After Yemeni Regime’s Collapse, Calls Mount for US Military Escalation across Middle East and Africa

After Yemeni Regime’s Collapse, Calls Mount for US Military Escalation across Middle East and Africa


One day after Yemeni President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi announced his resignation amidst the occupation of his government’s central facilities and his private residence by Houthi militants, a chorus of voices from the US political establishment and punditry are calling for expanded US and NATO military operations across the Middle East and Africa.

The collapse of the Yemeni regime, which as events have proven, enjoyed no support outside of the military aid flowing from Washington, represents another major debacle for US imperialism in the Middle East. The US had relied on Hadi to rubber-stamp authorization for drone missile strikes, despite widespread popular anger over the attacks, and to supply intelligence for their targeting and cover up their toll in terms of civilian casualties.

Obama had also touted Yemen as a model for his administration’s subsequent interventions in Iraq and Syria, with limited US military presence and what one senior advisor described as “intelligence-driven, dynamic targeting.”

Now these methods have succeeded only in completing the implosion of Yemeni society and the creation of a political situation in which the major contending forces consist of a Shia militia aligned with Iran and the local affiliate of Al Qaeda, with the country’s partition a real possibility.

The US campaign against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which is being portrayed as the most immediate terrorist threat to the West and linked to the recent attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, has been thrown into disarray.

The Houthis, a movement based in Yemen’s Zaidi Shia minority, has blamed the US for air strikes against its people and has voiced hostility to the US presence in the country.

In the wake of Hadi’s ouster, the US military has ordered emergency deployments near Yemen in preparation for a range of contingencies. “We are continuing to closely monitor the situation in Yemen,” a Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday.

“The unrest in Yemen is a concern overall. The [USS] Iwo Jima and [USS] Fort McHenry are on station, and between those two warships, there’s enough combat power to respond to whatever contingency may come up,” the US military spokesman said.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and French President Francois Hollande issued similar calls for a comprehensive expansion of NATO military and intelligence operations throughout the Middle East and Africa, during remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos Friday.

Kerry cited numerous countries as prime targets for new Western military incursions. “We must eliminate Daesh [ISIS], strengthen Somalia, intensify our efforts in Nigeria, and strike at the tentacles of al-Qaeda in Yemen, the Maghreb, and wherever else they appear,” Kerry said.

Kerry also pointed to Central African Republic, Libya, and Afghanistan as countries where new “long term” military interventions had become necessary. The NATO powers must focus their operations on “zones of greatest vulnerability,” including “the Horn of Africa, segments of the Swahili coast, the area around Lake Chad, and certain parts of the greater and south central Asian region,” Kerry said.

In high-flown rhetoric evoking an epochal struggle, Kerry compared the fight against Islamic extremist groups to the US military campaign against Nazi Germany, saying that Islamic State, Boko Haram, and similar groups pose an existential threat to the US-dominated political order established after World War II.

“This is a threat to the entire structure that we have worked so hard to put in place since the end of World War II. It’s a threat to nation-states. It is a threat to rule of law,” Kerry said.

The representative of US imperialism attributes to a handful of Islamist militants the crisis of the capitalist nation-state system that has arisen out of the contradictions of the capitalist system itself, giving rise to a new era of militarist aggression and drive toward world war.

Kerry also announced Friday that he will travel to Nigeria to confer with officials there about further US involvement in the Nigerian government’s war with the Islamist militant group Boko Haram

Also speaking in Davos, French President Hollande vowed that France will steadily escalate its already substantial military presence in Africa. “In Africa, France is on the ground and it will continue to be so more than ever before. It will be present to bring help to those countries who are having to deal with the scourge of terrorism,” Hollande said.

I’m thinking of the Sahel, in particular, but also the situation in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad, who are under attack from Boko Haram,” he said.

Kerry’s and Hollande’s remarks were accompanied by an appearance of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who demanded that the Western military alliance supply more aid to his government’s fight against ISIS.

Numerous other voices from the US political and military elite argued that the collapse of Yemen’s officially recognized government posed the necessity for aggressive new US military action.

“AQAP is fresh off its attack on Paris and has grown since 2009 into the most dangerous al-Qaeda affiliate in the world. It has attacked Detroit and Chicago. It is dedicated to overthrowing the House of Saud,” former CIA and Pentagon official Bruce Riedel wrote in Al Monitor .

US Representative Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the Houthi coup in Yemen represents “a big step forward for Al Qaeda” and a “win for Iran,” and repeated the mantra that AQAP constitutes the “most toxic, most lethal Al Qaeda affiliate.”

Royce praised the deposed Yemeni president for his collaboration in the US drone war. “Hadi was particularly helpful to the US in assisting us in targeting drone strikes against Al Qaeda” and was a “very close ally and partner,” Royce said.

The “global jihadist threat” is “greater than at any time in our history,” senior Defense Department official Michael Vickers said Wednesday in remarks to the Atlantic Council.

“Attacks on the West in particular are very high on their list and increasing in priority,” said Vickers, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for intelligence.

“Few on the ground see anything but an Islamic State on the move,” the Wall Street Journal warned.

US “counterterrorism” policy in Yemen is “in tatters,” the Washington Post reported. “If order and a friendly regime are not restored soon in Yemen, the White House may be confronted with a difficult choice: keep flying the drones even if they violate Yemeni sovereignty, or halt the operations and ease up on al-Qaeda,” the Post argued

Former US ambassador to Yemen Stephen Seche told the Post that the Houthi coup marked a turning point in US policy.

“I don’t think we’ll just want to continue running operations like we have done the last several years,” Seche said, suggesting that a considerably more aggressive intervention is on the agenda.

Meanwhile, an OxFam report published Friday found that Yemen faces a “humanitarian disaster” that places “millions of lives at risk.” Some 50 percent of Yemenis require some form of humanitarian assistance, with nearly a million children in the country subsisting on the verge of starvation, OxFam found. Saudi Arabia, which provided much of the funding for Yemen’s government, cut off most of its aid after the Houthis seized control of the capital in September.


By Thomas Gaist
Global Research