The Houthis are inviting a US military intervention in Yemen.
On Saturday, at least a dozen people were killed in an attack on the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, where Mohammed bin Salman has a rather vexing dilemma on his hands.
The Saudis would rather not return to a state of full-on war with the Houthis at a time when the Kingdom’s at pains to protect critical infrastructure and avoid additional disruptions to energy exports.
But the Houthis’ lightning offensive, which saw the group capture a series of strategic coastal towns and an island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait last month, forced Yemen’s internationally-recognized government to launch a counter-offensive aimed at recapturing lost territory. The Saudis are conducting airstrikes in support of that push. The death toll from those strikes is nearing 100 Yemenis, most of them civilians.
The Houthis have cited those civilian deaths, and the Saudis’ penchant for haphazard targeting more generally, for a succession of attacks on the Kingdom’s airports in recent days. The world needs to “understand that airports, wedding ceremonies, hospitals and markets in Yemen must not be targeted,” the group said Saturday. If they are, “the same rules that apply to civilian facilities in Yemen must also apply to their counterparts everywhere else.”
In other words, it’s an eye for an eye. The Houthis intend to avenge civilian deaths in Yemen by killing civilians in Saudi Arabia.
Saturday’s melee at King Khalid International was the deadliest of this week’s airport attacks, but more important from a symbolic perspective, October 10 was the deadliest day for the Kingdom since the US and Israel assassinated the Iranian leadership earlier this year.
The Saudis have to respond. And they will. The question is how. Most likely, they’ll just continue to conduct airstrikes in solidarity with the ousted Yemeni government the Kingdom still hopes to restore. But it’s possible MBS is at the end of his rope with this and is prepared to escalate further.
Recall that Yemen’s civil war was effectively frozen for nearly four years following a 2022 truce. That ceasefire started to unravel in July after Saudi-backed forces bombed an airfield in Sanaa, where the IRGC was attempting to land a plane returning Houthi fighters from Iran, where they attended the funeral of Ali Khamenei.
Following that episode, the Houthis declared the truce null and void. “Their willingness to prevent flights from arriving or departing gives Yemen the right to strike their airports and to impose on them a siege,” a spokesperson said at the time. Fast forward three months and the gloves are well and truly off.
Although the US has provided logistical support for the Saudis’ recent bombing runs in Yemen, Donald Trump reportedly declined MBS’s request to join the strikes early last month. That, despite the Saudis joining US airstrikes on Iranian militia in Iraq over the summer.
Asked Saturday whether the US is now considering any new requests from MBS to join the fight against the Houthis, Trump said, “We may. We’re going to look at it.” Trump has of course bombed the Houthis before to no obvious avail. This time, though, the goals would be different.
Previously, the US conducted strikes to dissuade the Houthis from threatening freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. Joining the Saudi campaign in support of the effort to oust the Houthis, or at least reverse their recent territorial gains, would mark a new phase of American involvement.
“We just found out about the recent attack,” Trump went on, in the same remarks to reporters. “So we’ll make a decision. We move very quickly.”
Everyone watch their Signal requests for group chat invites. American flag icons and flexed bicep emojis here we come.
We are well and truly in the stupidest timeline and Putin is having himself a weekend. Trump making deals with Putin and taking shots at Zelensky while Russia actively supports Iran and now we are going to get drawn deeper into a quagmire when we start going after the Houthis.
I hope diesel goes to $10 and bond yields hit 8%. We need to break this MAGA fever and it seems dear leader will need to inflict serious economic pain domestically to do it.
Don’t delude yourself. That 30% MAGA base is there for life. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change their minds. It would be easier to convince them that Jesus was a fraud than the idea that Trump is a terrible president.
The support remains as long as the president keeps shutting each and every affirmative action effort designed to favor non-white people, claiming to reduce urban (code word for black) crime, blocking immigration, both legal and illegal, and deporting darker-skinned people.
It sure aint based on worries about the cost of living.
Jesus wasn’t a fraud, he was just crazy. I say this all the time, and I’m sure it’s rough on some readers’ ears, but if Jesus were alive today and he wasn’t a violent cult leader (which I assume / hope he wouldn’t be), he’d be a homeless street seer calling out to dinner-goers in some third-tier US city, or he’d be playing drums on a discarded baking pan wearing a trapper hat —> https://kitschregister.com/2026/08/03/joy-and-pain/
“Did I tell you who I am?” “Yes, Mr. Christ. In a parallel reality, you’re the son of God and the center of Earth’s most popular organized religion.” “Exactly! And I say unto you, go forth and spread the good word!” “I will, Mr. Christ, but for right now, I say unto you, go forth and drink that free hot chocolate over there, then get in line for some soup. Later we’ll see if we can find you a cot for tonight, because it’s 15 degrees outside.”
Great!
An alternative ending might be “and then go have a seat over there. Some men from ICE are on their way. They’d like to have a word with you.”
Who says beating a bread pan on the street corner qualifies as crazy? Crazy, mythical figure or pure imagination potential aside, the re-write of the bible by the Constantinople Roman empire to promote Roman values as christianity is probably the greatest propaganda trick of all time.
My main issue with Christianity is the veracity of their texts. I was raised a Roman Catholic, but mostly abandoned my faith by the age of fourteen as it no longer made any logical sense to me. In college I was a history major, and when I studied the Roman Empire and the Reformation, I came to understand why.
Over two millennia, the Bible has gone from hand written scrolls that were copied and shared and often hidden (sometimes for hundreds of years) for fear of religious persecution; to a dozen or so major translations — each derived from different combinations of languages and sources (and sometimes made for political purposes); to differing versions that accepted or omitted certain books; to the dozens of “modern standardized” versions; to the modern discovery of ancient scrolls that sometimes differ from and even pre-date the earliest versions of the New Testament; we can really only generalize about who Jesus was and what he said. The Gospel of Thomas for example, found in the Nag Hammadi discovery, but excluded from the New Testament, tells a very different — and I would argue more plausible version — of Jesus’ teachings.
Personally, I believe Jesus was probably a real man with a most remarkable religious philosophy, which has likely been appropriated and misquoted for centuries. But far be it from me to challenge any one else’s faith or belief system. (One of my college professors used to joke that the portrayal of Christ’s Sermon On the Mount featured in Monty Python’s Life of Brian was probably the most realistic interpretation he had ever seen or heard.)
I recommend “Not Wanted on the Voyage”: a 1984 novel by Canadian author Timothy Findley.
“,,,,American flag icons and flexed bicep emojis” ,, you forgot the strangest one of all, the praying hands Witkoff included .. maybe it was prayers that they hit the migrant center containing mostly Ethiopians, (killing 68 ) , .. ya know , 2 policies with 1 bomb efficiency …
Murica