Posted on 02/03/2015 4:25:38 AM PST by Kaslin
Last September President Obama cited his drone program in Yemen as a successful model of US anti-terrorism strategy. He said that he would employ the Yemen model in his effort to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
But just a week ago, the government in Yemen fell to a Shite militia movement thought to be friendly to Iran. The US embassy in Yemen's capitol was forced to evacuate personnel and shut down operations.
If Yemen is any kind of model, it is a model of how badly US interventionism has failed.
In 2011 the US turned against Yemen's long-time dictator, Saleh, and supported a coup that resulted in another, even more US-friendly leader taking over in a "color revolution." The new leader, Hadi, took over in 2012 and soon became a strong supporter of the US drone program in his country against al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.
But last week Hadi was forced to flee from office in the coup. The media reports that the US has lost some of its intelligence capability in Yemen, which is making it more difficult to continue the drone strikes. Nevertheless, the White House said last week that its drone program would continue as before, despite the disintegration of the Yemeni government.
And the drone strikes have continued. Last Monday, in the first US strike after the coup, a 12 year old boy was killed in what is sickeningly called "collateral damage." Two alleged "al-Qaeda militants" were also killed. On Saturday yet another drone strike killed three more suspected militants.
The US government has killed at least dozens of civilian non-combatants in Yemen, but even those it counts as "militants" may actually be civilians. That is because the Obama administration counts any military-aged male in the area around a drone attack as a combatant.
It was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that claimed responsibility for the brutal shooting at an anti-religious magazine in Paris last month. At least one of the accused shooters cited his anger over US policy in the Middle East as a motivation for him to attack.
Does anyone wonder why, after 14 years of drone strikes killing more than 800 al-Qaeda militants, it seems there are still so many of them? As a Slate Magazine article this week asked, "what if the drones themselves are part of the problem?" That is an excellent question and one that goes to the heart of US anti-terrorist strategy. What if it is US interventionism in general and drone strikes in particular that are motivating so many people to join anti-US militant movements? What if it is interventionist and militarist western foreign policy that is motivating people to shoot up magazines and seek to bring terrorism back to the countries they see as aggressors?
That is the question that the interventionists fear most. If blowback is real, if they do not hate us because we are so rich and free but because of what our governments are doing to them, then US interventionism is making us less safe and less free.
The disintegration of Yemen is directly related to US drone policy. The disintegration of Libya is directly related to US military intervention. The chaos and killing in Syria is directly related to US support for regime change. Is there not a pattern here?
The lesson from Yemen is not to stay the course that has failed so miserably. It is to end a failed foreign policy that is killing civilians, creating radicals, and making us less safe.
Obama's Arab Spring is in full bloom.
Obama way is a slow walk into ....
It’s not a failure of US intervention as we’ve never intervened in Yemen. We’ve poked it with a stick but we’ve never done anything serious against it.
We have the exact same problem with ISIS. We’ve not attacked them at all.
Until we accept the fact that every moslem is a terrorist and start wholesale slaughter of all moslems who adhere to al-queda or isis then we will never make progress against them.
And we will certainly make no progress against the greater enemy, islam in general. Until we make it safe for people to leave islam, they will remain terrorists. Currently their choice is between being a terrorist and getting killed by the other terrorists for trying to not be a terrorist.
Failed? I’m of the opinion it was intentional. Everything the sitting pos, pres does is with the intention of causing pain and disharmony whether it is race baiting in this country or establishment of a worldwide caliphate.
The Yemen model does not work for me.
I prefer to see at least a little ankle.
/s
Tweet them our constitution with the 2nd amendment highlighted. If the peaceniks in the "religion of peace" can't figure it out, innocent individuals will continue to be slaughtered.
(Besides, we're not using it much.)
Absent those evil guns, the peaceniks/innocents could try this on the Totalitarians Without Borders…
What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
AFP vs AFFUP BUMP!
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