Yemen War Quotes

Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen.

More than any other nation, the United States has been almost constantly involved in armed conflict and, through military alliances, has used war as a means of resolving international and local disputes. Since the birth of the United Nations, we have seen American forces involved in combat in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, and Vietnam, and more recently with lethal attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other sovereign nations. There were no “boots on the ground” in some of these countries; instead we have used high-altitude bombers or remote-control drones. In these cases we rarely acknowledge the tremendous loss of life and prolonged suffering among people in the combat zones, even after our involvement in the conflict is ended.

The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.

In response to this direct challenge to British authority, the Mandate authorities deported virtually the entire Palestinian nationalist leadership, including the mayor of Jerusalem, Dr. Husayn al-Khalidi, my uncle. With four others (he and another two were members of the AHC) he was sent to the Seychelles Islands, an isolated location in the Indian Ocean that the British Empire frequently chose for exiling nationalist opponents.61 The men were held in a heavily guarded compound for sixteen months, deprived of visitors and outside contact. Their fellow prisoners in the Seychelles included political leaders from Aden in Yemen and Zanzibar. Other Palestinian leaders were exiled to Kenya or South Africa,

Obama would prove to be one of the most militarily aggressive American presidents in decades. He authorized military operations in seven Muslim countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen; mandated a troop surge in Afghanistan; and vastly ramped up the CIA drone program. And he became the first president since the Civil War to authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen: Anwar al-Awlaki.

Bin Laden was emerging now as a politician, a rising force in the underground and exiled Saudi opposition. The Islamist backlash against the Saudi royals that erupted after the Gulf War continued to gather momentum in 1994. Bin Laden allied himself early that year with a Saudi opposition group based in London that used fax machines and computer lines to denounce the royal family’s “insatiable carnal desires.” Bin Laden set up his own group, the Advisory and Reformation Committee, which also published hundreds of anti-Saudi pamphlets, all filled with bin Laden’s picture. His tracts proposed the breakup of the Saudi state. Saudi Arabia’s borders marked the reign of a single and illegitimate family, the al-Sauds, bin Laden argued. He proposed two new countries, Greater Yemen and Greater Hijaz, which would divide the Arabian Peninsula between them.11

(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)

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas—the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation. I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV. They watch TV and see how we live here in the West. They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash. I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

Modern-day Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west – the Arab world and its Shia minorities. It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (33 million Saudis as opposed to 81 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbour if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront each other directly. Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards itself as the champion of its respective version of Islam. When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf. The American-led deal on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which was concluded in the summer of 2015, has in no way reassured the Gulf States that the threat to them from Iran has diminished, and the increasingly bitter war of words between Saudi Arabia and Iran continues, along with a war sometimes fought by proxy elsewhere most notably in Yemen.

Yemen was, in the years prior to World War I, the ‘Vietnam’ of the Ottoman Empire, but not that of Egypt. In Yemen, Egypt attained its political goals. The republic survived.

Chroniques de la guerre contre le Yémen Aux 5000 enfants martyrs du Yémen tué sous les bombes de l'avion royal Aux oubliés du monde À sa mémoire

Yemen is paralyzed by the world’s first true civil war over access to fresh water. All but two of the country’s aquifers have run dry, prompting armed conflict to protect the sources of water still there.

Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Belgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars between states are dwarfed by those between terrorists and counter-terrorists, insurgents and counter-insurgents; and there are also economic, financial and cyber wars, wars over and through information, wars for the control of the drug trade and migration, and wars among urban militias and mafia groups. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and strangest – of all world wars: one that approximates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war.

