A Reflection on Yemen by Martin J

With the negotiations between various parties underway in Kuwait and just over one year since the outbreak of hostilities, perhaps it is time to evaluate the conflict in Yemen. 

If we were to rely solely on media reports, in English or those in Arabic, we would be fooled into thinking that the war was just as real as that in Syria, or perhaps akin to Libya but with an air component. This is not the case. 

The war does not pit Sunni against Shia

The war does not include ground troops from the Gulf

There is no siege imposed by the Gulf and allied nations (US, Australian, UK navy etc) 

Yes, the Gulf coalition does bomb Yemen from the air but there has not been a wholesale destruction of infrastructure. There are not hundreds of civilians dying from Saudi air strikes. 

After 13 months of this war total dead stands at an estimated 6,000 people. Most of those are armed combatants from both sides. 

If there were a real land and naval blockade of Yemen then we would have seen a humanitarian disaster on a vast scale. There would have been many thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of dead from famine by this point. Yemen is a country fast running out of water. Much of the remaining water lies deep beneath the surface and to extract it you need a pump. The pump needs diesel which, until now, is heavily subsidized by the state. This means all villages and most towns would rapidly run out of water for drinking and irrigation if there was an actual siege.

Additionally, the Saudis have ensured that the exchange rate of the Yemeni rial has held up by making sure they back the central bank with hard currency. If the rial spiraled out of control then no one would be able to afford staple foodstuffs. In this poor country, more in common with sub-saharan Africa than the Arab world, people would soon expire. 

The question is why the Saudis would want to do this. The answer is that they first of all do not wish to be responsible for a famine, nor do they want to see thousands of Yemenis escaping death by walking into Saudi Arabia. They also have adopted a tactic of a steady squeeze on the Huthi and Ali Abdallah Saleh coalition. They prefer to negotiate slowly and carefully with the major tribes in the north, bringing them onto side with a mixture of financial incentives and political reality. The system will not change, they say, but those who wield power will.

 

AQAP

 

While the news is telling us that Al Qaeda has taken over vast tracts of the South of Yemen, and that the resistance is now taking the fight to them, the reality is that AQ is a catch-all term that includes organized criminals, penniless youth, as well as the die-hard ideologues. The Gulf countries are fighting them with a mixture of hard cash payments, PR offensives, and limited usage of the big stick. 

It is debatable to what extent that AQAP is actually tied to Ali Abdallah Saleh but the connection is there. AQAP have not fought against him or the Huthis in any real sense. Quite the opposite in fact. Since August 2016, AQ and, to a lesser extent ISIS, have waged a campaign of assassinations against senior Hirak (southern resistance) leaders, military commanders who fought the Huthis, and several intelligence personnel from the UAE as well as Aden government. 

I would argue that the US has now pivoted from siding with Ali Abdallah Saleh and his security forces in the war against AQAP in Yemen, to siding increasingly with current president Hadi and the Gulf countries. The economy and its fate remains entirely in Saudi hands. And the slow progress to stabilize Aden and environs is ongoing despite Saleh’s best efforts to counter them. 

It seems that inexorably the Gulf is trying to edge the tribes into aligning with them and their figures (Saleh’s relative, Ali Muhsin, and the Al Ahmar family of the Hashid) instead of the current arrangement with the Huthis and Saleh. They are establishing their own overt network of patronage. 

Aside from Yemeni (Saleh and President Hadi et al from the elite) culpability for the abysmal state of the economy and infrastrucure there must be a dollop of responsibility given to both the Bush and Obama policies here. Their desire to support Saleh with cash bribes to ensure his support for the drone campaign only succeeded in making sure that Saleh was always dependent on maintaining AQAP as a credible threat to the West. In the logic of this dance, without that threat then that revenue stream would have dried up. 

The war is one between a narrow kleptocratic elite who have fallen out over how best to divide the revenue generated from the rapidly diminishing natural resources and US and Saudi aid money. The presence of AQ, the US, game-playing by the Iranians, is all a distraction from the bickering thieves who sit atop the smouldering failure of their own policies. 

