On February 5, the State Department informed Congress of its plans to remove Yemen’s Houthi guerrillas from its list of foreign terrorist organizations, a decision that goes into effect today. In the two days after the announcement, the Houthis—an Iran-backed insurrectionist group that has plunged the country into a bloody civil war—launched five drone attacks on civilian targets in Yemen, leading to a condemnation from Foggy Bottom, but no change in policy. Elliott Abrams observes a “contradiction.”

What do we usually call attacks on civilians, of the sort that led to this State Department rebuke? Terrorism. What might we call [the] December Houthi attack, [on the Yemeni city of Aden, that killed 22 and wounded 50 more]? Again, this is rightly called terrorism. The main defense of the Trump administration decision to call the Houthis terrorists is that they repeatedly commit acts of terrorism. QED. And the main critique of the Biden administration’s revocation of that decision is equally simple: the Houthis have long committed, and continue to commit, acts of terror. They should be designated a foreign terrorist organization because they are one.

The motivation for the Biden decision is clear: the designation may have a negative humanitarian impact in Yemen because some suppliers of food and other goods may back away for fear of prosecution. It may also be that the administration concluded that the terrorism designation would make negotiating with the Houthis more complex, thereby hindering efforts to end the war.

Logic suggests an alternative view: that the Houthis will be less inclined to negotiate, especially because the administration’s decision comes only days after its statement that it would no longer support offensive military operations by Saudi Arabia in Yemen. If I were a Houthi leader, I might conclude “I am winning. The Americans want out. They’ve walked away from the Saudis and reversed the terrorism designation even though my own behavior has not changed. Why negotiate?” If that is right, the Biden administration ought to be thinking hard about ways to change the incentive structure it has backed into.

The day after Abrams wrote these words, the Houthi drones attacked an airport in southern Saudi Arabia, setting a civilian plane on fire.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.