Bam’s yen for diplomacy over conflict is poised to bear poisonous fruit in his entanglement with a pivotal rogue gulf nation which, on the cusp of an economic and civil meltdown, has also become an evil recruiting ground for a new generation of al Qaeda monsters.
Yemen, a Middle East donkey with a wobbly central government, porous borders and armed tribal sickos warring over the same old Sunni/Shiite scat, is also without a conscience about its terror ties.
Its corrupt president, Ali Abdullah Saleh retains the death penalty for apostasy, robbery, adultery, homosexuality and prostitution, and happily released from prison the convicted mass murderer of the USS Cole warship bombing which killed 17 American sailors on October 12, 2000.
If he wants to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al Qaeda, then President Obama should not pledge hundreds of millions of US tax dollars to underwrite an ill-conceived counterinsurgency plan in a nation which stands accused of drug smuggling and arms trafficking, and where underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab received orders to explode his smalls aboard a Detroit-bound jet on Christmas Day.
Yemen is home to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a militant Islamic organization invigorated after a February 2006 jailbreak freed 23 militants and emancipated its ring leader, Nasser Abdul Karim al-Wuhayshi, in the capital city of Sana’a which has occupied the planet since the 6th century, BC, to no avail it would seem.
After 31 years of rule by Saleh, it stands today as the poorest nation in the Middle East with a deplorable human rights record and agenda. It executes its children, forces marriage upon its nubile girls, prides itself on its mostly illiterate population of 23 million which owns three guns per person and, in the assessment of Washington DC-based think-tank the Center for a New American Security, is an explosive land which “rests today on a knife’s edge.”
The Human Rights Watch documents in its World Report 2009 that Saleh’s government rejected provisions in a law that would have raised the minimum marriageable age for girls to 18, and banned female genital mutilation. The law was proposed by a governmental woman’s group “following public outcry over the case of a nine-year-old girl who sought divorce after her forced marriage to a much older man who raped her.”
Are you listening, Mr. President?
Through it all, Saleh has kept outstretched his beggar’s hand which the Free World has generously and graciously filled: The US has increased its counterterrorism aid to Yemen from less than $11 million in 2006 to more than $70 million this year. That’s in addition to providing up to $121 million for “development” over the next three years, making it the United States’ second largest beneficiary of military help after Pakistan.
Unsurprisingly, Yemen is yet another exquisite land demoted, degenerated and decayed by radical Islam, and it should not be extended good faith measures by the US, or any other nation, until it changes for the better.