As a now-assassinated Zaydi scholar had said of the conflict, the debate was always over who should sit in the seat of power, rather than any discussion over changing the nature of that seat itself. His wisdom and comprehension will be much missed.  Martin J

Comments

[Babak Makkinejad]

Well, as I had expected, you are equivocating.

Beyond equivocation remains the path that I had indicated: acceptance of our mutual antipathies and finding non-lethal ways of managing them - such as the JCOPA or the 99-Year Ceasefire of HAMAS.

[Tidewater]

Tidewater to Babak Makkinejad,

I keep thinking that this forum might better be compared to the London coffee houses that sprang up in the early 18th Century. Foreign aristocratic travellers and the spy-master John Mackey (James II invasion plans, 1682) were among those to marvel at the democratic aspect of these new establishments, where Lords, diplomats,soldiers, fish mongers, clerks, watermen, young bucks--in short, all and sundry, if male--and many of them total strangers, found convivial and intelligent company. They would drink a coffee that was, as the old Turkish proverb put it, "Black as hell, Strong as death, Sweet as love" and forty per cent coffee grinds. The Rules and Orders of the St. James, Covent Garden, and Cornhill coffee houses were posted as early as 1674. "Take the next fit seat you can find." These establishments were "spartan, wooden, no nonsense", there was always a fire, and once a new customer entered cries would go up routinely, "Your servant, Sir, what news of ..." Often enough, the places of interest were then, as now, in the Levant, or Mahgreb; Tangier, for example, a preoccupation of Samuel Pepys. In the case of the coffee house where only Latin was spoken, the greeting was always: "Quid Novi!"

Richard Steele, who brought out the Tatler (1709), and wrote under the nom de plume of Isaac Bickerstaff, assisted from time to time by Jonathan Swift (!), commented on the coffee house scene: Here "men were deposing princes, settling the bounds of kingdoms, and balancing the power of Europe with great justice and impartiality."

Sound familiar?

There is more. "Far from co-existing in perfect harmony on the fire-side bench, people sat in relentless judgment of one another."

Hmmmmm.

I tend to envisage a coffee house with Dr. (Samuel) Johnson surrounded by a number of extraordinary makers of conversation, who yet accord a certain precedence, a gracious deference to the good Doctor's opinions and views,who indeed are inspired with a genuine curiosity to hear his views--views which often enough are found completely satisfying, though which ,if challenged, should not be challenged carelessly, as the good Doctor's temperament was one which brought forth very forcible, sometime explosive, usually decisive concluding exposition on the point, as if, as it were, it were being tempered fine at the forge, to the delight of all the gathering but the one on the other end of the argument. The good Doctor, it was understood, was perfectly capable of kicking you down the stairs.

[Tidewater]

Tidewater to Tidewater,

Not 1682! Must be 1692. Glorious Revolution was 1688! The eternal Irish hangup that was the Boyne was 1690. Hence James II was back in in France in 1690. John Mack(e)y wrote an account of James II's court in exile at St. Germain(s) 1690-1695. This had to be a plot that fizzled. But Mack(e)y's net seems to have been involved in the later Jacobite plots and landings in Scotland. (Starting in 1707?) Then he became a travel writer. I am reminded of Auberon Waugh's account of his father's remarks upon his return home from university: "There are only two possible careers for a man who has been sent down from Oxford. You must either become a schoolmaster or a spy."

Of course, there was journalism in London for those who have the steely nerve and skill to live out on the edge! He specialized in the British class war. Was on both sides. The title of his memoirs, which I often think about, is a reference to the "only question left hanging in the air ...which every journalist asks himself on submitting an article...WILL THIS DO?" He is too casually professional to mention the fear; though he does mention the hope.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thank you for kindly for this insightful account.

Like so much else, this too came out of England.

Which had, evidently, revived the Platonic Symposium in a different guise.

[cynic]

Here's a possible explanation for the Saudi interest in Yemen, which I have not seem mentioned elsewhere.

Craig Murray suggests that the Saudis want to build a canal by-passing the Straits of Hormuz.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/uk-killing-civilians-for-oil-again/

[Babak Makkinejad]

Please God, make it so.