On the menu today: Happy Saint Patrick’s Day. You’re almost certainly having a luckier day than the Houthis. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that not only was the lab-leak idea plausible, there was an organized, dishonest effort to demonize and discredit the theory. Elsewhere, American journalists in Moscow tell Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov how untrustworthy their own government is, and now Tulsi Gabbard is opposed to leaks of classified information.
You Had a Better Weekend than the Houthis
I’ve been awfully critical of President Trump lately, and deservedly so — but that doesn’t mean his bellicose nature doesn’t periodically steer the U.S. in productive directions. The Houthis in Yemen — kidnapping, humanitarian-aid-obstructing, cholera-exacerbating Islamists who carried out a “partial and limited reintroduction of slavery” — earned a hard-nosed American response long ago. From late 2023 to January, the Houthis enjoyed the benefits of an octogenarian president who wanted to brag that “the United States is not at war,” even while the U.S Navy was in “the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II, its leaders and experts told The Associated Press.” The Biden approach was to fight the Houthis half-heartedly and hope the American people didn’t notice.
With the backing of Iran, the Houthis have been attacking ships in the Red Sea since 2016, but their attacks seriously intensified in November 2023, effectively blocking off one of the world’s key trade routes. The Houthis did not target Chinese ships, and reportedly are assisted with Russian intelligence and North Korean weapons. (It is an “axis” or interlocking efforts and cooperation, whether we like to call it that or not.)
The “don’t mention the war” philosophy was so intense that back in August, the Houthis attacked a tanker ship with four times the oil of the Exxon Valdez and deliberately planted and detonated explosives. You didn’t hear a peep from the green crowd.
Upon returning to office, Trump reversed a Joe Biden decision and re-designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization. A day later, the Houthis made some conciliatory gestures, pledging to not attack U.S. or British ships in the Gulf. (Note that January’s coverage of Trump and the Houthis got translated and read over in Yemeni press. I’m telling you, this newsletter is just huge in Sana’a.)
But in the first week of March, Yemeni-Houthi leader Abdul-Malik Badreddine Al-Houthi accused Israel of violating the cease-fire and warned, “If, after four days, the Israeli enemy continues to prevent the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip, continues with its complete closure of the border crossings, and it keeps preventing the entry of food and medicine into the Gaza Strip, then we will resume our naval operations against the Israeli enemy. We say it loud and clear — a siege will be met with a siege.”
On March 15, U.S. Central Command initiated an operation consisting of precision strikes against Iran-backed Houthi targets across Yemen in order to restore freedom of navigation. (Beware the Ides of March, Houthis.) You can see Pentagon-released video of U.S. fighter jets taking off and landing from the sorties from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier here. The Houthis counterattacked on Sunday, although not in a particularly effective manner:
The Houthis claimed on Sunday to have fired 18 ballistic missiles and a drone at the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier group in two separate attacks over the previous 24 hours. The strike, the group said, “succeeded in thwarting a hostile attack the enemy was preparing to launch against our country.”
A U.S. official told ABC News that the Houthis fired 11 drones and one ballistic missile, none of which came close to hitting any U.S. vessels.
All drones were downed by fighters — 10 shot down by Air Force planes and one by Navy planes — while the ballistic missile was not intercepted as it fell far short of the vessels, the official said.
One U.S. official told Reuters the campaign might continue for weeks.
The New York Times: Oh, Hey, Our Trusted Experts Lied to Us About ‘Covid’s Natural Origin’
Better late than never, but a mere five years after the Covid pandemic shut down our lives, the New York Times ran an op-ed that doesn’t just concede, “Eh, maybe the lab-leak theory makes sense after all,” but lays out the scope of the scandal directly and clearly in the headline: “We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives.”
Zeynep Tufekci writes:
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.
Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles or the evolving bird flu, right?
Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk. . . .
If you scroll all the way down to Page 19 of the journal article and squint, you learn that the scientists did all this under what they call “BSL-2 plus” conditions, a designation that isn’t standardized and that Baric and Lipkin say is “insufficient for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.” If just one lab worker unwittingly inhaled the virus and got infected, there’s no telling what the impact could be on Wuhan, a city of millions, or beyond it, the world.
You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test potential gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.
Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe, without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.
Ya think? Nobody learned anything — at least, not nearly enough people in positions of authority who exhibited jaw-dropping arrogance.
Why would we be surprised that the Chinese government’s Wuhan Institute of Virology is still doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in bats in insufficiently safe lab conditions? What consequences did the Chinese government face for the first time they did this? Zero, zip, zilch, nada. When the pandemic hit, we started buying tons of personal protective equipment . . . from China.
