The editors of the Washington Post react to our attacks on the Houthis who have been attacking shipping in the Red Sea:

The U.S.-led airstrikes against targets in the Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen represent a new level of American involvement in the Middle East upheaval that began Oct. 7. Some regional analysts are already warning that the action plays into the Houthis’ hands, and risks igniting a wider Middle East conflagration, without much chance of having their intended effect: to deter further Houthi attacks on international shipping.

Precisely the opposite is true. The Houthis already escalated the regional conflict, by using the pretext of Israel’s war with Hamas to launch unprovoked attacks against commercial ships traversing the Red Sea. The United States and its coalition allies — Britain, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Bahrain — had little choice but to mount a strong response. And this coalition employed just the right amount of proportionate firepower. If the Biden administration could be faulted for anything, it is that the same effort taken sooner might have had greater effect.

and

The Houthis’ leadership has made its strategic objective clear from the start; its goal was to draw the United States into a fight, ostensibly to show solidarity with Hamas. Having taken over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in 2014 and endured a civil war and a bloody Saudi Arabia-led bombing campaign, the Houthis survive — and thrive — on never-ending conflict. Actual governance is not their forte, as their official slogan indicates: “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

concluding:

We have no illusion that these airstrikes mark an end to the conflict, and the Houthis have already vowed retaliation. But the United States, with wide support, open or tacit from other countries, has sent a strong message. Let’s see how it’s received, by the Houthis and their patrons in Tehran.

I haven’t argued that our attacks on Houthi positions were unjustified or disproportionate but I do question whether they are achieving any tactical or strategic objective. The very fact of our attacks prove that the Houthis have been successful in achieving their military objective in harassing Red Sea shipping—it has drawn us into the conflict. Whether that’s prudent of them or not is another question.

I wish the editors had made a case that our attacks on Houthi positions were reducing support for them in the Gulf region. That, at least, would have provided evidence that we were achieving a reasonable objective. Alas, they did not.

When I rose this morning they said the temperature was -9°F (-23°C) and the windchill was -37°F (-38°C). As I always do I took Jack out for a brief walk, carefully bundling up to brave the cold. After one block Jack was ready to go home. That’s cold. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Jack complain about the cold.

Here’s how Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan of Eurasia Group, in outlining the risks they see in 2024, describe their Risk #3:

Ukraine will be de facto partitioned this year, an unacceptable outcome for Ukraine and the West that will nevertheless become reality. At a minimum, Russia will keep control of the territory it now occupies on the Crimean peninsula and in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts—about 18% of Ukraine’s territory—as the war settles into a defensive struggle with a fairly static line of control. But Russia now has the battlefield initiative and a material advantage, and it could take more land in 2024. This year is an inflection point in the war: If Ukraine doesn’t solve its manpower problems, increase weapons production, and set a realistic military strategy soon, it could “lose” the war as early as next year.

They blame the United States.

What caught my attention was their characterization of Europe’s role:

The outlook for European assistance is only slightly better. German budgetary challenges on one side, growing Hungarian opposition on the other, and a lack of leadership from most everyone else will make it hard for the Europeans to fill the gap in military aid the Americans will leave over the medium term. While Europe is ramping up production capacity, it doesn’t have the infrastructure to provide the high volume of ammunition (including all-important artillery shells), heavy tanks, howitzers, and infantry fighting vehicles that Ukraine needs.

which I find difficult to understand. The EU has half again the population of the United States and a larger aggregate GNP. Assuming that Russia does, indeed, intend to occupy all of Ukraine and, having accomplished that, will move onwards to the Baltic countries, the former members of the Warsaw Pact, and, who knows?, Western Europe as well, they face a much greater risk than we do. If they don’t have the infrastructure to provide the munitions that Ukraine needs, how do we? I think the available evidence suggests that we don’t have anything resembling the ability to supply the munitions the Ukrainians say they need.

I think the best explanations of the Europeans’ relative insouciance are that either they don’t believe that Russia actually poses a threat to them or they have confidence that the United States will deal with the situation whether they’re willing to defend themselves or not. That makes not exerting maximum effort the prudent political choice.

