Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi warned on Saturday that his country, still unstable after a US-backed transition ousted his predecessor Ali Abdullah Saleh, risks a descent into a civil war “worse than Afghanistan.”
Hadi boasted about what he described as “excellent” counterterrorism cooperation with the Obama administration and confirmed that he personally signs off on all drone strikes conducted by the US.
This admission is notable especially because the Obama administration, despite repeatedly hyping the drone war in Yemen when it suits them, still regard the drone program as classified.
The US-backed dictator praised the supposed precision of drone technology, describing it as “more advanced than the human brain,” and insisting that he and his American counterparts are taking steps to avoid past “mistakes,” an apparent reference to the Yemeni civilians that have been killed by drones.
The US-run drone war in Yemen is something of an extra-legal program of targeted assassinations which not only regularly kills civilians but is one of the major forces driving al-Qaeda recruitment.
Hadi’s hyping of his country’s instability and of the al-Qaeda threat there is in keeping with the protocol of his predecessor, Ali Saleh, who always cited such threats in order to milk more US aid and military assistance and to eliminate threats to his own regime, as opposed to legitimate threats to American security.