just like pakistan!!! “Saleh basically said to the Bush administration, “We’re going to give you full access to Yemen’s territories to conduct counterterrorist operations.” They hatched a plot where Yemen would extract funding for its own military out of the Bush administration in return for the Bush administration being able to conduct counterterrorist operations inside of Yemen, including the killing of Yemeni citizens.
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The U.S. has been almost entirely silent in the face of Saleh’s forces gunning down their own citizens, which stands in stark contrast to the position that the U.S. has taken on some of the other regimes in the area.
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The U.S. has forces on the ground in Yemen that have been directly killing people in unilateral operations. They’ve done air strikes inside of Yemen. They’ve trained Yemeni forces. The U.S. has spent a lot of money militarily in Yemen, and very little money, by comparison, building up Yemen’s civilian infrastructure. So, you could say that U.S. policy has played a central role in the last decade of destabilization in Yemen and has also undermined the authority of their own leader that they back by killing civilians in air strikes. So, I think that the Obama administration’s position on Yemen has been one of deafening silence thus far.
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. It was a disaster in Iraq, where it resulted in a strengthening of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The U.S. has bombed Gaddafi’s house. The U.S. is bombing targets that have no aerial value whatsoever. You know, I’m against the U.S. policy in Libya for tactical and strategic reasons. I think that it could end up backfiring in a tremendous way and keeping Gaddafi in power even longer. And if the United States is going to start intervening in every failed rebellion or insurrection around the world, it’s going to be very, very busy. I think this was a reactionary policy with very little sight of an endgame. This morning we heard that an F-15 went down inside of Libya. Remember Donald Rumsfeld said in November of 2002, “Iraq might be five days, five weeks or five months, but no longer than that,” and 50,000 U.S. troops and an equal number of private contractors remain there. So, I don’t see an endgame here. I think this is a classic case of knee-jerk “we need to remain relevant in the world so we’re going to take military action,” while propping up ruthless dictators elsewhere that have conducted the same kinds of operations, or ignoring far worse humanitarian crises and far worse mass slaughter on the part of dictators around the world.
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