I’m also skeptical that Russia has any intention of occupying all of Ukraine. I’m in agreement with John Mearsheimer who has said that Russia won’t occupy all of Ukraine but will “wreck it”. Why not take the Russians at their word? From the beginning they have said that their objectives in invading Ukraine are to

• De-militarize Ukraine
• De-Nazify Ukraine, i.e. eliminate Ukrainian ethnic nationalism

I don’t know whether Ukraine will be “de facto partitioned” this year. I do think that some partitioning of Ukraine was inevitable after the Ukrainians overthrew the legitimately elected pro-Russian government and replaced it with an anti-Russian one.

but deterrence isn’t one of them. When I first heard that the United States and United Kingdom forces had struck Houthi positions in Yemen, my first reaction was not unlike the one that Farea al-Muslimi expresses at Chatham House:

The air strikes are highly unlikely to have a significant impact on Houthi military capabilities, especially their maritime operations.

The Houthis are far more savvy, prepared, and well-equipped than many Western commentators realize. They are highly experienced in waging war after years of brutal conflict, involving direct confrontation with Saudi Arabia and a lot of supporting and capacity building from Iran through the years.

and

Regardless, an anti-Israel/US stance is fundamental to Houthi ideology and their leadership will have calculated, correctly, that a Western attack on Yemen will only increase local and regional support for their efforts. The US and UK will more than ever be perceived by a majority in the Middle East as outright allies of Israel in a broader regional conflict.

The question that has not been considered sufficiently is what the U. S. and Britain are trying to achieve with the strikes? It strikes me as a politically motivated response and an instance of the “politician’s syllogism”:

• Something must be done.
• X is something.
• Do X.

Far from deterring the Houthis it will probably encourage them to more and greater attacks on Red Sea shipping and sympathizers in the Gulf region will be happy to donate to their cause to enable them to do it.

That’s not to say that I don’t think the Houthis can be deterred. They can. I just think they can’t be deterred using the approach we appear to be using and that the strategies that would deter them would be widely characterized as war crimes, both domestically and internationally. For example, if we conducted air, land, and see operations in Yemen with the objective of finding Houthi leaders and killing them and their families, that would probably deter them.

What I think we’re actually accomplishing is deterring ourselves or, as someone waggishly observed, we’ve just spent $47 million destroying a couple of thousand dollars worth of drones; good job!

What are reasonable military objectives for strikes against Houthi positions?

• Degrade their ability to carry out attacks. The means they are using are so darned cheap that will be darned hard to do.
• Take out command and control centers. Frankly, I doubt they actually have anything we could reasonably call command and control centers. I strongly suspect this is more like using missiles to take out criminal gangs.
• We could attack Iranian command and control centers. That would reasonably be considered a major escalation and might not stop the Houthis from carrying out attacks, see above. The Iranians aren’t the only ones providing financial support to the Houthis.

Let’s turn this around. What are the Houthis trying to accomplish by attacking Red Sea shipping? I suggest it is probably to show that they can and to provoke military responses. They’ve been successful. To counter that we need to cut off their supplies of military equipment and money. Failing that our attacks are counter-productive if anything.

In his latest Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria says that Israel’s war against Hamas is not genocide but wonders if it is “proportionate”:

Israel suffered a brutal terrorist attack on Oct. 7 and had a right to respond forcefully. But consider what it has done in a small territory housing 2.2 million people, half of whom are children and of which, by Israel’s own estimate before the war, only 30,000 are Hamas fighters.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of Israel’s bombing campaign notes that by mid-December, “nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. … Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair.” Of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, only eight can still accept patients. U.N. monitors report that more than two-thirds of all school buildings have been damaged, as have several churches and more than 100 mosques.

The Associated Press reports that according to experts, in roughly two months, Israel caused more destruction in Gaza than the battle for Aleppo in Syria or the razing of Mariupol in Ukraine, and killed more civilians than the United States and its allies did in a three-year campaign against the Islamic State. Proportionally, Israel’s campaign has exceeded the destruction of the Allied bombings of Germany in World War II and, as the University of Chicago’s Robert Pape notes, “is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.”

Let me start right off and admit that I have no idea whether Israel’s response has been proportionate and I doubt that Mr. Zakaria does, either, but he’s using the language of just war and I believe I understand that.

The question cannot be answered by appealing to the numbers killed in Hamas’s attack or by comparing it with Allied bombings of Germany in World War II or any of the other things to which Mr. Zakaria compares the violence because “proportionate” means something different than I think he realizes. The question is whether the amount of death and destruction being wrought by Israel is proportionate to the threat Israel faces and I don’t believe anybody but the Israelis can answer that.

Hamas has said outright that its intention is to kill every Jew in Israel. That’s part of its mission statement. Hamas has illustrated that it is willing and able to do grievous harm to Israel and kill lots of Israeli Jews. That’s the threat Israel faces.

