The Houthis in our midst

by David Benjamin

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
— Sigmund Freud, to Marie Bonaparte

 

NAPILI POINT, Hawaii—Once, in the course of writing a novel, my research sent me into T.E. Lawrence’s epic adventure, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, about mobilizing native forces in the fractured Arabian subcontinent to fight the Germans in World War I. Lawrence’s mightiest challenge was to cajole leaders of the many tribes in the region to suspend fighting with neighboring tribes and cooperate just long enough to defeat the Germans.

One of the insights I gathered from Lawrence’s narrative was that these warring tribes were willing—although grudgingly and temporarily—to kill, maim and pillage a different enemy as long as they had leave to kill, maim and pillage somebody. Among these tribes, as Lawrence discovered and articulated, war was waged for the sake of war. These battle-hardened peoples did not fight over turf (it was a desert), treasure (they were all poor) or ideology (they were almost exclusively Muslim), but because they had always fought. It was, in Tevye’s word, tradition.

I thought of Lawrence lately when the Houthis of Yemen who in the last decade had been battling other Yemenis and fellow Arabs from Saudi Arabia, began lobbing missiles at cargo ships in the Suez Canal—supposedly to help out Hamas in Gaza. The Houthis and Hamas both pose a profound threat to escalate tensions and unravel alliances among Arab states, NATO nations, the U.S, and Israel. As I follow coverage of these conflicts, I have yet to hear a diplomat or media pundit ask the question—of the Houthis, or Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the terrorists of Al-Shabaab—that nags in the back of my mind:

“What the hell do you guys want?”

Hamas’ shadowy leaders, for example, might say that they want to govern Gaza peacefully, without Israeli interference and most of all, without help from their tribal enemy, the Palestinian Authority. But Hamas governance in Gaza has remained, at best, rudimentary and diffident while Hamas has exercised its tribal imperative to wage eternal holy war against Israel, accumulating stockpiles of ordnance, training warriors and excavating an immense, bomb-resistant underground fortress that guaranteed a state of perpetual, traditional war.

You could ask a Houthi or the Taliban in Afghanistan what they want. They might offer lip service to an Islamic caliphate, perhaps the restoration of the Ottoman Empire, maybe the obliteration of Jews, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Kurds, yada yada yada. But the honest answer is simple, “We hate those bastards and we wanna kill ’em!” As T.E. Lawrence intimated, the bastards in question are a fungible force. The uniting principle that tends to validate and sustain a tribal group is conflict with other tribes, or against a post-tribal enemy with the power to end the reign of tribalism.

It’s instructive to look back from Lawrence’s Arabia to Frederick Jackson Turner’s 18th-century America. The U.S. government turned Turner’s concept of Manifest Destiny into policy, waging war on a nation that had been, until the white man arrived, a continent-wide network of native tribes—many of whom warred against one another by tradition, but some of whom had become so sophisticated that they had made peace with neighbors and taken up politics. Nonetheless, subtle sociological distinctions between, say, the Cherokee and Shoshone, cut no slack with an invading force whose motto was “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Genocide ended the tribal era in American history.

Until lately.

Inspired by scorched-earth blowhards like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party transformed itself into a tribal movement whose mission is not to govern but to crush its enemies. It finds enemies in its midst and in far-flung places. It describes them in religious epithets, much as Islamists denounce their foes as “infidel” and “enemy of God.” Of course, foremost among the enemies of the militant right are Democrats—excuse me, Demon-crats. It has become the all-consuming purpose of GOP zealots not to win elections (which they believe will eventually be rendered irrelevant), to articulate policy or to solve problems. The prevailing mantra is to “own the libs.” In the 2020 election, for the first time in history, Republicans at their convention adopted no platform of goals or policies except, literally, what their leader, Donald Trump wanted.

There is an inadvertent insight in Trump’s adoption of “witch hunt” to describe his many troubles with the law. In a tribal context, he is the “witch doctor,” the shaman who holds more sway in his tribe than its hereditary chief. The shaman is more a figure of mystery, mutilation and fear than of love, counsel and humility. Speaking often in gibberish and incantation, his word is indisputable and he has the power to bring down the wrath of the gods. The tribe cowers in his presence and trembles at the gobbledegook of his pronouncements. He is Christ in a fright wig, straddling a thunderbolt.

Unlike Lawrence of Arabia, Trump did not have to ride camels from valley to valley in a parched landscape to cajole his tribes into fragile unity. Trump had the luxury of sitting back on a gilded throne at Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago, abetted by Twitter, Fox News—no, all the “news”—by NBC and “reality” television, each medium stroking his adolescent ego and fashioning a cult of personality that has restored to American culture a tribal ethos more pervasive than any populist upswell since Huey Long ruled Louisiana.

In a modern democratic context, tribalism is a dead end. It is reactionary, atavistic and parochial. It fosters division, xenophobia, racism, malignant religiosity and mob violence. But its appeal, because of all those qualities, is visceral and exciting. In a life of uncertainty, insecurity and painful compromise, the tribe not only pledges its members into a like-mined, like-colored community, it identifies its enemies unequivocally and brooks no sympathy for the Devil. Instead of shouting haplessly into the wind, its members fling threats and brickbats across the fence at their neighbors.

We are the Hatfields. Those back-shooting, miscegenating, child-molesting, scum are the McCoys. They are less than human. The worst of us stands head and shoulders above the best of them.

Political analysts and social scientists have joined with the most thoughtful and sympathetic journalists in America to examine the rise of this vast cult and to understand somehow the blind worship among millions for the most shameless, transparent and selfish mountebank in perhaps the entire history of our republic. These well-meaning investigators have risked life and limb at Trump rallies to gingerly buttonhole believers and elicit their feelings and fears, to feel their pain, to air their devotion to a secular Messiah to whom their loyalty is unshakeable—even in the presence of a bullet-riddled corpse on Fifth Avenue.

But I’ve yet to hear, in any of these drive-by, man-on-the-street “interviews,” the question—which must be asked once, repeated and asked again, and again—that has the power to expose the inchoate motives of these tribal naifs and the emptiness of their faith:

“What the hell do you guys want?”