Something About Yemen: America-China Global Dominance
Battle Field
30 January 2010By Conn Hallinan
“The instability in Yemen is a threat to regional
stability and even global stability” — U.S. Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton.
“Yemen is a regional and global threat” —British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown.
“Yemen could be the ground of America’s next overseas
war if Washington does not take preemptive action to
root out al-Qaeda there” —U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn)
Yemen—a country slightly smaller than France with a
population of 22 million—perches on the southern tip
of the Arabian Peninsula. It is the poorest country in
the region, with one of the most explosive birthrates
in the world. Unemployment hovers above 40 percent and
projections are that its oil—which makes up 70 percent
of its GDP—will run out in 2017, as will water for the
capital, Sana, in 2015.
It is a bit of a patchwork nation. It was formerly two
countries—North Yemen and the Democratic People’s
Republic of Yemen (south), which merged in 1990 and
fought a nasty civil war in 1994.
The current government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh
is corrupt, despotic, and presently fighting a
two-front war against northern Shiites, called “Houthis,”
and separatist-minded southerners. Based in the north,
Saleh’s government has limited influence outside of
the capital. Whoever runs the place, according to The
Independent’s Middle East reporter Patrick Cockburn,
has to contend with “tribal confederations, tribes,
clans, and powerful families. Almost everybody has a
gun, usually at least an AK-47 assault rifle, but
tribesmen often own heavier armament.”
To make things even more complex, Yemen’s northern
neighbor, Saudi Arabia, has sent troops and warplanes
to back up Saleh. According to Reuters, “The conflict
in Yemen’s northern mountains has killed hundreds and
displaced tens of thousands.” Aid groups put the
number of refugees at 150,000. The Saleh government
and the Saudis claim the Shiia uprising is being
directed by Iran— there is no evidence to back up the
charge—thus escalating a local civil war to a regional
face off between Riyadh and Teheran.
And this is a place that Hillary, Gordon and Joe think
we need to intervene?
In a sense, of course, the U.S. is already in Yemen,
and was so even before the attempted bombing Christmas
Day of a Northwest Airlines flight by a young
Nigerian. For most Americans, Yemen first appeared on
their radar screens when the USS Cole was attacked in
the port of Aden by al-Qaeda in 1990, killing 17
sailors. It reappeared this past November when a U.S.
Army officer linked to a Muslim cleric in Yemen killed
13 people at Fort Hood, Colorado. The Christmas Day
attacker said he was trained by al-Qaeda, and the
group took credit for the failed operation.
But U.S. involvement in Yemen goes back almost 40
years. In 1979, the Carter Administration blew a minor
border incident between north and south Yemen into a
full-blown East- West crisis, accusing the Soviets of
aggression. The White House dispatched an aircraft
carrier and several warships to the Arabian Sea, and
sent tanks, armored personal carriers and warplanes to
the North Yemen government.
The tension between the two Yemens was hardly
accidental. According to UPI, the CIA funneled $4
million a year to Jordan’s King Hussein to help brew
up a civil war between the conservative North and the
wealthier and socialist south.
The merger between the two countries never quite took.
Southern Yemenis complain that the north plunders its
oil and wealth and discriminates against southerners.
Demonstrations and general strikes by the Southern
Movement demanding independence have increased over
the past year. The Saleh government has generally
responded with clubs, tear gas and guns.
When Yemen refused to back the 1991 Gulf War to expel
Iraq from Kuwait, the U.S. cancelled $70 million in
foreign aid to Sana and supported a decision by Saudi
Arabia to expel 850,000 Yemeni workers. Both moves had
a catastrophic impact on the Yemeni economy that
played a major role in initiating the current
instability gripping the country.
In 2002 the Bush administration used armed drones to
assassinate several Yemenis it accused of being
al-Qaeda members. The New York Times reported that the
Obama administration launched a cruise missile attack
Dec. 17 at suspected al-Qaeda members that, according
to Agence France Presse, killed 49 civilians,
including 23 children and 17 women. The attack has
sparked widespread anger throughout Yemen that
al-Qaeda organizers have heavily exploited.
So is the current uproar over Yemen a case of a U.S.
administration overreacting and stumbling into yet
another quagmire in the Middle East? Or is this talk
about a “global danger” just a smokescreen to allow
the Americans to prop up the increasingly isolated and
unpopular regime in Saudi Arabia?
