Democrats Insist There’s a Better Way to Indiscriminately Bomb Civilians

The manufactured outrage over the Trump administration’s Houthi war plans leak is guided by the Democratic Party’s own ease with aimless war

Photo credit: Getty Images

The Democrats in Congress are livid and it should come as no surprise that their anger is equal parts performative and terribly misplaced.

In the wake of President Trump’s decision to resume the US military’s reckless and illogical bombing campaign against the Houthis, congressional Democrats haven’t bothered to ask how long the salvo will last, how the Pentagon can avoid civilian casualties, or how this operation will differ from the identical one launched by the previous administration a year ago.

During Tuesday’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing to discuss the intelligence community’s Annual Threat Assessment, not a single lawmaker asked about the children the president’s recent strikes are reported to have killed. Not one senator inquired about the Houthi statement that the White House’s actions have only emboldened the group to intensify their targeting of commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea even further. Because Joe Biden is guilty of the same transgressions, none of these topics seemed like viable options.

Luckily, the Democratic Party found what it was looking for in the pages of The Atlantic. Just a day earlier, the magazine printed an account of how their editor-in-chief was inadvertently added to a private chat conversation in which a group of Trump cabinet members planned the military’s March 15 bombing against the Houthis.

There’s absolutely no denying that accidentally disclosing war plans to someone who wasn’t authorized to hear them was careless, unprofessional, and potentially extremely dangerous. However, the more important point – the one Democrats have chosen to blissfully ignore – is why these plans existed in the first place.

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The Houthis are an Iran-backed, Shia Muslim group from Northern Yemen that overthrew the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and seized the capital in 2014. A coalition led by Saudi Arabia and supported by weapons supplied by the US then intervened, resulting in a devastating war that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Shortly after Israel began its bombing of Gaza in the wake of October 7^th, the Houthis launched their own campaign in the Red Sea, disrupting the commercial traffic transiting the area as a show of support for the Palestinian people. With the official Palestinian death toll rising daily as a result of Israel’s indiscriminate and relentless bombing, the Houthis pledged to retaliate by targeting all ships sailing towards Israel, regardless of the vessels’ origin.

"If Gaza does not receive the food and medicine it needs, all ships in the Red Sea bound for Israeli ports, regardless of their nationality, will become a target for our armed forces," a spokesperson for the group was quoted in December 2023 as saying.

The first documented incident between these militants and Western forces came on October 19, 2023, when the USS Carney, operating in the northern Red Sea, shot down four cruise missiles and 14 drones fired from Houthi-controlled territory in western Yemen.

Shortly after, US and British forces began bombing Houthi targets on Yemeni soil. The stated intent of these strikes was to deter the Houthis from continuing a campaign that was interfering with the free flow of trade in one of the most vital waterways on earth.

The Red Sea leads to the Suez Canal, a maritime corridor less than 1,000 feet wide at its narrowest point through which roughly 12% of the world’s trade passes. Regarded as one of the most economically consequential bodies of water on earth, the Red Sea connects Europe and Asia, hosts nearly 30% of the globe’s container traffic, and facilitates the passage of more than $1 trillion of commerce every year.

As that fall continued, the Houthis would attack dozens of commercial vessels, prompting hundreds of shipping companies to rethink how they move goods around the world. According to data compiled by IMF PortWatch, the average number of tankers and cargo ships passing through the Suez Canal was down approximately 40% as of mid-January 2024, compared with the same period a year prior.

Shortly after the standoff between Houthi and Western forces began that fall, the cost of shipping a standard 40-foot container between China and Northern Europe skyrocketed from around $1,500 to $4,000, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research organization.

The Houthis are a group situated on the opposite side of the planet that pose no imminent threat to the safety and security of the American people. Nevertheless, the Biden administration determined that the economic danger these militants posed to global commerce represented a hazard that was significant enough to warrant military action.

How the strikes the Biden team planned would actually accomplish this goal, or why the countless civilian lives that would suddenly find themselves in the Pentagon’s crosshairs were worth trying to achieve it, wasn’t clear. Because the threshold for justifying US military action has become so shockingly low, the lack of a cohesive strategy or moral justification for the mission did nothing to discourage the president from executing it.

