Should it be a surprise that the Washington Post sets Yemen on George W. Bush's doorstep? We will pay over and over again for an unnecessary and irrelevant invasion in Iraq and our loss of focus in Afghanistan.
Now Yemen has become a recognizable front in the "invisible war."
Nearly a decade after the bombing of the USS Cole, a combination of U.S. and Yemeni missteps, deep mistrust and a lack of political will have allowed al-Qaeda militants here to regroup and pose a major threat to the United States, according to Yemeni and U.S. officials, diplomats and analysts.
The U.S. failures have included a lack of focus on al-Qaeda's growing stature, insufficient funding to and cooperation with Yemen, and a misunderstanding of the Middle Eastern country's complex political terrain, Yemeni officials and analysts said. U.S. policies in the region, they said, often alienated top Yemeni officials and did little to address the root causes of militancy. ...
It is part of a largely invisible war, stretching from the Arabian Peninsula to Africa, waged from the skies and from high-tech intelligence centers, with unmanned aircraft, CIA operatives and vivid satellite images serving as the weapons of choice. ...Sudarsan Raghavan, WaPo
Too little, too late. Last year the US began to pay more attention to Yemen. Raghavan writes: "But many say the war could arrive too late to change the trajectory in Yemen. Since the Cole attack, the nation has been on a path toward dissolution. The government is weak, unable to control large swaths of the country and the porous borders."
The sympathy for Al Qaeda only grows stronger.
... The more the government cracks down on suspected militants, the more vulnerable Yemen seems to become. In southern Yemen, opposition politicians and newspapers have accused the government of killing civilians in order to appease the United States. Yemeni officials have acknowledged that women and children were killed, but say they were the relatives of the militants.
Early this morning, the New York Times reported: ''The U.S. Embassy in San'a is closed today, January 3, 2010, in
response to ongoing threats by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula ... to
attack American interests in Yemen,'' the embassy said in a message on
its Web site. It did not say how long the embassy would remain closed
and an embassy spokesman reached by phone would not comment on whether
there was a specific threat.
