With the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, yet another vicious proxy of Iran has been defeated, his execrable regime in ruins. In the Gaza strip, Hamas is effectively a broken organization, with thousands of operatives killed and its leader, Yahya Sinwar, dead. In Lebanon, most of the Hezbollah top leadership has been eliminated by everything from drone assassinations to precision air strikes to exploding beepers and funding and support from Iran are effectively cut off.
Some analysts, both in Israel and the U.S., are calling for further and more potent strikes directly against Iran (the Israelis hit a limited number of Iranian military sites in October). The argument is that the Iranians are so weakened by the losses of their proxies and the weakening of their air defenses by Israel that it’s time for a crippling blow.
And there are tempting targets: The Iranians’ nuclear weapons research and construction sites, oil production facilities and further military-industrial installations. But there is a final proxy enemy that needs to be dealt with more immediately: Houthi terrorists operating in Yemen on the shores of the Red Sea.
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