It was an escalation Congress never voted to approve, but the White House still authorized the operation because it was fully aware that the opposition that would follow was all but guaranteed to be merely for show. The cowards on Capitol Hill did not disappoint.

A little more than a year ago, this publication covered the futile and ultimately performative “attempt” by lawmakers like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Mike Lee to get Joe Biden to halt his unauthorized air campaign. The effort barely had a pulse and was engineered to cement their faux objections into the record, not to actually limit the president’s actions in any meaningful way.

In a joint statement in January 2024, the senators proclaimed that “as tensions in the region rise, we believe that American participation in another war in the Middle East cannot happen in the absence of authorization by Congress,” but President Biden just kept bombing.

“The President needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and involving us in another middle east conflict. That is Article I of the Constitution. I will stand up for that regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House,” Congressman Ro Khanna wrote on X on January 11 of that year. Because this warning wasn’t paired with any realistic restriction or consequence, the president ignored it and ordered strikes against Yemeni targets anyway.

Like so many other issues, how to most effectively regulate the president’s war powers has bifurcated Congress into two separate camps: the group that openly embraces its constitutional neglect and the group comprised of lawmakers like Congressman Khanna that still takes the time to cosplay oversight via empty statements that lead nowhere.

In the wake of Biden’s Red Sea campaign, most of the lawmakers who chose to comment on the weekly strikes supported them. In fact, a good chunk of the commentary said that the strikes were long overdue, and that the Biden administration should have been even more forceful against the Houthis.

Still, the matter was never voted on. Just because President Biden’s unconstitutional aggression had the support of some members of the House and Senate, that doesn’t mean that the majority of Congress agreed. Much more importantly, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of Congress would have been willing to officially attach their names to the potential consequences of repeatedly engaging an Iranian-backed militia.

The White House continued to do as it pleased but once the strongly worded press releases were published, the senators moved on. This is a pattern that’s repeated for years, relegating this once crucial part of the process to a seemingly antiquated formality that presidents could and now always do comfortably ignore.

For an entire generation, hundreds of members of Congress were politically haunted as a result of their decision to authorize the offensive and unjustified US invasion of Iraq. The upshot is that they never wanted to get burned again. This refusal to cosign any foreign entanglement that could potentially hurt them down the line has resulted in an environment which grants presidents complete autonomy to bomb any group of people, anywhere in the world, for as long as they want.

When Donald Trump dusted off the Biden playbook and turned to the Houthi page, congressional Democrats played dead. They only decided to scrutinize the approach to the issue when The Atlantic gave them something to complain about.

According to the report, senior members of the Trump administration convened on March 15 in a private chatroom on the Signal messaging app to discuss a set of strikes that would be directed at the Houthis later that same day. Some of the individuals on the thread included Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

Again, this is an egregious error that deserves to be scrutinized but unsurprisingly, the Democrats fell flat and ignored the most crucial elements of this development.

During the aforementioned committee hearing, every single Democrat in attendance utilized at least a portion of their allotted time to hammer Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel on the Signal chat.

Ranking Member Mark Warner noted the following:

Yesterday, we stunningly learned that senior members of this administration, and according to the reports, two of our witnesses here today, were members of a group chat that discussed highly sensitive and likely classified information that supposedly even included weapons packages, targets, and timing, and included the name of an active CIA agent.

…

This was not only sloppy and not only violated all procedures, but if this information had gotten out, American lives could have been lost. The Houthis had this information… could reposition their defensive systems.

Gabbard initially refused to comment as to whether she was a part of the chat, while Ratcliffe confirmed his participation before sparring with Warner about the security level of Signal as well as whether government officials were permitted to use the app’s services.

During his exchange with the senator, Ratcliffe made sure to note the following:

So that we’re clear, one of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was uploaded onto my computer at the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers. One of the things that I was briefed on very early, senator, was by the CIA records management folks about the use of Signal as a permissible work use.

…

My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.

Two foolish men engaged in a foolish debate.

Even if this is true and the Signal app really was uploaded onto his devices earlier this year, it wasn’t installed for the director to relay details about imminent strikes overseas. This is the point Democrats were trying to drive home but it didn’t land because it wasn’t made within the context of an operation that needed to happen. The senators took turns grilling the witnesses on how the lead-up to the strikes was executed, but not for a moment paused to inquire about the value of or justification for the operation itself.

