Al-Qaeda's Pied-a-Terre In The 'Hood
by George Jonas
National Post
January 20, 2010
Yemen isn't on every-one's lips. There's a good reason. As a country it has contributed little to the spiritual or material betterment of mankind in times ancient or modern. Unless one counts chewing Khat, and I don't.
This, by the way, is a politically incorrect paragraph.
On the other hand, unlike many politically correct paragraphs in the press, it's true.
People would know even less about Yemen if a young Nigerian hadn't put the dysfunctional republic on the map. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab did so by reportedly receiving his marching orders in Yemen to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas day. The 23-year-old scion of Africa's new elite tried, but igniting some dud explosives in his underwear achieved little beyond putting Yemen on the front page.
I suppose if Yemen were a matinee idol, one could say any publicity is good publicity, but one can't really say this about countries, and Yemen is a country of sorts. It has a capital, a flag and a seat in the United Nations. Such assets can't save a nation from being divided, unstable and impoverished, but they do amount to an address in the 'hood -- in this case, the desolate crook of the elbow formed by the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.
Neither shore is a tourist destination, except for war correspondents, mercenaries, do-gooders and vacationing venture capitalists who cherish encounters with local pirates. The coast is a stretch of about 400 miles dotted with trouble spots gazing at one another across the cobalt waters of the Gulf of Aden: Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia on one side; Yemen, dangling precariously from the tip of the Arab peninsula, on the other.
Like everyone looking to rent, terrorists want location, location, location. An address in such a 'hood isn't a very desirable piece of real estate, unless your racket happens to be a floating crap game. Cue al-Qaeda: "Have plastic, will travel!" By golly, a floating crap game. Those boys need a pied-a-terre badly.
Yemen joined the 20th century in 1962. That was the year the Republic of Yemen replaced the old Zaidi Imamate. It seemed a good idea at the time, but modernity and Yemen never really fit. Yemen -- well, Switzerland it wasn't. Central casting wouldn't have picked it for a republic. The Imamate may have been outdated but it functioned for about 1,000 years, while the Republic may have been up-to-date but didn't function worth a whiff of Khat. The hybrid coexisted for five more years with Aden and the Protectorates -- no, not a rock group, only the rear-guard of the British Empire.
By 1967, Yemen had split into the People's Democratic Republic in the south and the Yemen Arab Republic in the north, just like East and West Germany, North and South Vietnam, and North and South Korea. Soviet-style colonialism had replaced British-style colonialism. It would have required a person more committed to modernity than the average Yemenite to view republican Yemen an improvement over the Imamate.
For the next 23 years Yemen was divided into an impoverished P.D.R.Y. and a slightly less impoverished Y.A.R., until the global failure of socialism made the two halves reunite again in 1990. This, however, didn't make them more functional, and by 1994 they were at each other's throats again. Then, in the 1990s, a new player began to emerge in the 'hood.
The Arab "street," and especially the Arab/Muslim intelligentsia, disillusioned by traditional despots, kings, sheiks and emirs no less than by modern European-style political models, started pinning its hopes on militant Islam. Neo-theocrats felt that Islamic militancy might deliver what the various European-isms with which they had been flirting, from Marxism to nationalism, couldn't and didn't. After all, it was the ayatollahs and imams who expelled the Americans and the Shah from Iran and the Soviets and their puppets from Afghanistan. It sure wasn't Baathists and Nasserites and Arab-style Marxists -- they were fighting mainly each other, killing fellow Arabs or Muslims. (So did the Islamists, but that wasn't immediately noticed.)
If the mullahs and their rag-tag followers could kick out both superpowers from the vicinity of the Persian Gulf and the Hindu Kush, the nouveau-theocrats said, why, let's hear it for the Wahhabis, let's hear it for the Taliban, let's hear it for al-Qaeda. As Osama bin Laden put it, people prefer the stronger horse.
And that's where we are today. Official Yemen opposes terrorism but can't get too excited about it. Certainly not as excited as it gets about former or current socialist opponents, or about any suggestion that Yemen might do America's bidding. If President Ali Abdallah Salih is emphatic about one thing, it's that Yemenis "are not obedient soldiers of the United States."
If Yemen's rulers had to list the order in which they ranked their enemies, I suspect Yemen's socialists would have a comfortable lead, followed by America, Israel, Wahhabi (or Zaidi) heresy, Saudi treachery, unemployment and unrequited love. Terrorism would come last. Which is why Yemeni terror-masters feel safe embroidering Nigerian human bombs as Christmas gifts for America.