Whether these politicians lack understanding of the law or simply seek to circumvent it by using corporate regulations instead is unclear. But in the case of both Hamas and Hezbollah, we need to ask: What is the impact in Palestine and Lebanon, where these groups are powerful players in local politics—local politics that have no shortage of violent actors? Azza El Masri is a media researcher from Lebanon who, for the past several years, has studied content moderation. “Is Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and its participation in the Iran-KSA proxy war tantamount to terrorist activities? Yes,” she told me in a text message. “However, this doesn’t absolve the fact that Hezbollah today is the most powerful political actor in Lebanon.” Lebanon’s political scene is, to the outsider, messy and difficult to parse. After the fifteen-year civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, the country’s parliament instituted a law that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment, allowing the groups that were formerly militias to form political parties. Only Hezbollah—an Iran-sponsored creation to unify the country’s Shia population during the war—was allowed by the postwar Syrian occupation to retain its militia. The United States designated Hezbollah (which translates to “Party of God”) a foreign terrorist organization in 1995, more than a decade after the group bombed US military barracks in Beirut.

Americans assassinating foreigners in a foreign land for a foreign power. Yemen was a strange war.

Two Yemeni Jews, Hannah and Saadya Akiva, gave a similarly bleak account of Yemen in the aftermath of the Second World War. Speaking to the historian Bat Ye’or, they recalled how it was forbidden for a Jew to work in agriculture, to write in Arabic, to possess firearms, or to ride on a horse or a camel. Jews could only ride on donkeys, and even then they were obliged to ride sidesaddle in order to jump to the ground whenever they passed a Muslim–as in the early days of the Covenant of Omar more than 1,200 years earlier. In the streets in Yemen, Jewish pedestrians had to pass Muslims on the left. Although Jewish cobblers made shoes for Muslims, they were not allowed to wear them. Hannah and Saadya Akiva explained: ‘The Arabs forbade us to wear shoes, so that we hid them when, as children, we went searching for wood for cooking. When we were far enough away, we put on our shoes; on returning we took them off and hid them in the branches. The Arabs frequently searched us, and if they found them, they punished us and forbade us to collect wood. We had to lower our heads, accepting insults and humiliations. The Arabs called us

Hysteria! And grief and bitterness. That's what goes on. Not satisfied that our fighters evacuated the city, the enemy went after their women and children whom they left behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, slaughtered them, and left their bodies stacked in grotesque piles in the muddy lanes, fly-covered, rotting in the sun. They went after our Palestine Research Center the repository of our culture and history in exile, whose treasures we had been collecting since the day we left Palestine, looted it then burned it to the ground. Fifteen thousand of our people, including boys under the age if twelve and men over the age of eighty, were picked up and put in a concentration camp called Ansar. Our community in Lebanon, half a million men, women, and children found itself suddenly severed from institutions (educational, medical, cultural, economic, and social) they had depended on for their everyday living, which the enemy destroyed. Our fighters, the mainspring of our national struggle, were shipped to thre deserts of Algeria, the outback of Sudan, and the scorching plain of Yemen. Our leadership sought refuge in Tunisia. And when the choked psyche of our nation gasped for air, some months later, we lunged atat each other in civil war, because we had failed our people and ourselves. Our promises had proved illusory.

Of course, Obama, like most of his duplicitous predecessors of both Parties, is only a front man; a shameless, feckless, rabble rousing puppet whose protective skin pigmentation insulates him from the close scrutiny and criticism which he so richly deserves. Sound too harsh? Ask the grieving family members of all those women and children that the “Commander In Chief” has obliterated in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan etc, if such an assessment is too harsh, or “racist”?

Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Belgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars between states are dwarfed by those between terrorists and counter-terrorists, insurgents and counter-insurgents; and there are also economic, financial and cyber wars, wars over and through information, wars for the control of the drug trade and migration, and wars among urban militias and mafia groups. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and strangest – of all world wars: one that approximates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war. Unquestionably,

Osama bin Laden wanted to coax just the right response out of the United States by creating a situation in which the United States could not ignore him. His goal was to cross a threshold that Americans would deem intolerable (something bin Laden had failed to do with his previous attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa or the USS Cole in Yemen), causing a massive attack to be launched on the Islamic world that used the most advanced and sophisticated methods available. Bin Laden was confident that if the U.S. plunged into the Islamic world, he would get the uprising he wanted. He had studied the Afghan war against the Soviets carefully. He felt he knew how to survive the initial American attack and, over time, defeat the Americans. But first, he needed the Americans to attack.

Abdullah al-Sallal, the first president of the republic, came from a low-class butcher family.

