On Houthi Bullshit and Taxonomy of Speculation
The Iran-backed Houthis are probably, definitely, possibly, and absolutely not joining the war. But also, they might.
A friend of mine, a theologian and a former priest, had me read a little book called On Bullshit about a decade ago. He gave it to me right before an important talk. I read it, felt slightly implicated, and put it away. Then, a few weeks ago, I was at his place, and there it was on the shelf. I sat down and read it again while scrolling through hot takes on Twitter (Will never get used to calling it X) and experienced something close to a spiritual communion with a dead philosopher.
Frankfurt’s book makes one point, and it makes it well. The liar knows the truth and works against it. The bullshitter does not care whether what he says is true or false. His only concern is producing an impression, and the impression he wants to produce is that he knows what he is talking about. This makes bullshit more corrosive than lying, because the liar at least respects the architecture of truth enough to build against it. The bullshitter just walks past it on the way to the podium.
I have never read a more precise description of the current discourse on Yemen. And if you think this describes DC in general, you are far more cynical than I am, and probably beyond help. We should grab a coffee.
The Original Bullshitters
The Houthis are, by Frankfurt’s measure, among the most prolific bullshitters operating in the Middle East today, which is saying something in a region where the competition is stiff.
Consider the record. In late 2023, Abdul Malik al-Houthi declared that the Red Sea would become a graveyard for any vessel associated with Israel or its allies. What followed was real enough, missiles, drones, seized ships, and genuine disruption to global shipping. But the rhetoric always outran the action by a wide margin. The Houthis promised a naval blockade they never imposed. They declared they would strike deep into Israel and then fired missiles that were intercepted or missed. When the U.S. launched Operation Rough Rider in 2025, the Houthis promised ferocious retaliation and then absorbed over a thousand strikes while doing relatively little in response. When the bombing stopped, they sank two ships, as if to remind everyone they still existed, and then went quiet again.
And now, with Iran under direct assault by the United States and Israel, the pattern has reached its most absurd iteration yet. Even before the strikes began, Houthi media had promised a “Red Death” in the Red Sea should Iran be attacked. Iran was attacked. Then al-Houthi declared that “our fingers are on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment should developments warrant it.” Mohammed al-Bukhiti promised “zero hour” was coming and floated the possibility of closing the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The media apparatus produced rallies, statements, posters of the late Khamenei, and declarations of eternal solidarity with the Islamic Republic. What it has not produced is a single missile, a single drone, or a single military action of any kind. The only trigger the Houthis pulled in the weeks since their patron was struck was an artillery strike on civilians during iftar in Hajjah that killed sixteen Yemenis. Three weeks of fingers on triggers and not one trigger pulled at the enemy. At a certain point you have to admire the finger discipline.
The Houthis are not lying about their intentions, because lying would require a commitment to a specific falsehood. They are doing something more slippery. They are producing the atmosphere of imminent action without any obligation to follow through, and they have been doing it long enough that it should be recognizable by now. We can call it deterrence, scrambling, and a bunch of other names, but the most obvious one is bullshit.
The Secondary Industry
Instead, the Houthis’ own bullshit has generated a secondary cottage industry of bullshit, this one produced not by militia leaders in Sanaa but by analysts, commentators, and think tank fellows in Washington, London, and places behind a laptop. Since the war in Iran erupted on February 28, a considerable volume of confident commentary has emerged in just three short weeks to explain Houthi inaction, and nearly all of it shares one quality with the Houthi statements it purports to analyze, which is that it is not grounded in evidence but in the desire to sound like it is grounded in evidence. Frankfurt would have recognized the family resemblance immediately. I recognized it from my couch, which is less impressive but still counts.
What follows is a taxonomy of that speculation. A sea of contradictory analysis has surfaced, and it goes something like this: the Houthis are definitely, probably, possibly, and absolutely not joining the war. They could but they can’t. They will but they won’t. I realize we are all working with incomplete information in a fast-moving situation, and the temptation to produce an explainer is genuinely difficult to resist, as I am demonstrating right now by writing one on top of three or four other explainers I have given before. The problem is not that people are trying to answer a hard question. The problem is that the answers I have seen were accompanied by a level of confidence the evidence cannot support.
The Command Theory
The first and most persistent claim is that the IRGC has ordered the Houthis to stay out of the fight. Sometimes this is framed as strategic choice, with Tehran supposedly holding the Houthis in reserve for a later phase of the war. In one particularly creative version, Iran has already begun activating its proxies, with Hezbollah first, then Iraqi militias, saving the Houthis for the endgame. This narrative requires you to believe that the IRGC, currently operating without its supreme leader and half its senior command, is playing four-dimensional chess. It also requires you not to ask who is on the other end of the phone. Some outlets call the Houthis a “reserve card to be played.” Others quote commentators saying Tehran “does not want to use all its cards at once.” Others say the Houthis are “keeping their cards close to their chest.” At this point, Tehran’s Yemen strategy is apparently a poker game, a chess match, and an insurance plan simultaneously.
The appeal of this theory is that it suggests somewhere, in a room none of us have been in, a decision was made, and the analyst has reverse-engineered it from the outcome. The problem is that nobody advancing it has produced a single piece of evidence. Not a leaked communication, not a sourced account, not even a credible anonymous briefing. Knowing that Iran and the Houthis are connected is not the same as knowing what was said on the phone last Tuesday.
