(Dobbs) "It took 20 years... to replace the Taliban with the Taliban."

The Axis of Resistance is not easily defeated.

A week ago I wrote about the Qataris, who are trying to ease the Middle East war. Today, it’s about the Houthis, who are aggravating it.

Until now, if you knew the Houthis’ name at all, it was because of the calamitous civil war they have been fighting, and mostly winning, in Yemen. With Iran backing the Houthis and Saudi Arabia backing their enemies, it became a remorseless proxy war and tore their already pitifully poor nation apart. Today though, you know their name because more than any other player in the Middle East, they threaten to tear the whole region apart.

It started in October, twelve days after Hamas attacked Israel, when the Houthis, proclaiming “solidarity” with Palestinians, began firing on and even boarding commercial ships they think have Israeli connections, ships steaming toward the Suez Canal via the Red Sea, the narrow entrance to which they control.

But every ship heading for Suez was a potential victim, which made this a global threat. While normally 12% of the world’s trade passes through the canal, these attacks have forced as many as 2,000 oil tankers and cargo carriers to take longer routes to bypass the peril, more than doubling the cost of those diverted cargoes. 

So the United States put together a ten-nation coalition to fight back. Friday, in two series of attacks, more than 150 bombs and missiles were fired at Houthi targets in Yemen, from air defense systems to radar installations to launch sites.

The Houthi military responded with the warning that the strikes will “not go unanswered and unpunished.” The Pentagon believes their missiles can fly as far as 1,200 miles, which is ominous for Israel.

It all has the makings of a wider war. With Iran pulling some strings.

The Houthis have become a key part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which some call the “Shiite Crescent.” It is an alliance of radical states and terrorist groups supported by and loyal to Iran: Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and militant cells in Syria and Iraq. And, the Houthis. None is a friend of the United States. None is a friend of Israel. In fact the Houthi slogan includes these words: “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.” 

While more Arab nations were forging relationships with Israel before the war and their public passion for the Palestinian cause apparently was waning, the Houthis have made the Palestinians their paramount purpose.

And it has made the Houthis into heroes in some of the Islamic world.

They are the ones fighting for their brethren. They are the ones taking on the western coalition. They are the ones confronting the great powers, whatever the cost to their own nation of Yemen. Abdullah Baabood, of Beirut’s Carnegie Middle East Center, says they can afford to be defiant. “They calculate that there aren’t many valuable targets that the U.S. and U.K. can strike, as the country is already in ruins.” 

The Houthis are very tough people. I’ve reported from Yemen, just once, many years ago. The nation was so poor that most buildings, even including the U.S. Embassy at the time, were made of mud baked hard in the sun. There were no paved roads outside the capital, and only a half-dozen doctors in the whole country. Yemen was so remote that its precise borders with Saudi Arabia and Oman were missing from many maps because nobody knew where they were. From all I’ve read, almost ten years since the start of the civil war, the privations are only worse. 

Ibrahim Jalal, an analyst with the Washington-based Middle East Institute, talking with The Washington Post, described the Houthis as “a nimble militant group hardened by years of guerrilla warfare and weathering years of Saudi-led airstrikes.” It’s a reminder: with all their money and all their American arms, the Saudis couldn’t defeat them.

The Houthis are tough people, in a tough place to survive. And now they’re taking us on.

Friday, a reporter asked President Biden if the Houthis are a terrorist group and he said, “I think they are.” His goal is to stop them.

But it might turn out that between their scattered military and their mobile missile launchers, the best we can do is slow them down. Even the great powers have found that ideologically- and religiously-determined enemies, no matter how primitive and how poor, are not easily defeated. As political scientist Norman Finkelstein recently said of the comparatively parallel challenge for the United States in Afghanistan, “Remember it took 20 years, trillions of dollars, and four U.S Presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.”

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.