Yemen: Toward another US quagmire

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Yemen: Toward another US quagmire
16 January 2010

All the signs point to Yemen being the next target in the US-led “war
on terrorism”. The Obama administration seized on the failed attempt
by Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to set off a bomb on a
US-bound flight on Christmas Day to dispatch the CIA and military
trainers to the impoverished country. Pressure is being exerted on
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to intensify military operations
against the organisation known as Al Qaeda in South Arabia.

Prominent US Democrat Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed
Forces Committee, called on Wednesday for the US to consider “a broad
range of options” including air strikes, armed drones and clandestine
operations in Yemen. General David Petraeus, head of the US Central
Command, has urged a doubling of US military aid to the country.

The new focus on Yemen was prepared well before Abdulmutallab took off
for Detroit. Sections of the American foreign policy establishment
were critical of President Bush for not taking more decisive action.
Obama had already been boosting military and civilian aid to Saleh’s
regime. On December 17 and 24, Washington provided the intelligence
for Yemeni air strikes against alleged Al Qaeda targets.

Last November the Center for a New American Security, which has close
connections to the Obama administration, warned in a policy brief:
“Facing an active insurgency in the north, a separatist movement in
the south, and a domestic al-Qaeda presence, Yemen rests today on the
knife’s edge. The consequences of instability in Yemen reach far
beyond this troubled land, and pose serious challenges to vital US
interests.”

The report spelt out those vital interests, declaring: “A destabilised
Arabian Peninsula would shatter regional security, disrupt trade
routes and obstruct access to fossil fuels.” Yemen itself has limited
oil reserves, but is strategically positioned adjacent to the vital
sea lanes from the Middle East to Europe via the Suez Canal.

Like his predecessor, Obama is recklessly plunging into impoverished
Yemen in a bid to shore up US strategic and economic interests in the
Middle East. At this stage, the Pentagon has ruled out sending US
troops. This reflects concerns that as well as the US military being
overstretched by the neo-colonial occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan,
sending in ground forces would intensify opposition to President
Saleh’s autocratic and widely detested rule.

The pretext for the US intervention is to combat Al Qaeda. However, as
elsewhere in the Middle East, the presence of radical Islamists in
Yemen is a product of previous American intrigues. In the 1980s,
thousands of Yemenis flocked to the CIA’s holy war in Afghanistan
against the Soviet occupation. In 1994, Saleh used many of those who
returned in his war to crush a southern secessionist movement and he
has continued relations with the Islamists.

Washington’s new ally in its bogus “war on terrorism” exemplifies the
venal character of the Yemeni bourgeoisie. A former army major, Saleh
came to power in 1978 in what was then North Yemen. For three decades,
he has maintained his rule by keeping a firm grip on the security
forces, balancing between various tribal groupings, while manoeuvring
on the international stage between the various major and regional
powers. He runs the government as a family fiefdom, dispensing
patronage to the favoured few in the Middle East’s poorest country.
Family members hold all key positions in the security apparatus.

The country is in desperate economic straits. Yemen ranks 153 on the
UN Human Development Index of 192 nations. Its limited oil reserves,
on which the economy and government revenue heavily depend, are
predicted to run out by 2017. The global economic crisis has impacted
on the Gulf States and therefore on many Yemeni guest workers whose
remittances back home are a vital source of revenue. A rapidly
expanding population is exacerbating chronic ground water shortages as
well as the social gulf between rich and poor. The unemployment rate
is around 40 percent and predicted to rise. According to the UN, about
45 percent of the population lives on less than $US2 a day. These
worsening social tensions are fuelling anger and opposition which, at
present, is being exploited by dissident sections of the ruling elite
that have been left out of the regime’s system of patronage.

In the north, the military has been fighting to suppress a rebellion
among Shiites tribes that broke out in the Saada governate in 2004.
Sections of the Shiite elite felt marginalised and discriminated
against by the Saleh regime as a result of its relations with Sunni
extremists. The revolt has been further fuelled by the military’s
brutal methods, which have resulted in thousands of civilian
casualties, the displacement of at least 130,000 people and
indiscriminate detention without trial. The rebellion has become
entangled with regional rivalries, with neighbouring Saudi Arabia
providing funding to Saleh and attacking Shiite rebels inside Yemen’s
border areas. Without providing evidence, the Yemeni and Saudi Arabian
regimes both accuse Iran of assisting the Shiite revolt, raising the
danger that Washington could also seize on the issue in its
confrontation with Tehran, further compounding the conflict.

Saleh also confronts a southern secessionist movement. Until 1990,
Yemen was divided between north and south—the product of the arbitrary
borders between the British colonial protectorate in the south,
focussed on the key strategic port of Aden, and the Ottoman Empire
that collapsed after World War I. The division remained even after the
1962 overthrow of the Imanate that replaced the Ottomans in the north
and the rebellion that ousted the British in 1967. North and south
only unified after the former Soviet Union withdrew financial and
military support from its client state—the so-called socialist
republic in South Yemen—in 1989. Secessionist sentiment in the south
led to the brief 1994 war and was further inflamed as Saleh
consolidated his position by dismissing southern military officers and
state officials. As in the north, Saleh reacted to the re-emergence of
a Southern Movement in 2007 by ruthlessly cracking down on public
protests, in turn generating a growing armed insurgency.

The Obama administration is now intervening into this seething social
and political cauldron in pursuit of Washington’s broader economic and
strategic ambitions. The inevitable outcome is already evident in the
disasters that the US has created in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as
its escalating proxy war in Pakistan. In the final analysis, the
impoverished and unstable state of Yemen is the product not only of
the corrupt, parasitic Yemeni ruling class but of imperialist
oppression stretching back to the seizure of Aden by the British in
the nineteenth century. The US intervention now being prepared will
only create another catastrophe for the Yemeni people and a potential
quagmire for the American military.

Peter Symonds

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j16.shtml

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