MESSAGE
| DATE | 2016-10-13 |
| FROM | Rick Moen
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] AlQuadia in Yemen? Where? Not over here!
|
Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben-at-mrbrklyn.com):
> Probe of USS Cole Bombing Unravels
> Plotters Freed in Yemen; U.S. Efforts Frustrated
>
> By Craig Whitlock
> Washington Post Foreign Service
> Sunday, May 4, 2008
So, basically, chaotic country with recurring civil war, extreme
poverty, and pervasive world-class corruption fails to prevent prison
escapes and unknown ruling elements sometimes assists criminals, while
other elements try to cooperate with international justice but are
foiled. I didn't know this but am not exactly surprised. (I don't
spend any amount of time worrying about Yemen beause after all it's just
Yemen and doesn't really matter.)
What do you do, then? You could join the Saudis in bombing occasionally
and making the rubble bounce. You can keep trying to work in the open
via official diplomatic contact and mostly get the brush-off. You can
intervene directly via covert opps and black-bag actions. You can take
the pragmatic popular route used by thousands of years of external
actors and just quietly buy what you want.
Those are basically the options, and to the best of my understanding
we the USA have settled on a mix of the latter two options, which is
probably rational and about right.
And you don't repeat the Clinton Administration blunder of using Aden as
a refueling port for US-flagged military vessels, which was unbelievably
stupid no matter what piece of paper the local weak government du jour
signed professing to make that OK, because it was and remains a hopeless
security setting, and the Clintonites should have known that and not
been so mind-bogglingly stupid as to send a Navy destroyer there in the
first place.
And I have to say, Ambassador Bodine seems to have been a bit of a dim
bulb about the realities of the region -- but she's from Princeton
University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,
which probably explains that. Every one of those people I encountered
around Princeton was a luftmensch.
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