tehran:

To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!

According to a Pentagon press briefing on Monday, the initial wave of strikes hit over 30 targets in Yemen, including training camps, radars, air defenses, weapons manufacturing and storage facilities, and command-and-control structures, resulting in “dozens” of military casualties. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz told ABC on Saturday that the United States—presumably with help from Israeli intelligence—had “hit multiple Houthis leaders and took them out,” though those leaders have not been identified. By itself, however, the targeting of Houthi leaders represents a harder line than the Biden administration was ever willing to take.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News Sunday that the U.S. campaign will end as soon as the Houthis cease their attacks. But the Houthis have, at least initially, remained defiant. On Monday, the group announced via Telegram that it had launched a barrage of missiles and drones at the USS Truman carrier group. The United States responded with a second series of airstrikes early Monday morning, targeting the port of Hodeidah and Al-Jawf, north of Sanaa. On Monday afternoon, Trump posted again on Truth Social, this time channeling The Scroll by directly connecting Tehran to the actions of its proxies (emphasis ours):

Let nobody be fooled! The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN. Any further attack or retaliation by the “Houthis” will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there. Iran has played “the innocent victim” of rogue terrorists from which they’ve lost control, but they haven’t lost control. They’re dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated Military equipment, and even, so-called, “Intelligence.” Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!

The new U.S. campaign comes shortly after the Houthis announced that they would resume targeting Israeli-flagged vessels in the Red Sea, which has led some in the self-described “realist” camp to insinuate that Trump is fighting on behalf of Israel. The New York Times notes, however, that Trump has been personally “angered” by the Houthis’ recent attacks on U.S. military assets in the region, including the shooting down of a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone and a (failed) surface-to-air missile attack on a U.S. F-16. On the other hand, the Times reports, citing conversations with U.S. officials, that Trump is still resisting advice from some of his aides to “pursue an even more aggressive campaign that could lead the Houthis to essentially lose control of large parts of [Yemen’s] north,” as well as advice from the Israelis to take advantage of Iran’s current weakness to join an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Still, the new campaign against the Houthis, and the U.S. rhetoric surrounding it, offers further confirmation of what Lee Smith argued in Tablet on Friday: The “realists” who have sought to attach themselves to MAGA—and who have in some cases been insinuated into the policymaking apparatus—are not aligned with President Trump’s instincts or his foreign policy. In their public communications about the strikes, Trump and Hegseth have made clear that it is a core U.S. interest to protect global freedom of navigation from the depredations of Iran-backed pirates. “No terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World,” Trump wrote on Saturday. A White House press release noted that the Houthi attacks had caused about 75% of U.S.- and U.K.-flagged vessels to route around the Red Sea over the past year, leading to higher shipping costs that “increased global consumer goods inflation between 0.6 and 0.7 percent in 2024.”

By contrast, Michael DiMino, the current deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East—a role in which he serves as the “principal policy advisor on all defense and security issues pertaining to the Middle East,” according to his Pentagon bio—had this to say last year about the Biden administration’s much-less-aggressive strikes on the Houthis: “Put simply, there are no existential or vital U.S. national interests at stake in Yemen, and very little is at stake for the U.S. economically in the Red Sea.” He added, again contra the president, that Iran “doesn’t have total control over the Houthis” and that “military action in Yemen … presents dubious prospects for success.”

That’s a fine thing to believe—it’s a free country, after all. But as Trump has once again made clear, it is not the foreign policy of Donald J. Trump.

---

The Rest

→In the latest “constitutional crisis” (scare quotes intentional), the Trump administration over the weekend ignored an order from a federal district court judge to halt the deportation to El Salvador of members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang, under the Alien Enemies Act. A report in Axios offers a timeline of what happened on Saturday as well as interesting insight into how the activist nonprofit blob attempts to tie up federal immigration enforcement. Around midday Saturday, an activist affiliated with Witness at the Border—a small open-borders NGO that partners with the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union, LULAC, and other elements of the NGO Borg—used the public flight tracker FlightAware to identify two Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flights bound for El Salvador and posted the information on X. Within hours, the ACLU had filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking the judge, James Boasberg, to order a halt to the deportations. Boasberg complied and said that any flights in the air should turn around and return to the United States. On the advice of its lawyers, the White House ignored Boasberg, reasoning that because the flights had already left U.S. territorial waters, Boasberg’s order did not apply.

While the administration disputes that it “defied” a court order, Axios suggests that the White House is “spoiling for a fight over the Alien Enemies Act,” a 1798 law that provides the executive with broad powers to deport the citizens of an enemy nation without going through normal due process. The United States is not at war with Venezuela, but the Trump administration has designated TdA as a terrorist group. In a Saturday press release, the White House argued that TdA is “closely aligned with” and has “infiltrated” the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and that it works “in conjunction with” Cartel de los Soles, a “regime-sponsored” Venezuelan cartel, to support “the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas.”