Maybe both, but at least one respected analyst
suggests that the game in play is considerably larger
than the Arabian Peninsula and may have more to do
with the control of the Indian Ocean and the South
China Sea than with hunting down al-Qaeda in the
Yemeni wilderness.
The Asia Times’ M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career Indian
diplomat who served in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Pakistan,
and Turkey, argues that the current U.S. concern with
Yemen is actually about the strategic port of Aden.
“Control of Aden and the Malacca Straits will put the
U.S. in an unassailable position in the ‘great game’
of the Indian Ocean,” he writes.
Aden controls the strait of Bab el-Mandab, the
entrance to the Red Sea though which passes 3.5
million barrels of oil a day. The Malacca Straits,
between the southern Malay Peninsula and the
Indonesian island of Sumatra, is one of the key
passages that link the Indian Ocean with the South
China Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
Bhadrakumar says the Indian Ocean and the Malacca
Straits are “literally the jugular veins of the
Chinese economy.” Indeed, a quarter of the world’s
sea-borne trade passes through the area, including 80
percent of China’s oil and gas.
In 2005 the Bush Administration pressed India to
counter the rise of China by joining an alliance with
South Korea, Japan, and Australia. As a quid pro quo
for coming aboard, Washington agreed to sell uranium
to India, in spite of New Delhi’s refusal to sign the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement. Only countries
that sign the Treaty can purchase uranium in the
international market. The Bush administration also
agreed to sell India the latest in military
technology. The Obama administration has continued the
same policies.
China and India have indeed beefed up their naval
forces in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.
Beijing is also developing a “string of pearls”— ports
that will run from East Africa to Southeast Asia.
India has just established a formal naval presence in
Oman at the entrance to the strategic Persian Gulf.
According to Bhadrakumar, the growing U.S.
rapprochement with Myanmar and Sri Lanka is aimed at
checkmating China’s influence in both nations, and
cutting off efforts by Beijing to reduce its reliance
on ocean-borne energy transportation by constructing
land-based pipelines. China just opened such a
pipeline to Central Asia.
“The U.S. , on the contrary, is determined that China
remain vulnerable to the choke points between
Indonesia and Malaysia,” writes the former Indian
diplomat.
Checkmating China would also explain some of the
pressure that the Obama administration is exerting on
Pakistan.
“The U.S. is unhappy with China’s efforts to reach the
warm waters of the Persian Gulf through the Central
Asian region and Pakistan. Slowly but steadily,
Washington is tightening the noose around the neck of
the Pakistani elites—civilian and military—and forcing
them to make a strategic choice between the U.S. and
China,” writes Bhadrakumar.
This would help explain the increasing tension between
China and India over a Himalayan border region that
has sparked a military buildup in Chinese-occupied
Tibet and India’s Arunachai Pradesh state. Former
Indian Air Marshall Fali Homi told the Hindustan Times
that China was now a bigger threat than Pakistan, and
former Indian National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra
predicts an India-China war within five years.
“Energy security” has been at the heart of U.S.
foreign policy for decades. The 1980’s “Carter
Doctrine” made it explicit that the U.S. would use
military if its energy supplies were ever threatened.
Whether the administration was Republican or
Democratic made little difference when it came to
controlling gas and oil supplies, and the greatest
concentration of U.S. military forces is in the Middle
East, where 60 percent of the world’s energy supplies
lie.
Except for using Special Forces and supplying weapons,
it is unlikely that the U.S. will intervene in a major
way in Yemen. But through military aid it can exert a
good deal of influence over the Sana government,
including extracting basing rights.
The White House has elevated the 200 or so “al-Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula” members in Yemen into what
the President calls a “serious problem,” and there are
dark hints that the country is on its way to becoming
a “failed state,” the green light for a more robust
intervention.
However, as Jon Alterman, Middle East Director of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies,
argues, “The problems in Yemen are not fundamentally
problems that military operations can solve.”
But then the “problems” of Yemen may be simply a
prelude for a much wider and potentially dangerous
strategy focused on China.
“The U.S. cannot give up on its global dominance
without putting up a real fight,” says Bhadrakumar.
“And the reality of all such momentous struggles is
that they cannot be fought piecemeal. You cannot fight
China without occupying Yemen.”
-- Conn Hallinan can be reached at: ringoanne@sbcglobal.net
©
EsinIslam.Com
Add Comments