In three days in February 1945 (mostly) British and American bombers firebombed the German city of Dresden nearly leveling the city and killing something between 25,000 and 125,000 people, mostly civilians. We’ll probably never know for sure. Was Germany an existential threat to Britain or the United States in February 1945? Almost unquestionably not and certainly not the threat that Hamas is to Israel since in February 1945 nobody believed that it was the Germans’ intent to exterminate all of the British or Americans while today nobody doubts that Hamas is serious.

At Liberal Patriot Ruy Teixeira warns Democrats that they are repeating the same mistake they made 20 years ago but this time instead making bad assumptions about black, Hispanic, and Asian voters they’re making incorrect assumptions about younger age groups. He starts by questioning just how progressive Generation Z actually is:

Just how progressive are today’s youth (or “youts” as My Cousin Vinny would have it)? It’s fair to say that compared to older generations they generally lean more left on most issues, are more likely to say they’re “liberal” and more likely to support Democrats. But that’s a relative assessment; it doesn’t follow logically that the entire generation is therefore “progressive,” especially as the term has come to be understood by Democrats.

This potential problem has been thrown into relief by recent poll findings that the show the youth vote lagging considerably for Democrats when Biden is matched against Trump in 2024 trial heats. Some polls even show Biden polling behind Trump among voters under 30 (a group dominated by members of Gen Z). But on average Biden is still polling ahead of Trump among these voters—the problem is that the margin in his favor is much less than it was in 2020.

Data from the Split Ticket analytics site, based on an average of December cross-tabular data, show Biden carrying 18-29 year olds by 11 points, a 12-point pro-Trump shift relative to Catalist estimates from 2020. Similarly, pollster John Della Volpe collected a number of mostly December 18-29 year old crosstabs on his site. These crosstabs average out to a 6-point advantage for Biden among voters under 30, a 17 point shift toward Trump relative to 2020.

Looking at polling data he finds that on issue after issue young voters see themselves as moderate to conservative and President Biden as being more progressive than they are: immigration, transgender issues, crime, oil and gas exploration.

Now there are actual several distinct possibilities. The first, as I have been pointing out for 20 years, is that placing yourself correctly on the left-right axis is highly subjective and that many people don’t actually know where their views lie on that axis. The second is that other than ideologues, the views of many people don’t fit neatly into any category. On some issues they’re progressive, on some conservative, on others moderate. A third is that President Biden is doing such a lousy job of communicating that respondents are incorrectly placing him on the political spectrum.

I don’t believe the third. To the contrary I think that the progressive wing of the party has been punching considerably above its weight since President Biden took office and whatever the president believes privately his actions have been more progressive than young voters are comfortable with.

He concludes:

The lesson here: Demographics are not destiny. This cannot be repeated enough. The demographics are destiny thesis seems to attract Democrats like moths to a flame. We saw it in the bowdlerization of (ahem) The Emerging Democratic Majority argument and we’re seeing it today in the enshrinement of generational change as the engine of certain Democratic dominance. Rising pro-Democratic generations = larger share of voters over time = Democratic dominance.

We’ve been here before with the rise of nonwhite voters. Here’s how the argument is being repurposed: if voter groups favorable to the Democrats (racial minorities, now younger generations) are growing while unfavorable groups (whites, now older generations) are declining, that’s good news for the Democrats. This is called a “mix effect”: a change in electoral margins attributable to the changing mix of voters.

and

In short, there’s no free (demographic) lunch. The boring, tedious, difficult task of persuasion is still the key to building electoral majorities. So maybe instead of blowing off these polls that show poor support for Democrats among young voters, they should take them seriously and get to work.

I think his advice is in vain. As Jonathan Swift observed 300 years ago it is useless to attempt to reason anyone out of a thing they were never reasoned into. Position are being drawn from premises and the premises themselves are unprovable.

There is another risk to the hypothesis that demographics is destiny. It is an observed phenomenon that changes in life circumstances have an effect on voting patterns. Once a Democrat, always a Democrat is not nearly as true as it once was.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about Sec. Lloyd Austin’s absence in December and the first part of January. If you haven’t Google it.

For me the mysterious absence and that his deputy was out of the country on vacation at the time and did not cut her vaca short raises an interesting question: do we really need a Secretary of Defense and if so why?

I wish the Supreme Court would come down with a decision on whether what transpired on January 6, 2021 was an insurrection within the meaning of the 14th Amendment and whether the states can bar Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of that Amendment and that they would do so well before Super Tuesday and with a 9-0 or 8-1 verdict. As usual I expect to be disappointed.