We saw Lieberman slobbering over the prospects for a new war in a Muslim country, as if the present ones are not enough. Here's a good article on the prospects for such a war and some info the country the focus of our next war. ******** Patrick Cockburn: Threats to Yemen prove America hasn't learned the lesson of history Extraordinarily, the US is making exactly the same mistake as in Iraq and Afghanistan Thursday, 31 December 2009 ... Yemen has always been a dangerous place. Wonderfully beautiful, the mountainous north of the country is guerrilla paradise. The Yemenis are exceptionally hospitable, though this has its limits. For instance, the Kazam tribe east of Aden are generous to passing strangers, but deem the laws of hospitality to lapse when the stranger leaves their tribal territory, at which time he becomes "a good back to shoot at". The Awaleq and Kazam tribes are not exotic survivals on the margins of Yemeni society but are both politically important and influential. The strength of the central government in the capital, Sanaa, is limited and it generally avoids direct confrontations with tribal confederations, tribes, clans and powerful families. Almost everybody has a gun, usually at least an AK-47 assault rifle, but tribesmen often own heavier armament. ... Yemen is a mosaic of conflicting authorities, though this authority may be confined to a few villages. Larger communities include the Shia around Sanaa in the north of the country near Saada, with whom the government has been fighting a fierce little civil war. The unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 has never wholly gelled and the government is wary of southern secessionism. Its ability to buy off its opponents is also under threat as oil revenues fall, with the few oilfields beginning to run dry... There is ominous use by American politicians and commentators of the phrase "failed state" in relation to Yemen, as if this some how legitimised foreign intervention. It is extraordinary that the US political elite has never taken on board that its greatest defeats have been in just such "failed states"', not least Lebanon in 1982, when 240 US Marines were blown up; Somalia in the early 1990s when the body of a US helicopter pilot was dragged through the streets; Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein; and Afghanistan after the supposed fall of the Taliban. Yemen has all the explosive ingredients of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. But the arch-hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, was happily confirming this week that the Green Berets and the US Special Forces are already there.... The US will get entangled because the Yemeni government will want to manipulate US action in its own interests and to preserve its wilting authority. It has long been trying to portray the Shia rebels in north Yemen as Iranian cats-paws in order to secure American and Saudi support. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) probably only has a few hundred activists in Yemen, but the government of long time Yemeni President Ali Abdulah Salih will portray his diverse opponents as somehow linked to al-Qa'ida. In Yemen the US will be intervening on one side in a country which is always in danger of sliding into a civil war. This has happened before. In Iraq the US was the supporter of the Shia Arabs and Kurds against the Sunni Arabs. In Afghanistan it is the ally of the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara against the Pashtun community. Whatever the intentions of Washington, its participation in these civil conflicts destabilises the country because one side becomes labelled as the quisling supporter of a foreign invader. Communal and nationalist antipathies combine to create a lethal blend. Despite sectarian, ethnic and tribal loyalties in the countries where the US has intervened in the Middle East, they usually have a strong sense of national identity. Yemenis are highly conscious of their own nationality and their identity as Arabs. One of the reasons the country is so miserably poor, with almost half its 22 million people trying to live on $2 a day, is that in 1990 Yemen refused to join the war against Iraq and Saudi Arabia consequently expelled 850,000 Yemeni workers. It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq. What it is doing is much to al-Qa'ida's advantage. The real strength of al-Qa'ida is not that it can "train" a fanatical Nigerian student to sew explosives into his underpants, but that it can provoke an exaggerated US response to every botched attack. Al-Qa'ida leaders openly admitted at the time of 9/11 that the aim of such operations is to provoke the US into direct military intervention in Muslim countries. In Yemen the US is walking into the al-Qa'ida trap. Once there it will face the same dilemma it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became impossible to exit these conflicts because the loss of face would be too great. Just as Washington saved banks and insurance giants from bankruptcy in 2008 because they were "too big to fail," so these wars become too important to lose because to do so would damage the US claim to be the sole superpower... http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...nt-learned-the-lesson-of-history-1853847.html
If they continue to breed terrorists over there then hell yes I'd send my kids there to take them out. Period.
I hate to keep quoting perpetually from the same man's blog over and over, but Col. Lang knows of what he speaks: [rquoter] Yemen as quagmire [rquoter] "Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi told the BBC that Yemen had the will and ability to deal with al-Qaeda, but was undermined by a lack of support. He estimated that several hundred al-Qaeda members were operating in Yemen and could be planning more attacks. A Yemen-based branch of the network has claimed it planned the failed attack. Yemeni officials said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up the Detroit-bound jet on Christmas Day, was living in Yemen from August until the beginning of December, the official Saba news agency reported. " BBC [/rquoter] I was Defense and Army Attache in the US Embassy in Sana, North Yemen in 1981 and 1982. I have been back several times. most recently three or four years ago. The same man, Ali Abdullah Salih, is president of a united north and south Yemen. He was merely president in the north when I lived in Sana. There have been no "breaks" in his service. The country is an example of tribalism run riot. Except for the coastal plains the terrain is a wilderness of dissected mountain ridges, each of which is topped by a very defensible village. The tribal structure is very complex and divided into; confederations, tribes, clans, families, etc. In the north of the country live Zeidi (Fiver) Shia. Their type of Shiism is the closest to Sunni Islam. Their jurisprudence is actually based on Mu'tazilism. The rest of the country is largely inhabited by Sunni Shafa'i. There is constant war in Yemen, war over women's honor, water rights, land, beasts or just for the fun of it. The government does not exercize any substatial control over most places outside the cities. The tribesmen are both in the army and out of it and a favorite political move is for some dissident officer to desert taking many of his men and such odds and ends as; small arms; artillery and tanks to his home district after proclaiming "come and get me." The tribesmen are heavily armed. An AK-47 is a standard accessory in personal fashion, and they DO shoot at each other a lot. The Yemenis are crafty folk. In the Cold War they were adept at getting free money and weapons from the USSR, USA, Saudi Arabia, and East Germany. They hired the French, Taiwanese and Italians to do odd jobs for them using other peoples' money. Salih is particularly good at that. He delights in "screwing" the big guys by playing on their fears. This is the next Afghanistan? pl [/rquoter] Be very critical of what you hear regarding the "threat" in Yemen. The Yemeni government has a vested interest in, and a proven lack of shame about hyping the threat. If you take what they Yemenis say unequivocally, then you are being played.