The remainder of the day’s commentary from the rest of the Democrats in the chamber was just as shortsighted. The most noteworthy excerpts from the day follow below:

Senator Ron Wyden

Obviously, my colleagues and I feel very strongly about the war planning meeting over unclassified phones. Obviously reckless, obviously dangerous… both the mishandling of classified information and the deliberate destruction of federal records, potential crimes that ought to be investigated immediately. I want to make clear that I’m of the view that there ought to be resignations, starting with the national security advisor and the secretary of defense.

Senator Martin Heinrich

Director Ratliffe, I want to start with you. Who determined that the content of this discussion on signal was not classified?

Senator Angus King

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Director Gabbard, I didn't intend to get into the Jeffrey Goldberg story, but something you said has sort of puzzled me. According to open-source reporting, at 11:44 on the morning of March 15, Secretary Hegseth put into this group text a detailed operation plan, including targets, the weapons we were going to be using, attack sequences, and timing. And yet you've testified that nothing in that chain was classified. Wouldn't that be classified? What if that had been made public that morning before the attack took place?

Senator Michael Bennet

Thank you very much for holding this hearing and thank you for being here. Director Ratcliffe, it sounds to me like your testimony today and the DNI’s testimony is that there was nothing wrong at all with the Signal thread that you were on... that it didn’t include any targeting information or battle sequence. That is your testimony. That’s your testimony. And, I am a little staggered that that is your view, Director Ratcliffe. Does the CIA have any rules about handling of classified information, yes or no?

Senator Mark Kelly

I am going to come back to the topic of the day here, the Signal chain as reported by The Atlantic. Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Ratcliffe, you each testified that there was no information operational in nature, no classified information, so I want to ask each of you just a series of… just respond yes or no. I’ll start with Ms. Gabbard. In the Signal chain that we have been talking about, was there any mention of a target in Yemen?

Senator Jack Reed

Director Ratliffe, you have repeatedly made the point that there was no classified information contained in any of these discussions that were reported in The Atlantic Monthly, is that correct?

One additional line of questioning worth noting was conducted by Senator Jon Ossoff.

Because the entire interaction is worth a listen, I’ve linked the video rather than transcribing the whole exchange.

Because these lawmakers took no issue with Biden’s pointless monthslong campaign [and because they’re as militaristic as their Republican counterparts], the scope of their rage had to be tightened to something that could only be attributed to individuals within Trump’s orbit.

The Atlantic this morning revealed the transcript of the chat. The newly published logs reveal two things. First, they show that the efforts by many administration officials to downplay the significance of the chat’s contents were misleading.

“Nobody was texting war plans,” Hegseth was quoted as telling reporters after landing in Hawaii on Monday.

Actually, according to The Atlantic’s Wednesday release, Hegseth did exactly this at 11:44 on the morning of March 15.

Furthermore, the excerpts that have now been publicized illustrate that the plan to launch American bombs at some of the poorest people on the planet was thrown together at the last minute by a group of officials who weren’t even sure why the strikes were going to be ordered in the first place.

Initial reports indicate that at least 53 people, including women and children, were killed in the strikes.

Were their lives cut short because President Trump wanted to “send a message,” as Vance declared? Was it to reopen shipping lanes, as Hegseth said? Who knows? As the defense secretary noted, “This [is] not about the Houthis.”

In a healthy society, the revelation that the calculus for deciding to bomb another country could be so casual would be a generation-defining scandal. The Democrats didn’t even mention it. Based on their questioning during this week’s hearing, their concerns appeared to be centered on finding ways to more effectively execute a war we have no business fighting.

This is what makes the Democratic Party’s so-called “resistance” to the Trump presidency so comically ineffective and ultimately pointless. His election has been branded as an “existential crisis” to US democracy, yet the most authoritarian power-grabs often go unchecked. By making sure never to focus on the things that Democratic administrations have also been guilty of, the DNC is choosing to narrow the scope of its opposition to what they believe will help them in the next election cycle.

Because the Democrats were never willing to hold Biden accountable [truly accountable] for his unilateral strikes last year, they certainly can’t attempt to do the same with Trump.

[Note: This article has been updated to reflect that the USS Carney shot down cruise missiles and drones fired from Houthi-controlled territory on October 19, 2023, and not October 1, as initially inadvertently published.]