Salih was more greedy and paranoid than ever, describing him as “unrealistically and stupidly confident.

They were gateway schools, innocuous on the surface but deadly in retrospect.

Both Salih and bin Laden wanted to erase all traces of the past. The bikini beaches were closed and the beer gardens wiped away by sweaty men with guns and beards. It was time for a new start.

I pledge before God my obedience to carry out both pleasant and unpleasant orders at good times and bad, and to work selflessly and not to disobey my commanders.

Saudi Arabia put Egyptians like Qutb on salary, giving them positions in state mosques and schools where they would go on to mold a generation of students with their understanding of the Quran and jihad.

Taught by Egyptian and Saudi exiles, the institutes didn’t necessarily turn students into terrorists, but they did create a student more prepared for al-Qaeda’s message.

At Azzam’s funeral, days later, a brokenhearted Zindani tried to hold the movement together. Standing before hundreds of mourners on a hill outside Peshawar, he made an impassioned plea, his voice rising and falling in the microphone, as he praised Azzam’s ability to reconcile different factions and called for unity now that Azzam was gone. But Zindani couldn’t replace Azzam. No one could.

Fadhli was indoctrinated in the same theological school that would produce bin Laden and eventually al-Qaeda.

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.

Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s biggest donor, warned the US against putting cash into the country, saying it usually ended up in Swiss bank accounts.

In Aden’s wide, British-built thoroughfares, broken glass lay everywhere as soldiers smashed windows and display cases, carting off the booty as partial payment for their services. Some men simply backed their trucks up to buildings and disassembled them piece by piece, stripping the walls down to bare concrete before shipping them north.

This will be the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast,” Baker told the diplomat.

They are surrounded but continue to fight like donkeys,

Unlike other Arab governments, who publicly supported the jihad while privately discouraging their young men from traveling to Afghanistan, North Yemen, then a separate state, sent scores of its best and brightest. For an entire generation of young Yemenis, a trip to the front lines in Afghanistan became a rite of passage.

Salih turned a blind eye to the jihadis flooding into Yemen in the months after unification in early 1990.

The US had its link. From an interrogation room in Sanaa, bin Laden’s bodyguard tied the hijackers to al-Qaeda.

At the presidential palace in Sanaa, the same polished stone building where he had recruited for the jihad in Afghanistan, Salih reacted to the news of the battle by calling Abd al-Majid al-Zindani, the radical preacher with the carrot-colored beard who had also played a major role in sending Yemenis abroad to fight.

Bid was convinced that in order to get outside help, particularly from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, whose leaders still harbored a grudge against Salih for backing Saddam during the Gulf War, he needed to formally secede.

Even from the air, the poverty was apparent. There were no rivers, no cities, and no green, just a single, unending collage of dusty grays and browns unfolding below like a rumpled quilt.

In the early 1990s, Salih and the jihadis were on the same side.

As he walked out of the apartment, Hilah made his decision. Within minutes the Yemeni spy dialed a number he knew well and informed the man who answered that he had a traitor in his ranks.

Once again, Salih and the jihadis were on the same side.

Afghanistan, the shaykh’s voice rang out from the front of the mosque, is a land where Muslims are under attack. Soviet pilots strike from the air, murdering entire families in their homes as they sleep, he said.

(Government, Economic, Corporate, and Social Structure/Formation) Militaristic Wars, Invasions, and Occupations (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan) Secret Wars (e.g., Mexico, North Africa) Government Overthrows (e.g., Libya, Central America, Chile) Illegal Assassinations Drone Bombing (e.g., Pakistan, Yemen) Use of Radioactive Weapons (e.g., Fallujah) World’s Largest Military Budget Leader in Weapons Sales Privileging of Wealthy and Powerful (e.g., No Prosecution) Corporate and Institutional Corruption, Fraud, and Crime (e.g., Priceless)

The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic, and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable with their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.

I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops. If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually.

