Man, I wish I could think of something witty, insightful or even simply funny to say about this little game of Red Sea Risk we’re playing all of a sudden.
I managed to squeeze out the nom de guerre “Houthi and the Blowemupfish,” but my head hurt afterward and I couldn’t think of anything to do with it.
Yemen, or what remains of it, was not on the map when I was into the Parker Brothers board game Risk. Lots of places weren’t.
And I don’t recall any asymmetrical warfare in the game, either. Or in real life, come to think of it.
We’d seen “The Rat Patrol” on ABC, of course, but thought that was just “Combat!” in the desert with G.I.’s in Jeeps getting big air off dunes. We had no idea that the concept was lifted, lock, stock, and smoking barrel, from British Lt. Col. David Stirling’s real-life Special Air Service hit-and-run commandos. The last surviving member of the original group, the hotshot navigator Mike Sadler, recently died at the ripe old age of 103.
Now it seems the bad guys are the ones doing all the run-and-gun. The Somalis were the O.G’s with their “technicals” (Toyota trucks tricked out with machine guns and other delights), and now the Houthis are in the game with whatever they’re driving. Not Volvos or Teslas, I assume; the Houthis’ insistence on trying to steal or sink anything that floats in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden has disrupted those two companies’ production/shipping schedules.
A decade of dodging bombs from a Saudi-led, U.S. supported coalition has taught the Houthis to launch and leave before things get noisy on their end of the dispute. Thus we have the anonymously sourced admission from the Pentagon that despite all the boom-boom laid on them over the past few days, the Houthis retain something like 75 percent of their ability to shoot at any ducks in “their” pond. From the NYT:
But … U.S. officials cautioned on Saturday that even after hitting more than 60 missile and drone targets with more than 150 precision-guided munitions, the strikes had damaged or destroyed only about 20 to 30 percent of the Houthis’ offensive capability, much of which is mounted on mobile platforms and can be readily moved or hidden.
“Put ’er in drive, Ahmed, Uncle Sammy will be wanting a word with us directly and we don’t want to be around to hear it.”
Mad Blog Media 
Well, the thing to remember is that the Houthis are pretty much just surrogates for Iran. Without Iran they’d be a bunch of unarmed idiots jumping up and down in the desert with no effect. With Iran they’re a bunch of dangerous idiots doing stupid shit.
On a separate note, I attended a Democrat candidate forum for our congressional primary today. 8 separate candidates all want a shot at our home grown seditionist Scott Perry next November. They ranged from the retired Marine Lt Col, to a retired TV news reporter to a youngish vet with hair down to his navel who’d done a spell of homelessness (think PO’G with a lot of hair and 30 years old). And EVERY one of them had more sensible shit to say than Perry has in his entire career in Congress. It gives me hope that if we can just get rid of our traitors we can maybe progress at least a little bit.
True, true. Iran has too many dumb dogs — Hamas, Houthi, Hezbollah — on too short a leash. Someone’s gon’ git bit, is what.
Good news about your candidates. Maybe there’s a chance the voters will take a long, hard look at how some of their representatives are behaving and come to the realization that if their middle-school kids acted like that in public they’d be looking long and hard at military schools and maybe a vasectomy.
I think Jon is on to something. Perry is indeed an indictable, and it couldn’t happen soon enough.
And for the record, Saudi Arabia and Iran can go pound sand up the collective asses. They should have no problem finding some. Fucking power hungry religious nut jobs (Shia) and so called royals backed by religious wackos (Sunni) flush with oil money, mostly from us, are determined to set the world on fire. Kinda like “the troubles” magnified a thousand fold. “Religion IS mind control.” Mr. Carlin is right again.
This is just one of the many reasons why theocracy, especially when married to kleptocracy, is such a great idea. You might as well just hand your country over to Marvel Studios. Their deep concern for the little people is evident in every film as various gods and demons lay waste to major metros in endless battle.