→Move over, Mahmoud Khalil, there’s a new martyr in town: Rasha Alawieh. The Lebanese-born, 34-year-old “kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school” (to quote the Times) was deported from the United States last week in yet another barbaric example of the Trump-Musk oligarchy’s relentless campaign to persecute doctors, human-rights activists, independent journalists, and anyone with the courage to stand up to the impending authoritarian takeover of the United States (see Sen. Chris Murphy’s forthcoming Ted Talk for more information). The Boston Globe, for instance, reported that Alawieh, who was on an H1-B visa, had been prevented from reentering the country after “visiting her parents in Lebanon,” while Eric Feigl-Ding, the longtime chief misinformation purveyor of progressive X, informed his 700,000 followers of the “SICKENING” news of the deportation of this Brown University “surgeon” who had “committed no crimes.”

Indeed, the news was so SICKENING that it made you wonder if there was more to the story. As it turns out, there is:

According to a report in Politico, CBP agents discovered “sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures in a deleted items folder on [Alawieh’s] cell phone.” Alawieh also told agents that she followed the teachings of Nasrallah “from a religious perspective,” but not a political one.

→Tablet Magazine is seeking Evangelical Christians to take part in a roundtable discussion about Israel, antisemitism, and Judaism. If you or someone you know fits the description, please complete this short form at the link below:

https://tabletminyan.typeform.com/April

→Despite the overheated rhetoric from MAGA influencers about “jihadists” massacring Christians in Syria, the Trump administration is diplomatically engaging with the new Syrian government behind the scenes, according to a Saturday report in The Wall Street Journal. The Journal, citing conversations with U.S. officials, said that Washington brokered last week’s agreement to integrate the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces into the central government and even flew the commander of the SDF, Mazloum Abdi, to Damascus on a U.S. helicopter to sign the deal. The administration has also encouraged peace talks between Damascus and the Syrian Free Army, which works with U.S. forces at the Al-Tanf base in southeastern Syria. “The moves are aimed at stabilizing the country and heading off a return to civil conflict that could complicate efforts to curb the radical Islamic State group,” the Journal writes, and “to give the U.S. a seat at the table as Syria shapes its future.” The report notes that the U.S. military, which currently has about 2,000 troops deployed to Syria, is in “direct contact with [interim President Ahmed al] Sharaa’s office and the Defense Ministry in Damascus.”

→The Syria diplomacy is also important for repairing the U.S. relationship with Turkey, which has soured since the United States under Obama extended its protective umbrella to the SDF, a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party terrorist group, right on Turkey’s southern border. On Sunday, Trump had his first phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan:

→Last week, we noted that the German foreign intelligence agency had concluded in early 2020 that there was an 80%-95% chance that the COVID-19 virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that this assessment was successively buried by the governments of Chancellors Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz. Now, the Daily Mail is reporting that the British government buried a similar 2020 intelligence assessment judging that it was “beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 was engineered in Wuhan Institute of Virology.” The assessment came in the form of a classified dossier compiled by the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, featuring analysis by “a group of eminent academics and intelligence experts,” which was presented to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson at some point in the early months of the pandemic. Johnson’s allies told the Mail that Johnson believed the assessment but was persuaded to bury it by then Science Minister Lord Patrick Vallance, for “fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardizing research funding”—which may be the worst attempted exoneration that we’ve ever heard. A leaked first page of the top-secret dossier reveals that Dearlove’s group believed not only that the virus had escaped from the lab but also that the wet-market origin hypothesis—specifically the infamous March 2020 “Proximal Origin” paper published by Kristian Andersen et al. in Nature Medicine—was part of a “PRC [People’s Republic of China] information operation to embed the natural causation narrative and, by misdirection, to conceal true origin and responsibility.”

→Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that he plans to fire Shin Bet head Ronen Bar—only to be told by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, whom Netanyahu has been trying to fire since earlier this month, that Bar can’t be fired without Baharav-Miara’s permission. Tensions between Netanyahu and Bar, who was appointed by Netanyahu’s predecessor, Naftali Bennett, have been growing for years but appear to have boiled over since February, when the Shin Bet publicly announced that it was investigating the prime minister’s office for its ties to Qatar, in what has become known as the “Qatar-gate” scandal. That scandal, which smells to us like Russiagate (i.e., fake), has in turn allowed Baharav-Miara to cite potential “conflicts of interest” as a reason the government cannot simply dismiss Bar—despite the letter of the law appearing to empower the prime minister to do so.

→Bible Lesson of the Day, New Testament edition:

Shortly before His death, Jesus was on trial before Pontius Pilate. All sorts of agitators were accusing Him of many things, some true, others not. But Jesus said nothing in his own defense, as recorded in Matthew 27.

What He suffered, and the unjust things He endured, are orders of magnitude higher than anything to which I may have been subject. If He can do that under such arduous conditions, then as a follower of Jesus Christ, so too should I, especially under far lesser circumstances.

This is all I have to say on any recent events related to me in the news.

That was Defense Priorities analyst and Koch-affiliated “realist” Daniel Davis (whom we wrote about last Wednesday) likening himself to Jesus Christ in an X post last week after being removed from consideration for deputy director for mission integration in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. We don’t question Mr. Davis’ faith, although we would suggest that he read the verses he quotes, Matthew 27: 12-14, a little more carefully. In the version Davis posted on X, it reads in part (emphasis ours), “Pilate asked him, ‘Do you hear that long list of accusations? Aren’t you going to say something?’ Jesus kept silence—not a word from his mouth.”

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---