Yemen Crisis Quotes

What she said next sounded barbed, but she meant it as a concession to the enormity of the president’s responsibility, rather than as a reprimand. “I don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she said. Obama replied, “You know what? I don’t really sleep at night, but let me tell you why. It’s not just that I worry about these kids from El Salvador. I also worry about kids in Sudan, and in Yemen, and in other parts of the world. And here’s my problem: we live in a world with nation states. I have borders. You may believe that it’s inherently unfair that a child born in El Salvador has a completely different set of opportunities available and a completely different set of dangers than a child born in the US. And that’s because it is unfair. I can’t fix that for you.

(Note: The following was written in 2003, before the full implication of US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fully appreciated. The passage also predates US drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen - to say nothing of Israeli affairs since 2003. It is unknown if and how the author's comments would change if he were writing the same today.) The value of Israel to the United States as a strategic asset has been much disputed. There have been some in the United States who view Israel as a major strategic ally in the region and the one sure bastion against both external and regional enemies. Others have argued that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, has been a strategic liability, by embittering U.S. relations with the Arab world and causing the failure of U.S. policies in the region. But if one compares the record of American policy in the Middle East with that of other regions, one is struck not by its failure but by its success. There is, after all, no Vietnam in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua or El Salvador, not even an Angola. On the contrary, throughout the successive crises that have shaken the region, there has always been an imposing political, economic, and cultural American presence, usually in several countries - and this, until the Gulf War of 1991, without the need for any significant military intervention. And even then, their presence was needed to rescue the victims of an inter-Arab aggression, unrelated to either Israelis or Palestinians. (99)

In the social dilemma of the tragic commons, popularised by Garrett Hardin (1968),[51] a group of famers has access to a common grassed area upon which to sustain their individually owned herds of sheep. Each farmer, being rational, wishes to keep as many sheep as possible on the commons in order to make more money – the sheep being a mechanism for converting common property (grass) into individual wealth. However, if the grass is consumed faster than the rate at which it grows (because the number of sheep is unsustainable) the farmers are collectively disadvantaged. The dilemma is that a farmer who adds extra sheep to the commons receives all of the profit, while the cost of doing so is distributed to the group. Each farmer, therefore, has an individual incentive to increase their use of the land even though doing so reduces the productivity of the land, and affects them all adversely. The selfish, though rational, short-term individual preferences of the farmers undermine their longer-term individual interests. Furthermore, the agential behaviour of the farmers creates structural barriers to collective reform because once one farmer overuses the common resource without being punished the action becomes legitimised. The rational behaviour of individuals can thus create collective irrationality. Solving this collective-action problem is typically understood to require either the conversion of the common resource into privately owned property (the exploitation of which is, therefore, regulated by the private owners because they have incentives to maintain its productivity), or through the creation of a public authority that is capable of regulating the amount of the common resource available to an individual.[52] But there is also another option: that the farmers lobby wealthy landowners from the neighbouring village to give them more land and more grass and thus prevent an outbreak of violence between the famers that may affect those beyond the borders of the commons.

In one analysis, Richard Doner, Bryan Ritchie and Dan Slater argue that for a regime to experience an ‘extraordinarily constrained political environment’ there must be three simultaneous conditions: the credible threat of mass unrest resulting from the deterioration of living standards; an increased need for military equipment and foreign exchange; and serious budget constraints resulting from insufficient exploitable sources of revenue.

US president George H. W. Bush warned Salih that Yemen was making the wrong choice. Bush wanted to make the Gulf crisis—the first post–Cold War conflict—a showcase for the new world order. To do that, the US needed a broad, multinational coalition. Yemen’s grandstanding and calls for an “Arab” solution to the crisis were ruining the show. Making matters worse, Yemen was scheduled to take over the presidency of the UN Security Council on December 1, 1990.

The Kharijis who had repudiated ʿAli after the battle of Siffin formed small bands, usually of between thirty and a hundred men. Each group was at once an outlaw gang and a fanatical religious sect. They were held together by the conviction that they were the only true Muslims and that their rebellions had profound religious justification. A group of Kharijis (called Najda) controlled a good part of Arabia – including Bahrain, Oman, Hadhramaut, and Yemen – before they were finally crushed. These Khariji bands were most likely formed by uprooted individuals looking for communal affiliation through sectarian movements. The second civil war, then, was a crisis for the cohesion of the Arab-Muslim elite, for its political authority, and for its concepts of true belief and communal leadership.

Firstly, given that a lasting solution to security threats requires fundamental change rather than near-constant crisis suppression and stabilisation, is there any way to avoid a trade-off between less short-term security and greater long-term security? At a superficial level, such a trade-off seems unavoidable but the dilemma may be largely one of risk perception and the need to be seen to act decisively. The 2011 uprisings across the region appear to testify against the notion that short-term security can be purchased at the expense of a state’s longer-term development and self determination. A critical question, therefore, becomes whether there is a way to avoid a perceived trade-off between less short-term security and more long-term security in front of a domestic audience? In other words, can a Western audience perceive the risks associated with political instability in the Middle East to be potentially beneficial for building more stable polities in the future and, moreover, something over which its elected officials can exercise little real positive influence in the short-term? US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others have repeatedly stressed their concerns that a power vaccuum or a civil war in Yemen may play into al-Qaeda’s hands.

Times have changed, and international laws and norms surrounding belligerency are far less permissive than they were in the early twentieth century. While this means that weak states have greater protection available to them from predatory neighbours, it also enables the survival of states and institutions that are not necessarily well adapted to their environment. The sovereignty – and sometimes territorial and fiscal integrity – of weak states is guaranteed to a significant degree by external sources, which can undermine the need for robust internal sources, such as popular legitimacy, or a productive economy.

A second important difference between the international environment that shaped Western states and the one that is now shaping post-colonial Middle Eastern states is that many in the latter category can trade petrodollars (or strategic rents) for Western arms, which artificially increases the ability of the rulers to coerce the ruled.[8] At the turn of the century, the Middle East already spent more of its GDP per capita on defence than any other region. Between 1999 and 2008, that spending increased by another 34%.[9] With this difference in mind, it is unrealistic to insist, as Western diplomats and leaders have done following the removal of Mubarak, that transitions from dictatorships to fledgling democracies must be orderly. This is particularly unrealistic given that the international weapons trade, the international reliance on oil and the Western tendency to view the region through a lens of counter-terrorism objectives have all helped to sustain these regimes, but cannot realistically be altered by those who take to the street in protest.