{"id":9827,"date":"2011-05-24T16:25:43","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T00:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=9827"},"modified":"2011-05-24T16:41:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T00:41:04","slug":"yemens-tipping-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/24\/yemens-tipping-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Yemen’s Tipping Point?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s violent clashes in Yemen<\/a> appear to have been instigated when Yemeni soldiers loyal to President Saleh began stockpiling weapons and munitions at the al- Ramah school near Shaykh Sadiq al-Amhar\u2019s residence in the capital Sana\u2019a. Sadiq al-Amhar is the head of the Hashid tribal federation from which Saleh also hails and his recent decision to side with the masses of anti-Saleh protestors had raised tribal tensions considerably, but reached a tipping point when this battle erupted between Saleh forces and Sadiq loyalists \u2013 an airline office was set on fire, at least one government building was taken over, 38 lives were lost and 24 people were injured.<\/p>\n

This all came after Saleh refused<\/a>, for the third time in one week, to sign a deal led by the GCC States and by U.S. and E.U. diplomats to step down from power, as the Yemeni people are demanding. The general conclusion seems to be that now that outright hostilities within the tribal federation have broken out Yemen has reached a critical juncture and prospects for a transition of power with relative peace is less likely, while out-and-out civil war is more likely.<\/p>\n

The Obama administration officially said yesterday<\/a> that they are \u201creassessing\u201d the exorbitant and deleterious economic and military aid<\/a> to Yemen due to this crisis. One might wonder why the atrocities the Yemeni government has been committing<\/a> against<\/a> protestors<\/a> was not enough to reassess or halt our support. And one would be forgetting that this kind of brutality has been understood by the U.S. as a corollary to the aid. Harsh responses to the developing Houthi rebellion<\/a> in the past few years, responses Saleh calls Operation Scorched Earth, were expected results of U.S. support while so-called U.S. \u201ccounterterrorism\u201d programs were pursued with impunity.<\/p>\n

U.S. diplomats have been present in meetings where Saleh was supposed to have signed the deal to step down, and\u00a0as the Post<\/em> explained<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cWhite House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan told the Yemeni president \u2018that if he doesn\u2019t sign, we\u2019re going to have to consider possible other steps,\u2019\u201d but these facts shouldn\u2019t be misconstrued for some new and improved U.S. policy of humanitarianism and concern for the well-being of Yemenis. Rather, they seem to fit a well-established approach to how U.S. national security planners deal with lavishly supported proxies who are in trouble: support them as long as possible, and when it reaches a tipping point plan for a transition that keeps as much of the old (and subservient) regime in power. This process has been followed for decades with a number of U.S. supported dictators from Duvalier to Ceaucescu to Suharto.<\/p>\n

With Suharto in Indonesia, the U.S. continued to support the tyrant<\/a>, while \u201cissuing tepid calls for reform\u2026and worrying deeply about what might follow<\/a>.\u201d Support continued past his rule<\/a> \u2013 when popular protests became overwhelming and military favor began to dwindle \u2013 and Suharto\u2019s vicious Vice Presient B.J. Habibie headed the transition (with a cabinet consisting of mostly the same faces as under Suharto). Dictatorship was soon overcome by the people for some kind of democracy, but the U.S. followed this protocol nicely \u2013 as they did in Egypt, supporting Mubarak right until the very end, and then attempting to keep people like Omar Suleiman<\/a> in power and in fact still supporting a transition government made up largely of Mubarak\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

Whether or not we\u2019re at that point in Yemen remains to be seen. All we can hope is that Brennan\u2019s \u201cother steps\u201d don\u2019t mean a continued support for dictatorship, and hopefully not a fourth (fifth?) war in a Muslim country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s violent clashes in Yemen appear to have been instigated when Yemeni soldiers loyal to President Saleh began stockpiling weapons and munitions at the al- Ramah school near Shaykh Sadiq al-Amhar\u2019s residence in the capital Sana\u2019a. Sadiq al-Amhar is the head of the Hashid tribal federation from which Saleh also hails and his recent decision […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9827"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9831,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9827\/revisions\/9831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9827"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}