As I try to process the cacophony of news coming out of Yemen, I thought I would share this tidbit from Gregory Johnsen’s latest post. Amid stories about unfinished business in Yemen, the cost of ignoring Yemen, comparisons between Libya and Yemen, and others, Johnsen offers some clear insights about what that analysis means for the US and for Yemen:
[M]ost of the analysts whose names one reads in the newspapers or sees on television are merry-go-round commentators, speaking on Libya one week, dissecting Syria the next, and then explaining Yemen when something goes boom in Sanaa.
The newspapers have ignored Yemen - this is what newspapers do. It is tough to write - let alone get people to read - a story about the inner-workings and behind-the-scenes political calculations of diverse and opaque groupings in Yemen. Particularly when few have an intimate knowledge of the primary players.
And because the news media, as should be expected, largely ignored Yemen when there were bloodier crises to cover in Libya and Syria and as a result so did the merry-go round experts in DC and Europe.
But the US did not.
No, he says, the US did not; we’ve just made a bunch of bad choices, and missed a bunch of opportunities over the past months. “[F]ew have an intimate knowledge of the primary players,” he says, and the ones we do seem to know become more and more entrenched. Ultimately, though, knowing the primary players seems to be worth less and less, as everyone tries to get a grasp on something. Johnsen writes later:
So what we have in Yemen, is a steadily shrinking center (the traditional state) that the Hashid elites are fighting over on the backs of the protesters, while on the periphery groups that feel they haven’t gotten a fair shake in decades, now believe the time is right for them to push forward and try to take as much as they can hold.
This, needless to say, is a disaster and one that is likely to get worse before it gets better.
This all reminds me of a quote from Victoria Clark’s book, in which Egyptian commander Field Marshal al-Amer remarked about “those five wasted years in Yemen”:
We did not bother to study the local, Arab and international implications or the political and military questions involved. After years of experience we realised that it was a war between tribes and that we entered it without knowing the nature of their land, their tradition and their ideas. (p. 100)
Sounds like not much has changed since the 1960s.
- thoughtsonyemen-blog posted this