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.

U.S Approves Target Killing Anwar Awlaki

The Obama Administration approves of target killing the radical jihadist American cleric Anwar Awlaki. Awlaki has been suspected of being in contact with the Fort Hood killer Nidal Hassan and has allegedly trained the Christmas bomber Umar Abdul Mutallab. According to officials, it is extremely rare to target kill an American.

“The danger Awlaki poses to this country is no longer confined to words,” said an anonymous  American official. “He’s gotten involved in plots.” 

The anonymous official then added: 

The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual — through his own actions — has become one. Awlaki knows what he’s done, and he knows he won’t be met with handshakes and flowers. None of this should surprise anyone.

 Awlaki was born and raised in new Mexico and has been hiding in Yemen for several years.

Civil Society & Money: Congressional Hearing on Yemen

After attending a Congressional hearing on Yemen today, I came to the conclusion that American foreign policy is still constantly playing world police, adapting Cold War policies that simply do not apply today. What Misters Feltman and Godec advocated for today was the same naïve politics of Kant’s Perpetual Peace.  The belief that no two democracies will ever go to war is simply rhetoric spewed by neo-conservative idealogues hoping to expand an American empire by territorial means rather than economic. Mr. Feltman, the Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, asserted that “local level development” and “civil society” are essential to the stability of the Yemeni state. What Mr. Feltman ignored, however, were the types of civil societies that should be emerging in this failing state. The Nazi Party was at one point a “civil society” and we all know how well that went.

Congressman Ackerman from New York asserted that there was still the “risk of doing everything.” He said this in opposition to Hillary Clinton’s policy of “the risks of doing nothing are far greater,” a policy which Mr. Feltman agreed with. When asked how many Al Quaeda operatives and fighters were in Yemen presently, neither Mr. Feltman nor Mr. Godec knew the answer to the question, despite their previous remarks of the successes in eliminating “twenty percent of the Al Quaeda threat in Yemen.”

Stewart: "getting attacked -- only way Americans learn about geography"

It's starting to get a bit absurd. I'm not sure how much longer the government is going to be able to sell the War on Terror when we must go to war with a new country every six months. First it was Afghanistan and Iraq; yesterday it was Pakistan and Iran; today we're discussing Yemen and tomorrow it's going to be...Oman? Jon Stewart points out the criteria by which Yemen qualifies to be the next country in line for American occupation.