Tufekci’s op-ed is good to see, with a couple caveats:
- Why aren’t we seeing this from the editorial board? Is hers a minority view on the Times editorial board?
- Why isn’t this on the news pages?
- Tufeki concludes, “The goal should be an international treaty guiding biosafety,” but China breaks treaties as easily as breathing.
The regime in Beijing has a particularly arbitrary perspective on when international law counts; a few years ago, a Chinese diplomat insisted, “The countries of the Soviet Union have no effective status in international law because there is no international agreement to recognize their status as sovereign countries.” As Michael Sheridan put it back in 2023, “Any policymaker negotiating with China — or dreaming it might be a reliable peace broker in Ukraine — needs to grasp the Marxist-Leninist thinking of its leaders. Power counts, scraps of paper don’t.”
Americans in Moscow: ‘I’m Not Sure I Trust My Own Country’
A quick follow up to Friday’s newsletter point about former Fox News host Andrew Napolitano traveling to Moscow and coming back singing the praises of the Russian state. Apparently, on March 12, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sat down for an interview with three Americans — Mario Nawfal, Larry C. Johnson, and Napolitano. You can find the Russian Foreign Ministry’s transcript of their conversation here.
They don’t identify which American asked which question, but they do transcribe the questions. A sample:
“Mr. Minister, it’s a pleasure to speak to you Sir. The first question I have, as I speak to people here in Moscow — there’s a perception that the US has changed, they are describing the US completely differently under President Trump. Do you think the US as a culture, not only the perception but do you think has it fundamentally changed and their perception of Russia and President Putin?”
“Mr. Minister, pleasure to be here. An early happy birthday to you. You have a special birthday coming up. I have the same one shortly afterwards. We are not the same day but shortly after. We are both the same age. We are born in the same year. Thank you for inviting us here. I want you to talk to us about NATO and the reaction in the Foreign Ministry to the treachery of NATO, and how the Foreign Ministry will view it if and when the United States leaves NATO?”
“The treachery of NATO”!
“You know, I’m not sure I trust my own country. I know that the Russian government is quite sincere in looking to pursue a diplomatic solution. What troubles me, and it’s something that I continue to hear now from people in significant positions just as the United States cynically developed a relationship with China in 1972 under Nixon. It was for the express purpose of going after then the Soviet Union, they wanted to make sure that they split them apart.”
“I have heard several people, and I know that this Elbridge Colby who is going to be like the number three person in the Department of Defense that they see China as the enemy and they believe that they can split Russia from China and again, use you (not you personally, Mr. Minister, but the country) as a wedge against China. Now, I try to say that’s foolishness because unlike the United States the Russian government takes its agreements seriously and adheres to them.”
“You know, it’s been said that you’re the Metternich of the modern era, but I think that’s wrong. They should say that Metternich was the Lavrov of his era.”
It’s not unusual to attempt to butter up your interview subjects, but even Paula Deen would say that’s excessive buttering.
Look, America’s not perfect. We’ve got flaws and problems, some old, some new. Criticizing your own country, and your own country’s government, is not just protected under the First Amendment, it’s often a prerequisite to solving those problems. I try to avoid criticizing my own country in front of foreigners because I feel like we ought to try to solve them “in house” and keep it in the family, so to speak. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with telling a foreign citizen, or even a foreign official, about where you think your country has gone wrong.
But there are some Americans out there who absolutely loathe their home country, and who are more than eager to sign on with some other hostile state’s worldview and public communications efforts. We used to say of particularly vociferous opponents of U.S. military action during the War on Terror, “They’re not pro-peace, they’re just on the other side.”
It’s not that hard to find American commentators insisting that the war in Ukraine is all the fault of the West, that the Russian government is all peaches and cream, and that mass graves in 2022 are justified because of what Mikhail Gorbachev later claimed he heard James Baker say back in 1990.
Just remember that there are some Americans out there who are very angry at their home country for not meeting their expectations, and they’re more than willing to tear down the reputation of our country in exchange for some flattery and access from hostile states.
ADDENDUM: I fully applaud this statement from our new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard:
Our nation’s Intelligence Community must be focused on our national security mission. Politically motivated leaks undermine our national security and the trust of the American people and will not be tolerated. Unfortunately, such leaks have become commonplace with no investigation or accountability. That ends now. We know of and are aggressively pursuing recent leakers from within the Intelligence Community and will hold them accountable.
I just find it a little hard to square with her declaring in October 2020:
I introduced [House Resolution] 1162 with my colleague congressman Matt Gaetz, that very simply calls on our government to drop all charges against Edward Snowden for the actions that he took in the public interest to expose a mass government surveillance program on all Americans that violates our privacy and civil liberties, and that courts deemed illegal more than once.