Washington: To be sure, there's a lot of suffering in Yemen. Since March 19, the World Health Organisation estimates that more than 600 Yemenis have been killed and more than 2000 injured. The longer-term conflict since 2011 has seen more than 250,000 Yemenis leave the country and more than 330,000 internally displaced.
Yet this war is still what Americans like to call a teachable moment – think of it as an opportunity to learn the difference between window dressing and true grit in the Middle East.
Exhibit A: A murderous insurgency runs amok in Syria and Iraq, committing unspeakable acts of violence – beheadings, mass executions and the sexual enslavement of women. It makes a third of each country its "caliphate" and declares that it will expand its borders. The so-called Islamic State is the biggest threat to the region since its borders were redrawn by Britain and France during and after World War I.
Exhibit B: In the chaos of Yemen, which is squeezed against the region's southern rim by the weight of Saudi Arabia, an insurgency led by a militant group known as the Houthis has taken the capital Sanaa and is marching on the southern port city of Aden.
How does the region respond?
When US President Barack Obama called for an international coalition to check the advances of IS, the regional response was lukewarm – nobody would send troops to fight for the stability of the region and while a handful of their air forces do fly missions against the Sunni militants, they account for a very small fraction of an air effort that, essentially, is American. In short, it is window dressing.
That was last year. This year, as Yemen began to unravel, Saudi Arabia demanded a regional coalition to check the Houthis' advances. The result? Nine regional air forces are bombing the rebels. Riyadh has put 150,000 troops on a war footing and Egypt and Sudan have indicated that they are ready to join a ground invasion. Now Riyadh is pressuring Pakistan to send troops. True Grit.
It is not often that we are indebted to Islamabad. But for three days this week, the Pakistani parliament has been debating how to respond to the Saudi request – which seems to ignore the domestic security crisis that confronts Pakistan.
A telling comment in the debate came from Muzaffar Hussain Shah, a senator from the Functional faction of the Pakistan Muslim League: "Saudi Arabia has always supported Pakistan, but is Saudi Arabia's territorial integrity under threat? The answer is no. There is unanimity in this house that Pakistan can't become a part of this war. It's not our war."
Riyadh's request for men and machines puts Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bind. The Saudis have propped up both his business and political careers but Pakistani public opinion is strongly against deploying to Yemen – though ready to defend Saudi Arabia.
For Sharif to refuse the Saudi request would be to bite the hand that feeds, and because his party has the numbers in parliament, some analysts in Islamabad are tipping a qualified response – troops would go, but their role would be limited to, say, protecting Islam's holy places in the Kingdom.
But if the war in Yemen does not truly threaten Saudi Arabia, why is there such a stark difference between Exhibits A and B?
Despite all the rhetoric in regional capitals about the "existential" threat posed by IS, it seems a bottom line is that they don't really mind what IS does, as long as it keeps doing it to Iran-affiliated governments in Syria and Iraq.
The regimes of the Arabian Peninsula are mostly Sunni, and IS is Sunni. But any force affiliated with Shiite Iran – such as the Houthis – must be punished.
Riyadh's behaviour is extraordinary. On its northern border, Iraq is being torn apart and it does virtually nothing. To the south, the Yemeni unravelling is far less consequential, but the Saudis have sent in the bombers and they are marshalling a multinational army for a ground campaign that becomes more likely as each new day of its air campaign fails to halt the Houthis and their allies.
At a question-and-answer session with reporters this week, Saudi Brigadier-General Ahmed Asiri was asked to respond to the argument that this was a sectarian war. As Riyadh's media frontman, the general pointed the finger of blame at Tehran.
"Who created the situation of sectarianism? The Iranians. They created the militias in Lebanon, Hezbollah; they created the militias in Iraq."
Think about that last observation – as seen from Riyadh, the problem in Iraq is not IS and its "caliphate" so much as the Iranian-sponsored militias, which are doing most of the fighting to check IS and protect Baghdad.
Doing the splits in the middle of all this is the United States – working in tandem with Iran in Iraq and giving the Saudi coalition a helping hand against the Houthis in Yemen.
That's quite a balancing act. And because it unfolds under the arc lights of a hot war in Yemen, we all have front-row seats for what the Beirut-based analyst Alastair Crooke describes as Washington's efforts to "rebalance" the region's major powers – "to strike an equilibrium of antagonisms".
