The New York Times reports on how the Saudi-led war has made things worse in Yemen:

With the failure of talks last week in Geneva to establish even a short-term cease-fire, it increasingly appears that Saudi Arabia lacks a realistic strategy to end the war, according to analysts and Yemenis interviewed in different parts of the country. In fact, many of them said Saudi intervention had made matters worse, expanding the violence while making resolution even harder to achieve.

“It is very clear that the Saudis did not do their homework before they went into Yemen,” said Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon. “They thought it would be really easy, but it has not turned out that way.”

It is remarkable how the Saudis have copied so many of the biggest mistakes of past foreign interventions in their attack on Yemen. Like other intervening powers, the Saudis greatly underestimated the difficulty of imposing their will on another country. Yemen has a history of resisting outside invaders with some success, but that doesn’t seem to have factored into Saudi planning at all. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that their intervention would play into the hands of the people in Yemen that they wanted to undermine.

The Saudis also seemed to expect that Egypt and Pakistan would sign up to send their soldiers to die for the Saudi cause, and they had no alternative plan when these governments balked at letting the Saudis use their people as cannon fodder. They have put far too confident in being able to achieve their goals through force (specifically through the use of air power), and they resorted to using force without giving much thought to what they should do if the initial stages of the bombing campaign didn’t succeed. The Saudis overestimated the amount of support that Hadi would have in the country, and they didn’t take into account the hostility their intervention would create. The Saudis’ goals and the means they were willing to commit were mismatched from the start, and their goals were never very realistic in the first place.

One of the more interesting things in the Times article is the description of the anti-Houthi forces, some of which are also opposed to the Saudis because of their bombing campaign:

Many share nothing other than their hatred of the Houthis. Few are loyal to Mr. Hadi, and some even oppose Saudi Arabia, despite its air support against their enemies.

Most of the Saudis’ would-be allies on the ground don’t share their goals, and some don’t even support their intervention. The Saudi-led war is already a failure on its own terms. What makes the war that much worse was that its likely failure was foreseeable months ago, but the Saudi leadership plunged ahead with the attack anyway. The intervention was entirely unnecessary, and it has caused even more harm to Yemen than many skeptics expected when it started.