Barack Obama has sent a clear signal to the Iranian government that further arms deliveries to Houthi rebels in Yemen would be unacceptable.
“[The crisis will] not be solved by having another proxy war fought inside Yemen and we’ve indicated to the Iranians that they need to be part of the solution and not part of the problem,” the US president said on Tuesday night.
The United States has dispatched the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to the Gulf of Aden in an effort to discourage a convoy of Iranian ships from delivering arms to Yemen. In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Obama said “if there are weapons delivered to factions in Yemen that could threaten navigation, that’s a problem”. The president said “we’re not sending [Iran] obscure messages, we’re sending very direct messages”.
Yemen is in the midst of a civil war between Shia rebels backed by Iran and the Sunni central government, which is backed by a coalition of Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has announced it is halting its campaign of air strikes, dubbed Operation Decisive Storm, against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Ground and naval forces would remain in place to guard against weapons deliveries to the insurgents.
Obama expressed his hope that eventually “we can settle down the situation in Yemen” and find what he referred to as “a political arrangement”.
In the interview Obama also expressed his hope that the nuclear framework with Iran that the United States provisionally agreed to in March could be finalized to produce a “deal that the world community can verify and trust”.
However, the president was confident that in the event of conflict, the United States would be able to use force to degrade the Iranian regime’s nuclear program. “Our defense budget is just a little under $600bn,” Obama said. “Theirs is a little over $17bn. Even though they have some air defence systems, if we had to we could penetrate them.”
Obama expressed confidence that despite recent conflicts the state of the world was better than in the past. “There’s less war, less violence, around the world today than there might have been 30 or 40 years ago,” Obama said. “Things can get better. We just need to have strong partners.”