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.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), which compared ‘food versus cash’ in four countries, found that in three of the four – Ecuador, Uganda and Yemen (before the civil war) – cash transfers led to better nutrition at lower cost, meaning many more people could be helped for the same outlay. (In the fourth, Niger, severe seasonal food shortages meant that in-kind deliveries improved dietary diversity more than cash.)54 This has led the WFP to put more emphasis on cash transfers; today, just over a quarter of WFP’s aid globally is cash-based.

Another part of al Qaeda’s public case justifying its war against America was U.S. support for corrupt dictatorships in the Middle East, which included Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Yemen and Egypt. This support, bin Laden complained, came with the condition that these regimes keep oil prices artificially low and spend their profits on large purchases of American arms instead of using it for the people’s benefit. Is it a surprise then that all the September 11th hijackers were from countries with governments friendly to our own—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates—and that none of them were from America’s designated enemy states of Iran, Iraq or Syria? Osama

Aden

Don't Despair - Victory Is Near *** O' God, show me the way So that I could tell Those who pray to one God, Those who follow their prophet Those who recite their Holy Book But neither people nor leaders In their lives Act on that as its context Kashmiris breathe In the tyranny of democratic beasts Palestinians live In the occupation of Zionists And cruel occupiers For decades and decades Alas, the Muslim world And United Nations Stayed: Dumb, Deaf, and Blind Except for issuing words of condemnation On the unjust, oppressive rapes, And killing practices and deeds The Muslim States and rulers And the Armed Forces are unique and brave, Only for murdering their people And damaging unity and resources To stay in power Such rulers destroyed Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iran Spending trillions of wealth The Muslim States fought wars In the interests of those who preach  Justice, equality, honesty, harmony,  And peace, never learn themselves.  How they can apply justice  For Palestinians and Kashmiris? Otherwise, peace was a destiny And the destination of the Muslim State And entire humanity In such a scenario as Kashmir,  And Palestine will be bearing cruelty Unjust, oppression, and bloodshed We belong to Allah And to Him, we shall return Oh, Palestine, oh, Kashmir Do not despair Victory is near.

She is tired of dreading the next war in Israel, of living in fear that she and everyone she knows may not survive. That Tel Aviv will be flattened by a shower of Russian-made missiles hurled by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon; or that Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, the United Emirates, or Libya will blacken the Israeli skies with their thousands of airplane bombers. It’s exhausting to always be on alert.

After several failed attempts to negotiate a settlement, Abdulaziz invaded Yemen. One Saudi column led by his eldest son, Prince Saud, captured Najran and advanced to Sa’dah, the center of today’s Houthi movement. Facing tremendous difficulties with mountainous terrain and tribesmen, he subsequently had no more success than the Roman General Gallus had had 2,000 years earlier or the Royal Saudi Air Force would have eighty years later. A second column led by the second son, Prince Faisal, was more successful. Using motor transport and modern weapons paid for with a loan from the newly arrived Standard Oil of California (today’s Chevron), Faisal advanced rapidly down the flat Red Sea coast.38 The Yemeni coastal tribes—notably, the Zaraniq—are Shafi Sunnis and were happy to join the war against the Zaydi Shia. They facilitated the surrender of the coastal city of Hodeidah without a fight.

A worried Abdulaziz asked H. St. John Philby, “Where will I get the manpower to govern Yemen?”41 Moreover, neither Britain nor Italy was enthusiastic about Saudi expansion into Yemen. Britain had interests in Aden and Italy in the Horn of Africa. Both nations had treaties of friendship with Yemen. The British government advised Abdulaziz that staying in Yemen could risk war with Italy and that London would not support him if it did.42 For the first and only time in his career, Abdulaziz ordered a strategic retreat, pulling out of Hodeidah and Sa’dah. Although he withdrew from large parts of what is today northern Yemen, the 1934 Treaty of Taif confirmed Saudi control of Najran and Jizan provinces. Across the border, many Yemenis continue to harbor irredentist claims on this Saudi territory, which they sometimes refer to as Historic Yemen.

