Diplomats in Washington were forced to defend the increasingly tangled web of US alliances in the Middle East on Thursday, as a surprise attack against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen appeared at odds with growing US support for pro-Iranian forces in Iraq.
The White House revealed late on Wednesday that it was providing intelligence and targeting support for Saudi-led air strikes in Yemen, which are designed to stem advances by Houthi rebels that threaten to overthrow its government.
The decision to intervene in what many observers fear could become a civil war between the Iranian-supported Shia rebels and a Yemeni government backed by Sunni Arab nations has raised concerns that the US is finding itself on the opposite side of similar sectarian tensions that have divided Iraq.
“We’re not taking sides against a Shia faction [on behalf of] a Sunni faction,” insisted a State Department spokesman, Jeff Rathke. “We’re trying to promote a dialogue process in which the views of all Yemenis can be taken into account, and it’s the Houthis who have refused to engage in that dialogue.”
The US has also denied it is overtly working in concert with an Iranian-backed assault on Islamic State militants in Tikrit, arguing that their interests only temporarily overlap.
But Rathke revealed the conflict in Yemen had been raised at a meeting between John Kerry, the secretary of state, and his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif during talks in Lausanne that are separately aimed at reaching a treaty with Iran over its nuclear programme.
These seemingly contradictory overtures towards Iran are leading to growing criticism of Barack Obama’s foreign policy from political opponents who claim he has no clear strategy for dealing with the rapidly deteriorating security conditions across the region.
“We have no overarching strategy to deal with the growing threat, and it’s not just Isis, or al-Qaida and all of their affiliates,” said the Republican House speaker, John Boehner. “We’ve got a serious problem facing the world and America is by and large sitting on the sidelines.”
But US experts close to the administration defended its seemingly ad-hoc response to recent events, insisting each country warranted a separate policy.
“Yes, it is messy. It is contradictory. That’s foreign policy,” a former US ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, told the Guardian.
“As opposed to seeing it as ad hoc … I would prefer to see it as tailored to local circumstances,” she added. “I would be more concerned if we had some sort of overly rigid policy. I think that would do us less good.”
Though stressing Iranian support for Houthi rebels was a relatively recent development in the long-running Yemeni tensions, Bodine did acknowledge that there were broader regional forces at play.
“The Saudis are actively trying to bring down Iran’s most important ally – Assad – and Iran supporting the Houthis at very little cost is a way of reminding the Saudis that if you are going to try to unseat our most important ally in Syria, we can make life very difficult for you along your southern border,” she said during a debate at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.
Democrats on Capitol Hill are so far also standing by the White House during what all agree is a challenging period for US policy in the region, especially given the threat from al-Qaida affiliates that are also active in Yemen.
“The Houthi rebels who have taken over large parts of Yemen are dangerously close to sparking an all-out civil war,” said congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, who supports US assistance for the Saudi intervention.
“Given the horrors of Syria, such an outcome must be avoided at all costs. In the chaos that now characterises Yemen, only al-Qaida and Isis stand to benefit.”
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