For the sake of the Yemen people who are suffering as the war drags on and Houthis divert humanitarian aid through the port of Hodeidah, we need to let Saudi Arabia's pro-government coalition win the war without imposing futile ceasefires:
The December 18th ceasefire around the Red Sea port of Hodeida has failed and the Shia rebels have resumed most of their combat operations including attacks against targets in Saudi Arabia using Iranian ballistic missiles and UAVs carrying explosives. The December 18th deal was supposed to make it possible for food and other aid to be unloaded from ships and sent off on trucks to an increasingly desperate and hungry population in northern and central Yemen. The ceasefire halted a government offensive that was about to capture the port facilities and the Shia rebels indicated that would (one way or another) probably lead to major damage to the port facilities.
The ceasefire terms called for the rebels to withdraw their forces from the port area by January 1st and from all of Hodeida a week later. This was to be monitored by 40 UN personnel. This process could not get started until the shooting stopped and that never happened. That is how previous ceasefire agreements have unraveled and this one was no different.
The Houthis weren't sincere and "all" they did was buy a month of time to recover. What a shock. No wonder the Saudis are only slowly winning the war.
As I wrote as a ceasefire was about to begin in November 2018:
The ceasefire will not noticeably work and humanitarian aid delivered will be siphoned off by the Houthi for their war needs and blocked for the people who need it after a brief respite.
And the Houthi will regroup and reorganize during the ceasefire to be better prepared to fight the war when the ceasefire is ended.
So the war will last longer and more people will suffer and die. But other than that a ceasefire is great.
Winning the war more rapidly would be the best humanitarian effort:
It is false compassion to say that very tight rules of engagement and very tight application of those rules that reduce casualties from our firing to a 2 or 3 per day is better than rules that result in 100 per day if the looser rules end the war much faster.
If we wage a two-day battle that defeats the enemy and ends the battle but kills 200 civilians, is that really worse than a 100-day battle--longer because the enemy isn't being hit as hard as it could be--that kills 2.5 civilians per day (so 250 total dead)?
And how many more civilians die from other causes in that extra 98 days of fighting from enemy executions, accidents, disease, lack of medicine for treatable conditions, hunger, thirst, suicide, or the perils of becoming a refugee (like dying in a sinking boat trying to reach Europe)?
Seriously, was it compassionate to have refused to get involved in the Syrian civil war 5 years and 450,000 dead ago out of fear of "further militarizing" the conflict as our secretary of state put it? Was that truly the compassionate decision?
You may feel better by thinking your ceasefire efforts are the compassionate course of action. But other people pay the price for your warm fuzzy feeling.
