Cue the Tusken Raiders memes.

The Houthis were front-page news Thursday after the group fired on a pair of ships attempting to transit the Red Sea in violation of a Saudi-specific blockade the group declared earlier this week.

On Monday, Sana’a’s scallywagging scoundrels decreed the Bab al-Mandab closed to all vessels linked to “the criminal Saudi enemy,” as the group described the Kingdom. They cited “the equation of ‘an eye for an eye'” in explaining the partial embargo.

48 hours later (give or take), two tankers, the Encelia and the Layla, sat ablaze in the crucial shipping lanes off Yemen’s coast. The Houthi’s took “credit” for the damage.

Below, find Yahya Saree, the group’s excitable spokesman, detailing what he called — drumroll — a “special military operation.”

Did you make it through that without laughing? I doubt it. I know I didn’t.

Riyadh wasn’t amused and may respond militarily. If they do, it could reignite the long-simmering conflict between the Kingdom and the Houthis.

A brief history lesson’s in order. In 2015, the Saudis intervened in Yemen’s civil war as part of a joint effort with the UAE to prevent the country falling to the Houthis. Long story short, it didn’t work. A decade later, the group’s entrenched. Although they “only” hold about a third of Yemen’s territory, they “govern” (and I use that term very loosely) somewhere between 60% and 75% of the country’s population. More importantly from a strategic perspective, they control the Red Sea coast, including Hodeidah, a critical port city.

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi eventually found themselves backing different horses in Yemen, even as both continued to oppose the Quds-supported Houthis, creating a “civil war within a civil war,” so to speak. Simply put: It’s a mess, and one consequence of the melee is an ongoing humanitarian crisis rivaled only by the highly unfortunate situation in Sudan (where the Saudis and the Emirates likewise support different warring factions), the abject despair in Gaza and the Medieval conditions of the North Korean countryside.

The Saudis and the Houthis began to deescalate in 2022, and have largely refrained from attacking one another since, with allowances for episodic flareups. The new blockade could rekindle tensions, particularly given the extent to which the Houthis are plainly trying to prevent the Saudis from using the Red Sea to divert oil shipments that can’t make it through the Strait of Hormuz.

“I think the Houthis, frankly, got snookered into this thing by the Iranians,” Marco Rubio said Thursday, speaking to reporters in Manila. “They should stay out of it.”

But they won’t. The Houthis are a cartoonishly irascible outfit, and although they’ve developed a broader set of goals over the years that don’t all revolve around advancing Iranian interests, they still say “How high?” when the IRGC says “Jump.”

The US and Israeli militaries struck Houthi targets on dozens of occasions over the last two or so years, and it never much mattered for the purposes of deterring threats to maritime traffic. It’s the same dynamic as the IRGC in the Gulf or, for that matter, a crazy person who goes into a grocery store with a pistol determined to kill somebody: No matter how expensive, powerful and omnipresent your deterrence strategy, you can’t reduce the risk to zero.

If the Houthis keep it up, the US will almost surely strike the group again, to little practical effect. The threat to shipping in the Red Sea will remain, even if the Pentagon roasts “a bunch of goat herders,” to employ Tom Cotton’s absurdly ethnocentric, but admittedly hilarious, characterization of the Houthis.

Brent rose near $100 on Thursday. On TruthSocial, Trump warned the group and its sponsor over the attacks on the two Saudi-linked ships.

“Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if they do this again… major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran and, of course, the Houthis themselves,” Trump said, adding he’s “very disappointed” in the Houthis who “until now have acted very professionally and smart.” For a “bunch of goat herders,” anyway.