Bill Roggio
speaker
300 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 8 Aug
Bill Roggio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Some of these are very easy to answer. And some, especially when you're dealing with the best way, a mercurial leader like President Trump, it really depends on his mood and his vision. And again, I just can't get inside his decision-making loop, which is interesting. And by the way, in many ways, his unpredictability A lot of people view that as a negative. I view it as an asset.
Our enemies and our adversaries have to look at that and say, you know, I'm not really sure about this guy. And we need to really consider whether we want to negotiate in good faith or not, or we want to conduct this type of attack, or we want to do this to raise the ire of President Trump. Yeah.
The Houthis are a militia terrorist organization that's taken control of, I would say, about half of Yemen. It did this in the mid-2010s, about 2015. It's backed by Iran, so it's one of Iran's, what they call the axis of resistance. These are the Shia militias that span the Middle East and Iraq and Syria and Gaza and the West Bank.
Lebanon, of course, being Hezbollah, being what used to be the premier militia, probably still is. The Houthis have become a very influential militia, particularly since the Israelis responded to Hamas's devastating attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. One month after the attack, the Houthis said that it would attack Israel, as well as Western and international shipping moving to the
Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. So they've been firing missiles and drones and other military hardware that it's accumulated first from taking over the Yemeni government and also being supplied by the Iranians. International shipping, a significant portion, I think it's like 15% of the international shipping leaves through the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal.
And it's driven on shipping costs, shipping times. And also, they've directly attacked U.S. warships. So the Biden administration delisted the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization immediately after taking office.
The Biden administration believed that the designation prevented aid from flowing into Yemen. And so the Trump administration designated his entire organization on its way out the door in January 2021. And the Biden administration came in. It's one of the first things it did was delist the entities, which absolutely made no sense.
Part of it, I think, was a finger in the eye to the Trump administration as well. It did like that the Trump administration listed them on its way out the door. One of the Trump administration's first things it did when it took office two months ago was, or actually did it last month, was to relist the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, as it should have been.
Its attacks on shipping and its attacks, it's also attacked Israel directly after the Hamas's attack on Israel. It should never have been removed.
Yeah, they've bounded the status of terrorist organization. It controls the apparatuses of the state. It has a military. Its military has to have over 100,000 fighters. We could call them soldiers in the organization. I much view it like You know, like the Taliban, we don't want to recognize the Taliban as being the government of Afghanistan, but they're the de facto government of Afghanistan.
It possesses a military hardware. It's running ministries. It's provided limited but services. It's providing the services. It's really the Houthis are a terrorist state, just as the Taliban is a terrorist state.
That's absolutely correct. And I do believe that that was another reason the Biden administration delisted the Houthis, because of animosity with the Saudis over the Saudis, how it was fighting the Houthis. That was a major mistake by the U.S. It caused serious rifts. And look, I have my issues with the Saudi government.
But you have few allies in the region, and they were fighting an Iranian client. you know, an Iranian proxy. And that was a fight that we should have been supporting. But the Biden administration, because of the Saudi government's murder of a reporter, the Saudi reporter Khashoggi, there was, you know, that was a big issue for the Democratic Party.
So over the last week, the US military has launched airstrikes against the Houthis. They're targeting... So the Biden administration did this, but in a limited capacity. It was primarily fighting a defensive war against the Houthis, used up a lot of air defense. But what they were doing was targeting... which you have to target things, military hardware.
They were targeting missiles on launch pads, weapons storage sites, but it was infrequent and it wasn't done with an intensity that could actually set back the Houthis. They refused to go after military leaders and political leaders of the Houthis. The Trump administration, I'm seeing they're not as concerned with going after the people aspect. And if you wanna go after the Houthis,
Look, hardware can be replaced, and the Iranians are very willing to replace that hardware. They've done this over time, and they've been effective at replacing that hardware. But so now the Trump administration does seem to be going after military commanders. I haven't seen indication that they've targeted political leadership at this time. That, to me, will be the determining factor. The U.S.
military, the U.S. government has to decide that it needs to launch a full-scale campaign against the Houthis in order to get them to stop. And I think these strikes aren't just aimed at the Houthis themselves. The reality is the Houthis haven't launched attacks against U.S. warships for several months.
But I also think this is a message directly to the Iranians that this administration isn't going to tolerate the actions by their proxies, particularly as egregious as the Houthis have been. And to get to your point about policy between administrations, this is something that really needs to change. If this haphazard lack of...
You know, a coherent policy that spans administrations, that's something over the last 20 years that is really, you know, a lack of continuity of foreign policy and how we deal with threats like the Iranians, like the Houthis. It really weakens us. It emboldens the Iranians to get the Houthis. They do this because they perceive us as weak.
All of Iran's proxies have a degree of autonomy. The Iranians are never going to ask the Houthis to do something that would threaten the Houthis' interests, that would threaten the viability of the Houthis. The same goes with Hezbollah, that goes with Hamas or any of these terrorist organizations, the Iraqi militias, the Syrian militias.
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