So far, the U.S. has responded to attacks by Iran-backed terrorists either by inaction or by attacks on the groups themselves, while avoiding what Naftali Bennett called “the head of the octopus.” Oved Lobel argues that deterrence
can only be achieved by also targeting those actually responsible for these attacks: the Islamic regime ruling Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). For too long, the U.S. has been engaging in the IRGC’s shell game, pretending that the Houthis, more formally known as Ansar Allah, were a Yemeni problem. The reality is that, like Hizballah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, and various militias in Iraq and Syria, Ansar Allah is an IRGC problem. . . .
Imagine if the situation were reversed and the Islamic Republic treated every branch of the U.S. military as an independent organization, each merely backed by or allied with the U.S. government. Whenever the U.S. Air Force struck a regime target, for instance, it would respond only against the air force, never the U.S. Army or Navy, and in a very narrow fashion, with [the U.S.] itself never suffering any kind of retaliation. At no stage would they all be treated as a unitary enemy whose decision-making center was in Washington.
If this seems patently absurd, that is because it is, and it is precisely what the U.S. is doing by trying to compartmentalize the components of the IRGC and deter each one as if it weren’t part of a whole. This approach, for obvious reasons, isn’t working in Iraq and Syria and it clearly won’t work in Yemen.
Read more on Fresh Air: https://aijac.org.au/australia-israel-review/stopping-the-houthis-requires-thinking-bigger/