The Independence Fantasy
The second theory is the mirror image of the first. In this version, Houthi inaction proves that the group is not really a proxy at all, that it operates autonomously, and that it has made a sovereign calculation to sit this one out. This reading has a certain elegance. It resolves the puzzle neatly and flatters the analyst’s preference for complexity over the crude “Iran controls everything” narrative.
But the logic is identical in reverse, which should be a warning sign. If you cannot prove the IRGC ordered the Houthis to stay quiet, you also cannot prove they chose to stay quiet on their own simply by pointing to the fact that they are quiet. Inaction is not evidence of motive. It is the absence of action, and the absence of action can be produced by a dozen different causes, from internal disagreement to calculated ambiguity to someone important not answering their phone. Extracting a grand theory of organizational autonomy from a single silence is like diagnosing a disease from one symptom. You can do it, but you should probably run some tests first.
The Crystal Ball
The third species of speculation is my personal favorite, because it requires the least effort and produces the most drama. This is the claim that the Houthis have “surprises up their sleeve” or are “waiting for the right moment” or will enter the war “when developments warrant it.” This last phrase, you may notice, is borrowed directly from Abdul Malik al-Houthi’s own televised address, which means that some analysts are now citing the Houthi leader’s talking points back to their readers as if they were analysis. There is a word for this, and it is not “insight.”
The crystal ball theorist does not claim to know what the Houthis will do. He claims to know that they will do something, and that the something will be significant, and that its timing will reveal strategic genius. This is not a prediction. It is a mood. It is the analytical equivalent of a movie trailer that shows explosions but will not tell you the plot. It creates the feeling of anticipation without any obligation to be right, which is a very comfortable place from which to operate.
The Alarm Factory
Adjacent to all of this, and feeding it, is a growing category of commentators who treat every Houthi statement as if it were an operational order. Al-Bukhiti mentions the Bab al-Mandab and within the hour it is a “breaking” development on six feeds. Al-Houthi says “our fingers are on the trigger” and the commentary class produces seventeen threads on what “the trigger” might refer to. A mid-ranking Houthi official gives a televised interview with the standard rhetorical flourishes and someone who has never read a Houthi communiqué in Arabic files it as “Houthis signal imminent escalation.”
The Houthis have spent years producing statements designed to generate exactly this kind of breathless coverage, and a surprising number of people have volunteered to distribute them. The result is a state of persistent alarm that serves the Houthis’ interests far more than it serves anyone else’s. Every “breaking” alert about a Houthi threat that does not materialize is a small deposit in the group’s credibility bank, because it keeps them relevant without requiring them to spend a single missile.
The question nobody in this category seems to ask is a simple one: when is a Houthi statement a signal and when is it just propaganda? The two look identical from the outside, and the only way to tell them apart is to track what happened after the last time they said the same thing. This requires memory, patience, and a willingness to go back and check, which is harder than retweeting a quote and adding a siren emoji.
The Scenario Machine
Finally, there is the framework that has come to dominate the think tank commentariat, in which the analyst presents three or four possible explanations for Houthi behavior, evaluates each with a paragraph of plausible-sounding reasoning, and then concludes by saying it is too early to tell. Unable, unwilling, or biding their time. Pick one, or better yet, don’t, because the analyst certainly won’t.
This format is actually desired, and I have in the past been called upon to generate scenarios. It is not my favorite form of writing or thinking, but it has become so common in the past four weeks that it now reads less like analysis and more like a genre, the war commentator’s version of a horoscope. It tells you several things that could be true, declines to commit to any of them, and leaves you feeling like you have learned something when, in fact, you have only been presented with options.
The deeper problem with the scenario machine is not that scenarios are inherently useless. It is that these particular scenarios are never anchored in primary evidence. They do not engage with what the Houthis have actually said in their own media, on their own channels, in their own language. They do not track the gap between Houthi rhetoric and Houthi action across previous cycles, which is the one thread of evidence that is actually available and actually illuminating. They reason from the outside in, applying generic armed-group decision theory to a specific movement with a specific history and specific patterns of communication. You could produce these pieces without knowing anything about Yemen at all, and in some cases, well.
What would help
There is a way to interpret what is happening with Iran’s favorite proxy right now, but it requires a willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than fill it with confidence. It requires less reliance on headlines and Houthi rhetoric, and a better understanding of patterns. The gap between what the Houthis say they will do and what they actually do is not a mystery but rather an open record. But reading it takes patience, and patience does not go viral.
And the question itself, why the Houthis have not fired is a very incomplete one. A movement that has spent months conscripting Yemenis in the North into a ground force was not building toward a missile campaign. The rhetoric points seaward but the mobilization points landward. Those two things are not in tension if you have been watching both.
Meanwhile, there is a boy in Rayma who graduated from an ideological course he never enrolled in, wearing a uniform he did not choose, for a cause his family does not share. There is a family in Hajjah that sat down for iftar last week and buried their children the next morning in a targeted Houthi shelling. There are entire governorates whose young men have been folded into a machinery of total mobilization, not because they believe in the axis of resistance but because there was no institution left in their lives that was not already part of it. The Houthis have already shown us what they are building. It is not a missile force but a ground war machine, assembled from the lives of people who were never asked.
That gap, between rhetoric and action, is the only starting point for answering the question everyone is asking. It will not give you a clean three-scenario framework. It will not produce the kind of confident, quotable conclusion that gets you on cable news. But it has the small advantage of being tethered to something real.
Everything else is bullshit.