Founded in Buenos Aires in 1974 and relocated to Mexico City after Argentina’s 1976 coup, Tercer Mundo (Third World) covered political events throughout what is today known as the Global South—Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In its first issue (September 1974), the journal discussed Argentina’s nationalist leader, Juan Domingo Perón, events in Peru, the decolonization struggle in Mozambique, dictatorship in Bolivia, and the Middle Eastern conflict. In issue 4 (May 1975), Tercer Mundo analyzed “Islamic Socialism” in Somalia, denounced the U.S. economic “blockade” of Cuba, discussed cultural decolonization in Tanzania, and reported on struggles for economic independence in Angola and Panama. Publishing from Mexico City a few years later, the journal’s issues 20 and 27 (April 1978 and February 1979) trained its anti-imperialist lens on issues commonly affecting Libya, Morocco (Western Sahara), Zaire (Congo), Mexico, Panama, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and Cambodia.

Nasser’s new order appeared to be on the way when military officers, pledging “loyalty” to him, seized power in a coup in Syria. This led, in 1958, to a “merger” of Egypt and Syria into what was supposed to be a single country, the United Arab Republic. But then in 1961 other officers seized power in Damascus and promptly withdrew Syria from the new “state.” The following year, Nasser sent troops to intervene in the civil war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory that would expand his reach. Instead it turned into a long battle against royalist guerrillas and a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran joined with Saudi Arabia to support the guerrillas in resisting the Egyptian forces, one result of which was the establishment of an Iran-Arab Friendship Society, with offices both in Tehran and Riyadh. Nasser would end up calling Yemen his “Vietnam,” a political quagmire that added to the economic woes of the grossly mismanaged Egyptian economy.

As they sat down to dinner, Trump wanted to gossip about the news of the day. Senator John McCain, displaying his maverick credentials, had publicly criticized the U.S. military raid in Yemen. Trump lashed out, suggesting that McCain had taken the coward’s way out of Vietnam as a prisoner of war. He said that as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War McCain, whose father was Admiral John McCain, the Pacific commander, had been offered and taken early release, leaving other POWs behind. “No, Mr. President,” Mattis said quickly, “I think you’ve got it reversed.” McCain had turned down early release and been brutally tortured and held five years in the Hanoi Hilton. “Oh, okay,” Trump said.

The years between the end of the Second World War and 2010 or 2011, Pinker designates the long peace.19 It is a peace that encompassed the Chinese Communist revolution, the partition of India, the Great Leap Forward, the ignominious Cultural Revolution, the suppression of Tibet, the Korean War, the French and American wars of Indochinese succession, the Egypt-Yemen war, the Franco-Algerian war, the Israeli-Arab wars, the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the grotesque and sterile Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia, the farcical Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, and various massacres, sub-continental famines, squalid civil insurrections, blood-lettings, throat-slittings, death squads, theological infamies, and suicide bombings taking place from Latin America to East Timor. Alone, broken, incompetent, and unloved, the Soviet Union lumbered into oblivion in 1989. The twentieth century had come to an end.

We are still slaves, facing colonialists and their pawns, direct or indirect, in the package of so-called democracies. - The world is such a train that has engines at both ends, the USA drives the front side while Russia operates the backside, and Western Europe performs as a ticket collector of that endless journey towards the mirage; all other states are passengers of that - The so-called Wars on terror, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or such other victimized Muslim States by the USA, West, Russia, Israel, and pawn leaders of the Muslim world, were for oligopoly, duopoly interests to monopolize and that resulted in thousands of deaths. The oppressor Arab leaders supported the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Yemen with all national resources, and Pakistan criminally favoured and fought in Afghanistan against those that its institutions created to defeat the former Soviet Union to obey and fulfil the desire of the USA; whereas, India benefited and achieved evil goals from legalized terror with the approval of the United Nations. The conclusion of those wars is that; India and Pakistan fooled the USA and West Europe for dollars, and the USA lied to its people, and Russia enjoyed the tragedies and consequences of the unnecessary wars; sure, history will never justify that and forgive criminals and such warmongers.

