Houthis Launch Attacks on Saudi Cities and Oil Facilities Amid Yemen Conflict
When Rockets Replace Laws, No Side Holds Legitimate Power
The Houthi strikes on Saudi cities and oil works are not acts of rightful war or governance but naked force against innocents, proof of a deeper dissolution of political trust on every side.
The news reports that Houthi forces have launched drones and missiles into Saudi Arabia, igniting fires at oil facilities, striking what are called civilian and economic sites in several cities, wounding at least seventy‑three people, and that women and children are among the injured. We are further told this comes after weeks of escalating clashes between the Houthis and Saudi‑backed government forces in Yemen, shattering a four‑year truce in that country’s civil war, and that earlier Houthi attacks have killed both civilians and Yemeni government forces. There is here enough, without knowing every particular, to see that power is being exercised, blood is being shed, and men claim a right to do so.
When I wrote the Second Treatise of Government, I began by observing that men are by nature in a state of perfect freedom and equality, subject only to the law of nature, which is reason teaching that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Political power is, by my own definition there, only a right of making laws, with penalties, for no other end but the public good. Any man or body of men who claim authority must justify it by consent, and by their faithful care of the lives and estates of those under their rule. This is the standard by which I must judge these present actions, however remote their scene is from my own time.
First, as to the Houthi attacks themselves. However they style their cause, and whether they consider themselves a government, an army of resistance, or something else, reason sits in judgment on their means. To direct explosive force at civilian and economic sites in cities such as Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jazan, and Najran, knowing that ordinary inhabitants, including women and children, will be maimed or killed, is plainly to violate that fundamental rule that no one ought to harm another in his life or health except in the strictest necessity of defence. These are not narrowly aimed blows upon an opposing army; they are hazards cast into the dwellings and marketplaces of those who have given no particular offence.
Some will say that their adversaries do the same or worse, that the Saudi‑backed forces have carried out many air strikes in Yemen, and that the Houthis answer violence with violence. I do not deny that the report hints at a wider circle of harms; yet wrongs on one side do not change the nature of wrongs on the other. If those who govern from Riyadh, or those Yemeni authorities they support, use their power likewise to strike indiscriminately, to destroy the property and hazard the lives of innocents, they too exceed the trust annexed to all political power and put themselves, as I once paraphrased it, into a state of war with the people. It is no excuse for one usurpation that it mirrors another.
Secondly, we must consider what it means that a truce of four years in Yemen’s civil war has been shattered by weeks of escalating clashes. A truce, however imperfect, is a kind of tacit agreement to suspend the sword and return, in part, to the rule of known standing norms. Its breaking tells us that the competing claimants to authority have not found a legislative common to them all, nor an impartial judge whom both sides will obey. Each, therefore, acts as judge in his own case, and where that happens for any length of time, men slide back toward the state of nature, but with this difference: they now wield engines of destruction capable of wounding scores at once and of disturbing not only their own people but the commerce of many nations.
Thirdly, what follows for the people subject to these powers? If either party, Houthi or Saudi‑backed, uses arms chiefly to secure dominion, to punish populations, or to overawe them by terror, rather than to preserve their lives, liberties, and estates, then they have broken the very trust for which government was first erected. In such a case, as I long ago argued concerning the dissolution of government, it is not the people who are rebels, but the rulers who, by a long train of abuses tending to the destruction of property, have first rebelled against the people. The right of resistance then revives, not as a licence for every private discontent, but as the common refuge God has provided against force and violence.
What, then, should men of understanding in that region desire? Not the victory of one arbitrary power over another, but the emergence, however slowly, of a form of government in which laws are made by a body chosen by the community, executed by officers bound to those laws, and confined to the protection of all within their reach, whether they dwell in Sana’a or Riyadh, in Abha or Jazan. Until authority on every side submits itself to that rule, and until the lives of those seventy‑three wounded and of the nameless slain weigh more with leaders than the pride of command, there will be, whatever the banners and the slogans, more force than government, and more cause for an appeal to heaven than for confidence in princes.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Dissolution of government and the right of resistance: when legislators invade property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people, not the people against them.