Yemen on the Verge of Collapse

Today was a whirlwind of a day for Yemen. 

One top officer, Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, and eighteen other senior commanders have announced that they are siding with their protesters, and it appears that those under their command have agreed to do so as well. While this reeks of a military coup, the Defense Minister, Mohammad Nasser Ali, came to the aid of Yemen's President Saleh and said, “The armed forces will stay faithful to the oath they gave before God, the nation and political leadership under the brother president Ali Abdullah Saleh.”

This interesting and potentially explosive development could give rise to a civil war, something which Yemen is not unfamiliar with. The same fears were expressed by one protester who said he desired a nonviolent solution, “We are now in the middle of two militaries – one that has joined the protesters and one that is under the authority of president Saleh. There is fear of civil war, but we are insisting on having a peaceful revolution.” An eery foreshadowing of things to come, tanks operated by defectors are literally facing those of Saleh loyalists...

Read the rest at Interest of the State.

Unintended Consequences

As I tried to point out in a recent article at the Daily Caller, foreign policy is an extremely complicated thing.  This sounds self-evident, but it's amazing the extent to which certain officials think they can control events occurring around the world.  I like to characterize US foreign policy in the Middle East as throwing rocks at a hornet's nest, and then expecting to be able to control the hornets when they emerge.  The consequences of intervention are so many, so widespread, so complicated, and so unforeseen that no one can hope to be able to manage them, without inevitably intervening even more and thus fueling even more unintended consequences.  (You can see a strong parallel between the overconfidence of government officials in the area of foreign policy and their attitude in areas of attempted economic control.  But, that's a separate discussion.)

Thanks to the wonderful (in my opinion) people at WikiLeaks, we have been able to see a much more realistic picture of the war in Afghanistan than has so far been available.  CNN reports on one element of these reports that is none other than one of these most unintended of consequences -- some of the most advanced military technology in our country's arsenal falling into the hands of...well we're not really sure who.

Alan Grayson: "We Won in Iraq & Afghanistan!"

I wish this guy was in step with the liberty movement because on issues we agree on no one makes more convincing arguments.

Eagles We Were, Eagles We Will Be Again

The following article is a response to Thomas Qualtere of The Heritage Foundation’s recent article “Hawks we are, hawks we must remain,” published on the Web site of The Daily Caller.

I rarely become truly angry when reading the opinion of a fellow human being. As should be obvious from my libertarian associations, I understand that free speech is inextricably linked with freedom. However, while I would never advocate for the silencing of one whose opinion I find little to no common ground with, I can still say that Thomas Qualtere of the Heritage Foundation’s recent article concerning the future of both foreign policy and conservatism in our nation deeply saddens me, and reinforces in my mind the importance of helping my fellow Americans gain an accurate understanding of the misguided foreign policy that has led our country into a cycle of perpetual war and violence from which it often seems there is no escape.

Qualtere attempts to address the question of where the youth of today should commit themselves in terms of creating the American foreign policy of tomorrow.  “We are the 9/11 generation,” he writes.  Qualtere states that we are a generation that should understand the cost of not confronting our enemies overseas, and that the lessons of 9/11 should be our call to fight for an American foreign policy that deals with our enemies where they live, rather than lets them come to strike us at home.