Yemen in the crosshairs

THE U.S. government had a terrifying New Year's message for the people of Yemen--you are our targets this year.

During his weekly radio address, President Barack Obama set the stage for a new front in the U.S. war on terror, linking a December 25 airplane bombing attempt--in which a young Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to set off a bomb on a Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit--with an al-Qaeda group in Yemen.

"We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies. It appears that he joined an affiliate of al-Qaeda, and that this group--al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula--trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America," Obama said.

The same day, Gen. David Petraeus visited Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. The U.S., along with the British government, plans to fund a special counterterrorism police unit in Yemen. The next day, the U.S. and Britain ordered that their embassies shut down in the capital of Sana'a.

The hawks were getting behind the Obama administration taking swift action in Yemen as part of the war on terrorism. "Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight," said Senate Homeland Security Committee chair Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). "We have a growing presence there--and we have to--of special operations, Green Berets, intelligence."

"Somebody in our government said to me in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, [that] Iraq was yesterday's war, Afghanistan is today's war," Lieberman said in a recent interview with Australia's ABC News, after his recent trip to Yemen. "If we don't act pre-emptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war. That's the danger we face."

The Obama administration appears to be moving quickly toward deadly assaults on Yemen. But while U.S. officials try to claim that targeting Yemen is about protecting the U.S. from terrorist attack, Yemen has been in the U.S. sights for some time. The only difference now is it's out in the open.

Long before a young Nigerian stepped onto a Northwest flight wearing explosives, the U.S. was fighting a covert war in Yemen.

On December 17, the U.S. military launched Cruise missiles against two alleged al-Qaeda sites in Yemen on orders from Obama. It took several days for U.S. officials to admit the its role in the strikes, with news reports from Yemen initially attributing the attacks to the Yemen Air Force.

ABC News reported that after the December 17 air strikes, the president called to "congratulate" Saleh. Yemen opposition forces said the raids killed 63 people, 28 of them children, in the province of Abyan. In addition to the air strikes, Yemen security forces conducted raids in three more locations, in which as 120 people were reportedly killed. Again, according to opposition leaders, many of the dead were civilians.

American drones have been conducting a covert assault on alleged al-Qaeda bases in Yemen for about a year. CIA agents have been on the ground there, as have American Special Forces, who are also involved in training Yemeni military forces.

Before the Christmas incident, the U.S. already had plans to increase its spending on counterterrorism in Yemen from $67 million this year to as much as $190 million in 2010, reported the Wall Street Journal. Publicly disclosed Pentagon counter-terrorism funding for Yemen grew from $4.6 million in 2006. This doesn't include funding for classified intelligence work.

"The U.S. Air Force has been flying over eastern and southern areas of Yemen, taking pictures of what they think are training camps for al-Qaeda," Abdulelah Haidar Shaea, an expert in al-Qaeda in Yemen, told the British Guardian newspaper. "The Yemeni air force attacked these places. Just as in Waziristan [Pakistan], the U.S. involvement led to civilian casualties, which mean people will join al-Qaeda in revenge."

So is it much of a surprise that the U.S., which is behind so much violence in Yemen, is viewed as a target for violence?

YEMEN IS marked by extreme poverty and political corruption. It has few natural resources. The country's few oilfields are expected to run dry in the coming years. Some 45 percent of Yemenis live on less than $2 a day, according to the United Nations.

The Saleh government likely hopes that it can use U.S. backing for its "war on terror" to maintain its tenuous hold on power.

While the North and South of the country were officially unified in 1990, the Saleh government faces a growing secessionist movement in the South and an insurgency in the North, led by Houthis, militant members of the Zaydi Shia group that makes up about a third of the country's population. In August, the Saleh government ended its cease-fire with the Houthis, launching what it called "Operation Scorched Earth." And in November, Saudi warplanes bombed alleged Houthi rebel positions along the border.

As journalist Patrick Cockburn pointed out, the Yemeni government "has long been trying to portray the Shia rebels in north Yemen as Iranian cats-paws in order to secure American and Saudi support. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula probably only has a few hundred activists in Yemen, but the government of longtime Yemeni President Ali Abdulah Saleh will portray his diverse opponents as somehow linked to al-Qaeda."

U.S. intervention in Yemen will only make conditions worse for Yemenis, increasing the possibility of already existing divisions growing deeper and of Saleh's corrupt rule becoming more cemented. And it does nothing to stop the terrorism that it was supposedly initiated to defeat. In fact, U.S. policy gives it the fuel it needs to flourish and grow.

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald said in a December 31 interview on Democracy Now!

The myth, from the beginning, has been that there is a certain group of intrinsically evil people called "the terrorists," and the key to beating them is to just kill them all. And once you kill them all with bombs and other air attacks and the like, or if you lock them up forever, once you do that to the finite group known as "the terrorists," there will be no more terrorists, and we will have won the war on terror...

And, of course, what we actually have been doing over the last nine years--and we don't ever learn our lesson--is we're actually expanding the pool of terrorists. We're increasing rapidly the number of people who are sympathetic to Islamic radicalism and who are willing--who are so angry at us that they're not only willing to kill innocent civilians, but they're willing to give up their own lives to do it.

With its threats to Yemen, as with its escalation of the war on Afghanistan, the Obama administration is continuing--and expanding--the same policies of war and intervention as the Bush administration. And with covert and not-so-covert air strikes and military operations in Yemen, Obama is also following in the footsteps of the Bush doctrine of "pre-emptive war" against any country the U.S. deems a "failed state."