CNN: "US to designate Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization"

..."It's a big mistake," said former US Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein. "It mostly is a problem for the US government more than for the Houthis.

"The Houthis will be more or less unaffected by this. Obviously, Iran doesn't care whether we designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization or not," he told CNN Monday. "But it does make it much more complicated for the US government to play a positive role in helping to resolve the conflict."

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Feierstein, the former US ambassador to Yemen who also worked on counterterrorism issues at the State Department, said that while bureaucratically it is possible for Biden to reverse the foreign terrorist organization designation, it is also a question of politics and bandwidth.

"You have the Trump administration saying these people are terrorists. That now requires the Biden people to come in and say no they're not terrorists," he said. "And that is fraught, and it requires a political decision that they may not be willing to make."

"And then the other reality is, look, Joe Biden and his administration are going to have a gazillion things that are going to occupy their time and attention that are going to be higher on their priority list than the Houthi designation. And so it's not so much a question of can they do it, will they do it -- it's also a question of when they can get around to it. And I'm not sure that the answer is going to be very quickly," Feierstein said.