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THE REAL YEMEN SCANDAL HAS ZERO TO DO WITH JEFFREY GOLDBERG  
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Branko Marcetic
March 26, 2025
Jacobin
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_ The press is mostly framing the Yemen group chat scandal as a story
of incompetence. There’s little attention being paid to the
deadliness, illegality, and ineffectiveness of the strikes themselves.
_

An image taken from video provided by the US Navy shows an aircraft
launching from the USS Harry S Truman in the Red Sea before conducting
air strikes in Sanaa, Yemen [, [US Navy via AP Photo]

 

One story and one story only is dominating American media attention
this week: President Donald Trump’s national security team
accidentally adding _Atlantic_ editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a
group chat in which they planned the recent air strikes on the
Houthis, who govern Yemen. It’s easy to see why. This is a scandal
that is unprecedented in terms of the incompetence and
irresponsibility on display from top officials, especially given that
it concerns the most traditionally sensitive of sensitive topics: war
and national security.

But there is so much media fixation on Trump officials’ recklessness
in potentially broadcasting classified information to prying eyes that
a lot is being lost in the mix.

For one, there’s almost no discussion about the actual nature of the
US strikes on Yemen, which were celebrated by Trump officials in the
group chat as a great success. It does seem that some Houthi leaders
were killed by the strikes. But they also destroyed
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cancer hospital and killed at least twenty-five civilians in the first
week — more than
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Biden’s own yearlong bombing of the Houthis had managed to kill—
with at least four children among the dead and another two injured.

At one point in the chat, Trump officials cheered
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the Houthis’ “top missile guy” had been identified “walking
into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed”
(“Excellent”; “A good start,” others responded). Yet there
were presumably other people in that building, too, and it’s hard to
believe they weren’t some of the civilian corpses later found
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the smoking debris left by the bombings. If this is proven correct, it
would bring up the question of whether Trump officials had admitted in
writing to carrying out a war crime.

All this has barely registered in most of the coverage of the group
chat, with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) one of the few to point out
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comparative lack of outcry over dozens of innocent people being
slaughtered. It’s hard to believe the US public would be comfortable
with their tax dollars being used to kill random women and children.
(The fact that members of the group chat stressed
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importance of “messaging” for the strikes because “nobody knows
who the Houthis are” suggests as much.)

Another question we might ask is: Are these strikes actually legal? As
I wrote
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little over a year ago when Biden first started bombing Yemen
directly, the Constitution is famously pretty clear about who can
actually declare war — namely, Congress.

Historically, the president has only been permitted to unilaterally
order US forces to wage war _in self-defense —_ if, say, US troops
or civilians come under attack somewhere. But just as with Biden’s
own Yemen strikes, that’s not what has happened here. Trump ordered
these strikes in response to the Houthis threatening to resume attacks
on _Israeli_ shipping. It’s worth noting, too, that the Houthis’
stated reason for restarting this blockade is as a response
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Israel breaking the terms of the Gaza cease-fire and once more
blocking humanitarian aid from entering the territory.

While the cease-fire was in place, there were no Houthi attacks. As
the Institute for the Study of War stated
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March 12, the day after the Houthis’ announcement, “the Houthis
have conducted no attacks since November 2024,” citing research
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the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, a typically hawkish
think tank founded
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the pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC). A different analysis
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the International Institute for Strategic Studies found that there
were a handful of attacks in November and December 2024, but
nonetheless that “there were no Houthi attacks on ships in January
or February” of 2025.

In other words, there was no Houthi attack on US forces or Americans
more generally that would legally justify carrying out these air
strikes without going through Congress.

And in fact, the chat logs make that clear, with defense secretary
Pete Hegseth bluntly writing: “This [is] not about the Houthis. I
see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core
national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden
cratered.”

Unfortunately, the Constitution’s warmaking clause doesn’t have a
special carve-out that lets the president act like a monarch as long
as it’s for restoring deterrence or reopening shipping lanes.

Ironically, the only Houthi attacks on US ships
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come _after_ and _in response to_ Trump’s air strikes (“If
they continue their aggression, we will continue the escalation,”
Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said
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a speech). Which brings up another question: Do these attacks actually
enhance US security?

Given that they directly resulted in seaborne US servicemembers being
fired on with Houthi missiles and drones, the opposite is the case:
the US government, first under Biden and now under Trump, is not
defending US lives here but putting them at risk for Israel’s sake
— specifically, to defend the Israeli government’s determination
to bomb and starve innocent civilians in Gaza. This is the opposite of
America First.

In fact, in the long term, this bombing campaign may end up further
endangering ordinary Americans, who will bear the brunt of any future
act of terrorism that serves as a reprisal for the deaths of innocent
Yemenis in air strikes. Chillingly, the strikes have already rallied
tens of thousands of protesters in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, who
were heard
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yelling “Death to America, death to Israel!” and “We defy the
Americans, we defy the Zionists!”

Even if we accept the Trump administration’s reasoning — that this
is all worth doing because protecting freedom of navigation in the Red
Sea is a core US interest— it is still hard to justify the wisdom of
these attacks. (It should be noted that Vice President J. D. Vance
didn’t agree with this reasoning, based on the chat logs: “I think
we are making a mistake. … 3 percent of US trade runs through the
suez. 40 percent of European trade does,” he wrote.) So far, there
has been only one period where the Houthis have definitively had their
attacks in the Red Sea successfully stopped, and it wasn’t while
they were being bombed.

Instead, it was after Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff leaned on
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu before Trump’s
inauguration, forcing him to accept a Gaza cease-fire. The
Houthis responded
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this by releasing ship crewmembers they had taken captive, pledging to
limit their attacks on ships, and vowing to end all threats to even
Israeli ships “upon the full implementation of all phases” of the
cease-fire deal, a deal
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Netanyahu then purposefully [[link removed]] broke
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All of which leads to the last question not being asked: What has been
accomplished by these strikes, and will they actually work? The answer
is plainly a negative one. The air strikes may have killed some Houthi
leaders, but there is no shortage of others who will take their place,
just as a year of decimating Hamas ended with the group simply
having recruited
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same number of fighters it lost, according to former secretary of
state Antony Blinken, and still posing
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threat to Israel’s security, according to the most recent US
intelligence assessment.

More than a year of strikes by Biden didn’t end the Houthis’
attacks on shipping — as the former president famously commented
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the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes” — and so far,
Trump’s bombing has only driven the Houthis to escalate their
attacks and take the fight directly to US vessels. Before that, the
Houthis withstood half a decade of much more brutal warfare at the
hands of Saudi Arabia, which similarly failed to dislodge them despite
creating a famine in the country and killing
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of thousands of Yemenis. It’s hard to believe it will work this
time.

It seems, then, that Trump’s air strikes are the worst of every
possible world: they have a dreadful human cost, they’re
unconstitutional, they’re putting Americans in danger, and they are
unlikely to even accomplish their ostensible goal. It’s not
surprising all these facts have taken a back seat so far in reactions
to the story. But if the press continues to ignore them in its
discussion of the scandal, it is failing the American public.

_Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden._

* Yemen
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* U.S. Bombing strategy
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* group chat
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* illegal bombing
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