The so-called Wars on terror, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or such other victimized Muslim States by the USA, West, Russia, Israel, and pawn leaders of the Muslim world, were for oligopoly, duopoly interests to monopolize and that resulted in thousands of deaths. The oppressor Arab leaders supported the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Yemen with all national resources, and Pakistan criminally favoured and fought in Afghanistan against those that its institutions created to defeat the former Soviet Union to obey and fulfil the desire of the USA; whereas, India benefited and achieved evil goals from legalized terror with the approval of the United Nations. The conclusion of those wars is that; India and Pakistan fooled the USA and West Europe for dollars, and the USA lied to its people, and Russia enjoyed the tragedies and consequences of the unnecessary wars; sure, history will never justify that and forgive criminals and such warmongers.

I remember explaining explaining what I saw to one brother who couldn't see the sea. "I see an endless body of blue," I said, "with a soul that courses through the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Suez Canal, all the way to the Red Sea and the western coast of Yemen, where in the seaside town of Hudaydah, my father is at the market buying fish for a special meal. And when the tide comes in and the air is heavy with salt, my mind takes me straight to the port city of Aden and weekends I spent there with friends after high school. We'd lie on the beach and imagine our lives and the wives and families we would one day have.

How could a preacher in rural Yemen pose a threat to the most powerful nation on earth? he wondered.

Nasser remained highly sceptical of American motives, chiding Miles Copeland, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Officer with the barb, ‘the genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that make us wonder that there may be something we are missing’.

It is worth remembering that in March 2015, Mohammed bin Salman was not the king of Saudi Arabia nor the crown prince or even the deputy crown prince. He was the newly appointed minister of defense. The experienced Saud al-Faisal, though ill, was still foreign minister. The popular view that 30-year-old Mohammed bin Salman recklessly took his country to war and that ten sovereign states, including Britain and the United States, blithely followed him, is a misreading of history. King Salman made the decision in order to stop the “Hezbollahization” of Yemen. Major Western powers supported the Saudis in order to prevent the expansion of Iranian influence into the Red Sea, especially in the strategically important Bab al-Mandeb strait, and to maintain Saudi support for then-ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran.

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.

The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Africa. In the early 20th century (post World War I), slavery was gradually outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France.[6] For example, Saudi Arabia and Yemen only abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman followed suit in 1970, and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007.[13] However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented presently in the predominantly Islamic countries of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Sudan.

I met Ali in the refugee camp while covering the famine and cholera epidemic that erupted in Yemen in 2017. Two years before, Ali decided to leave his homeland “forever.” He managed to get onboard a small boat which took him to a tanker ship that would carry him and three hundred other refugees to Djibouti. The night of his escape, Ali’s skiff pulled next to the towering tanker. The tanker crew lowered a basket to raise him more than forty feet onto the deck. During that hoist, rising vertically above the sea, the basket lifted Ali to an epiphany. “The crazy people do not have the height dimension!” he explained. “They have only two dimensions!” Ali presented his right palm, flat as a drafting table. “The crazy people have only length and width,” he said. He drew the two dimensions in imaginary lines on his outstretched palm. Then, with his left hand, the one holding a phantom pencil, he drew a vertical line up from his palm, stopping at the level of his eyes. “You must have the vertical dimension to be truly human,” he said. The imaginary vertical line stood balanced on his palm. Ali’s eyes crossed slightly as he focused on the point of his invisible pencil. The line rose, like a cable lifting a basket, into a third dimension beyond humanity’s binary divisions: beyond the choice of Sunni or Shiite, Muslim or Christian, political left or right. Ali was mad. Maybe the war pushed him into insanity. Maybe it was the torturing heat. But within insanity, there can be a kind of clarity unavailable to those who consider themselves sane. In his escape from Yemen, swaying in a basket in the night, Ali saw something—something that looked to the rising draftsman like compassion, forgiveness and empathy—a third dimension, the dimension of peace.

Do you think that George W Bush kept the US troop and foreign civilian death lists in Iraq next to his bible? Did Barack Obama use his Nobel Peace Prize as a paperweight for his kill list or the plans to initiate regime change Syria and destabilize Libya? Do you think that Trump is making America great by participating new foreign engagements in Yemen? Three widely different presidents with competing policies all seemed to agree on one thing, to them diplomacy is not as important as domination. The problem is not officials from one of the political parties; the problem is officials from both of them.