Of course he thinks we should do nothing. That is his constant cry. It tends not to play so well just after an attempt to blow up an aircraft over Detroit. The only way that some of us are going to learn that the threat is real and must be dealt with is to have the unimaginable happen.
I agree with this - of course equally as bad (and perhaps worse) are those who of us who fatally overestimate the US' ability to "deal[] with" asymmetric threats abroad using military force. Something we have proven awful at and that has in fact nearly bankrupted the country.
This is also true. We need to have strategy made by the best military and intelligence minds at our disposal. This should be read as somebody not named Donald Rumsfeld.
That does sound pretty troubling and I have no reason to deny that. I think we are a ways from figuring out what to do in regard to Yemen and I think we definately need caution. The one thing about the info you cited though gives me hope is that it shows that the Yemenis might be able to be bought off in regard to Al Qaeda.
Hear hear Sam. We can not keep sending the military to solve a problem where there is no clear foe or even a battlefield. We should be putting a lot more of our resources into intelligence and covert ops..... DD
Send some Ramen to Yemen. But only Chicken, Shrimp, Beef, Mushroom, Chicken Mushroom or Spicy Chili Shrimp. And don't invade them; just close the embassy and (gasp) don't buy their oil, if that's logistically possible.
Well, they just might, but it is damned near impossible to find out, given the chaos. BTW, I'm all for using Special Forces, intelligence assets, drones, etc., to try and take out AQ and their collaborators, wherever they are, including Yemen. I'm not for "sending the Marines." We're stretched too thin, already, even if it were considered, and I don't think that's on the table.
Well we should not do nothing. However, we should not be simplistic like Refman, Bush-Cheney and perhaps Obama, though one can hope Obama is still playing politics, or as with health care feels that this is the best he can do given the current political climate. Doing the same thing over and over is not working and is the point of the article. To actually decrease terrorism from the Middle East we are going to have to do a number of things. 1) We are going to have to lean on Israel to be a democratic state with equal rights for all, like the ideal of the Founding Fathers of this country, which we have made great strides on. This will perhaps be after Israel accepts a two state solution with very close to the 1967 borders. It will be hard for some to accept this, but there have been great changes in behavior and attitudes before. Our support of unjust Israeli policies causes much of the hatred towards us-- aside from our being over there killing folks directly as Bush and now Obama have been promoting. WE can't kill our way out of this. WE can't kill all the students in Nigeria, Saudi, etc. Our actions are increasing, not decreasing the number of such students that want to kill us. 2) Rather than spend trillions on killing Muslims and Middle Easterners we will have to tax ourselves to actually help them with lots of real aid, education, health care. WE will have to stop supporting corrupt emirs and kings in the Arab world just to get their oil at lower prices. We can't subsidize the Saudis to spread their evil form of the Muslim religion around the world. This will be very hard for American conservatives and alleged libertarians who only believe in taxation for war and not much else. With democracy these countries will not support the status quo in Israel and will not always do the oil deals we like, though they do have to sell it to us. They will eventually be less prone to terrorism. 3) We will have to treat Al Qaeda sort of like the Somali pirates. We try to have them arrested and tried by international courts. We don't waterboard them in secret prisons or rendition them to others to do so. We are not trying to occupy Somalia till the pirates are eliminated. We don't pretty indiscriminately bomb apartment complexes or wedding parties or cities to try to kill a pirate leader or two. Israel has done this strategy for years and it doesn't really work too well in the long run. These measures just create more terrorists. We don't declare war on Yemen even if it is of the phony propagandist "war on terror" meme. We don't try to occupy or change the country by taking sides in a civil war because one side claims to be on the side of the angels or against Iran, N, Korea, whomever. We don't get on TV to rile the American people up any more than they are to go kill over there. The president doesn't do this to try to win elections by seeming strong. We don't play politics as the GOP is scandalously doing by claiming the president isn't being belligerent enough. Let the spies , cops and diplomats to combat terrorism in such a way that does not create needless hatred in the Middle East. The simple fact is that we need to address the causes of terrorism. Simply repeating the Bush refrain: "they hate us because they are bad guys: and the good guys must kill the bad guys"; "smoke 'em out, dead or alive" etc. won't cut it, comforting as it can sound at times.
PS Like the rest of the folks on this board I am not an expert on terrorism I base my thinking aside from reading and trying to not be propagandized by much of the US media on the following. Middle Easterners and other folks around the world are human like we are. On 911 we had some Americans killed. Within hours we had Americans as far away as Hawail and Alaska going down to volunteer to go and fight. We can't expect to be over there bombing and so forth without many of the survivors and fellow religionists wanting to fight us.
