“Misguided US Policy in Yemen”
An excellent editorial from The Daily Star:
The strife and warfare that has shaken Yemen in the last few months raises disturbing parallels with another Arab country, one that has experienced years of misery and woe. There might not be an exact fit between the regimes of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the regime of the late Saddam Hussein, but the broad outlines are there, and don’t bode well.
Like Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh is an autocrat with a fair amount of blood on his hands, perched atop a decades-old security-oriented regime.
This regime does some things well, such as managing a personality cult, but it’s much less proficient at other tasks, such as running the country’s tribal and regional politics and generating stability.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt have stood with Saleh and the US is now getting heavily involved, providing the regime with missiles, sending unmanned drones to bomb areas affected by the Houthi rebellion, and dispatching covert military teams to join Yemen’s Army in pursuing threats to stability, under the rubric of the “war on terror” policy.
And like Saddam, Saleh deals with a large part of his country as if it’s the enemy. Iraq’s Kurds suffered atrocities in the weapons during the Saddam era, while the southerners of Yemen have also been treated horribly by the Saleh regime, and we’ve heard calls for secession from the central government in both countries.
Today, the Yemeni regime says it’s fighting both Iran and Al-Qaeda as it battles the Houthis in the north of the country. This leads us to ask what kind of policy conclusions are being drawn up in the White House. Will they resemble the ones for Iraq, circa 1990, when a supposed friend of Washington suddenly became an enemy?Despite the education, qualifications and intellectual atmosphere that emanates from the Obama administration, there’s no inkling of a serious effort to win hearts and minds. Instead, we’re getting the same old approach of heavy-handedness. This year saw Obama use Egypt and Turkey as forums for relaying a new American political rhetoric, based on international cooperation and addressing people’s hopes and aspirations. But Obama’s current policy in Yemen appears designed to lead to even further blood baths, and even wider instability, as countries like Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan are all now in Washington’s sights.
A workable solution in Yemen will have to reverse Washington’s policy of fighting terror with air raids and assassinations. American military planners might be enthusiastic about all of the new targets now becoming available in Yemen, but if this is the kind of targeting that’s going to take place, we’re in for a long, depressing ride.
