US Secretary of State John Kerry gave a clear warning today.

Speaking to PBS Newshour on Wednesday, Mr Kerry said it was clear Iran was aiding the Houthis: "There are obviously supplies that have been coming from Iran. There are a number of flights every single week that have been flying in."
"Iran needs to recognise that the US is not going to stand by while the region is destabilised or while people engage in overt warfare across lines, international boundaries and other countries," he added.

You tell 'em, Kerry. Destabilizing the middle east with overt warfare across international boundaries is OUR job.

Wait a second. The Obama Administration is threatening Iran with military force, while at the same time trying to push through an arms treaty.
Does this sound like contradictory objectives to anyone else?

The United States is standing shoulder to shoulder with the Saudi-led war. We are already providing “logistical and intelligence” support via a “joint planning cell”. This week we stepped up weapons deliveries to the Saudis, which followed our unfreezing weapons shipments to Saudi Arabia's ally, Egypt.
So if we are so on-board with this war against Yemen, we must totally endorse the goals of the Saudi coalition, right?

At least the Pentagon wasn’t trying to make things up. Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of Central Command, was frank when asked what the purpose of the campaign was, stating, “I don’t currently know the specific goals and objectives of the Saudi campaign, and I would have to know that to be able to assess the likelihood of success.” Despite the astonishing acknowledgment that he did not know why the intervention was occurring and was only given a few hours’ advance notice, Austin declared himself “very encouraged that we have seen what we’ve seen here.”

That translates roughly into "We don't know why they are killing each other, but we support the killing part."

So we may not know the actual goals and ultimate objectives of our allies, but we know the bad guys, don't we? And those Houthi bad guys must be really, really bad.

Officially known as Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), the Houthi rebels began as a theological movement that preached tolerance and peace in the early 1990s, according to Ahmed Addaghashi, a professor at Sanaa University and author of two books on the movement, Houthi Phenomenon and Houthis and Their Political and Military Future.
Addaghashi told Al Jazeera that the Houthi movement originally held a considerably broad-minded educational and cultural vision.

Tolerance and Peace?!? In the middle east? How dare they!
Oh wait. Those are good things. In fact, until a couple months ago the Obama Administration was trying to make them allies in the war on terror.
Well, they must be demanding something really awful to have taken up arms against the Yemeni government.

Among other demands, Houthi leader Abdulmalek al-Houthi requested that fuel subsidies, which had been cut significantly in late July, be reinstated. If the government failed to meet an ultimatum, he said, "other steps" would be taken. The Houthis were also demanding a more representative form of government that would reflect the seats allocated to political groups and independent activists during Yemen's 10-month National Dialogue Conference, which mapped out the political future of Yemen after its 2011 uprising.

Demanding a more representative form of government? Those bastards! Even Americans don't dare do that.

Well, at the very least this Saudi-led war is helping us to win the War on Some Terror.

The new American defense secretary acknowledged Wednesday that Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen had exploited the tumult partly created by the Saudi-led airstrikes there to capture territory, in what has become a broad expansion by the Sunni extremist group.
“A.Q.A.P.,” Mr. Carter said, “has seized the opportunity of the disorder there and the collapse of the central government.”

So let's sum this up:

We are at war with a group that is demanding more freedom and democracy, and is hated enemies of our enemies (i.e. al-Qaeda).
Our allies are autocratic dictatorships that are currently shooting down anti-war protestors in their own countries, and who's objectives in this war are unknown to us.
The war is creating a humanitarian catastrophe and harming our efforts to find peace with Iran and to destroy al-Qaeda. However, our military is still “very encouraged by what they have seen".

Richard Engel tried to sum up our current Iran policy this way.

In Iraq we are fighting with Iran [against ISIS]. In Syria we are both with and against Iran, and in Yemen, now we are backing Saudi Arabia and Egypt and this other coalition against Iran, but we say we aren't going to get deeply involved.

Just to bring this whole situation full circle, one of the Shia militias in Iraq that we just got done helping in Tikrit against ISIS, is planning to send troops to Yemen to fight the U.S.-backed coalition.

In Iraq, the militias are working on the same side as U.S. forces against the self-declared Islamic State. But once the militiamen get to Yemen, they'll be fighting not for the U.S., but against the Americans -- which means that the U.S. will be battling the same forces, and in some cases the very same men, that ISIS is taking on in Iraq.

But I'm sure that to someone, somewhere, this all makes perfect sense.