TEHRAN - The United States carried out 40 air raids on Yemen on Saturday night and continued into Sunday morning.

The attacks, ordered by Donald Trump, were conducted under the pretext that Yemen’s Ansarallah had threatened to target ships linked to Israel in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip in violation of the January 19 ceasefire deal.

Before returning to the White House, some held a wrong assumption that Trump is now more experienced and will act a bit shrewdly compared to his first term. However, he has reappeared much more reckless.

Calling northern neighbor Canada America’s 51st state, threatening to capture Greenland by force, and proposing to relocate the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and “take over’ it are a series of his rash remarks in the first few weeks of his presidency.    

Rarely a day passes that he does not make hasty remarks or decisions. The deadly attack on Yemen came suddenly.

The war on Yemen began in March 2015 with a Saudi-led coalition backed by the Barack Obama administration. However, the Yemenis have become militarily stronger and more resilient these years.

Wedding ceremonies were turned into mourning processions and many other tragedies, but the Yemenis were not subdued. 

In his first presidential term, Trump scolded George W. Bush for American “endless wars” in the Middle East. He was openly referring to the American wars on Afghanistan and Iraq that began in 2001 and 2003, respectively. 

However, after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the U.S. was forced to flee the country in humiliation. The memories of people were still fresh how the U.S. hurriedly flew its embassy Staff from Saigon in 1975 that another mishap happened for the Americans, this time in Afghanistan. Trump himself acknowledges that the U.S. left behind billions of dollars of equipment.

“We left billions, tens of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment behind” in Afghanistan, Trump told his first cabinet meeting in late February. (Of course, like other figures he exaggerates. It is also worth noting that the agreement to leave Afghanistan was made during his presidency and President Joe Biden just implemented it.)

Their wars on Afghanistan and Iraq proved scandalous. Taliban returned to power triumphantly.  Also, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the pretext for the attack on the country. The most important “achievement” of the wars on the two countries was the spread of terrorism in the region and beyond!!!

It attacked Afghanistan for giving sanctuary to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but new and more violent terrorist groups, such as Daesh (ISIS), emerged.

While the memories of the Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention Vietnam) wars are still haunting Americans, Trump suffers from the illusion that the U.S. can defeat the Yemenis. If the Trump administration continues its attacks on the Yemenis, the U.S. will be finally forced to give in to their demands and sign a humiliating agreement with them, like the one with the Taliban.

Yemenis just targeted some ships to and from Israel to force the occupation regime to end its genocidal acts in Gaza. Now that a relative and fragile truce is in effect, Yemen threatened to target Israeli-affiliated ships if the Zionist regime does not allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. 

Nabeel Khoury, a former US diplomat, says Trump’s decision to launch attacks against the Yemenis is misguided and will not subdue them.

“For our president who came in wanting to avoid war and wanting to be a man of peace, he’s going about it the wrong way. There are many paths that can be used before you resort to war,” Khoury told Al Jazeera.

The Yemenis, who have been “bombed severely all over their territory” in the past, are not likely to be subdued through “a few weeks of bombing”, Khoury said.

“If you think that Hamas, living and fighting on a very small piece of land, totally surrounded by land, air and sea, and yet, 17 months of bombardment by the Israelis did not get rid of them. The Houthis lived in a much more rugged space, mountainous regions – it would be virtually impossible to eradicate them,” he said.

“So there is no military logic to what’s happening, and there is no political logic either.”

The only solution is to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian and Arab lands, which is the source of instability and insecurity in the region.

The egoistic Trump may suffer from the illusion that he can change the course of events, but he must be reminded about the disastrous consequences of the United States’ wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. The Israeli relentless, genocidal, and futile war on Gazans is also a reminder.