Thoughts about Yemen, updated

I decided it was time to read something about Yemen now, since the U.S. is going to be sending troops there.  These observations come from an essay by Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch.  He is strongly critical of the rising U.S. military presence there; other viewpoints are certainly possible.  For now, these will do:

Yemen has always been a dangerous place. Wonderfully beautiful, the mountainous north of the country is guerrilla paradise with well-defended villages and towns clinging to every peak…   

The strength of the central government in the capital Sanaa is limited and it generally avoids direct confrontations with tribes, clans and powerful families. Almost everybody has a gun, usually at least an AK-47 assault rifle, but tribesmen often have own heavier armament.   

I have always loved the country. It is it physically very beautiful with stone villages perched on mountain tops on the sides of which are cut hundreds of terraces, making the country look like an exaggerated Tuscan landscape. Yemenis are intelligent, humorous, sociable and democratic, infinitely preferable as company to the arrogant and ignorant playboys of the Arab oil states in the rest of the Arabian Peninsula…     

It is in this fascinating but dangerous land that President Barack Obama is planning to increase US political and military involvement. Joint operations will be carried out by the US and Yemeni military. There will be American drone attacks on hamlets where al-Qa’ida supposedly has its bases. There is ominous use by American politicians and commentators of the phrase ‘failed state’ in relation to Yemen as if this somehow legitimises foreign intervention…   

The US will get entangled because the Yemeni government will want to manipulate US intervention 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…   

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…   

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. It is a formula which worked under President George W Bush and it still appears to work under President Barack Obama… 

Much more at the link.

Addendum:  There are approximately 90 Yemeni detainees who have been at Guantanamo for years and have never been charged with a crime.  Half of them have been "cleared for release," meaning that government officials believe they did nothing wrong or are of no danger to the U.S.  Now John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein are demanding that all Yemenis be kept imprisoned anyway and not released because their home country is "unstable."  Their attorney, David Remes, is challenging detention without charges: "I don’t see what the chaos in Yemen has to do with whether to return Yemenis to their home because these men have been determined not to be dangerous to the U.S."