After the Thursday resignation of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his entire cabinet, US officials say their “counter-terror operations” in Yemen are virtually entirely paralyzed.
The officials are saying they have put an entire halt to Yemen drone strikes and other operations in the wake of Hadi’s ouster. They insist this is temporary while they assess conditions.
The White House also tried to make it sound like the situation was extremely temporary, going so far as to deny that there were any policy changes as such at all.
Yet the Hadi government has been falling apart in Yemen for quite some time, and there’s no easy fix here. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that the Houthis will accept a successor in the military dictator model of Hadi or his predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, both of whom were on board with the US war.
That could be a problem, as the US has sought nominal support for its drone wars, even if in cases like Pakistan the claimed support was in direct opposition to what that government was saying.
If there is no government in place in Yemen for the long term, or indeed if a government that is not pro-US is installed, it’s going to be difficult for the US to make the claim that the war is being conducted with a government’s imprimatur.
Great news for the people of Yemen. Unfortunately the drone war is likely to resume fierce as ever.
Yes right affair the check clears. Sad
“government’s imprimatur” — The state’s seal of approval
So, if the Houthis freedom fighters should continue to maintain a monopoly on the use of force and violence, what a state is all about, and what with all the Houthis supporters being dead set against Empire USA and all the drone killer corruption we have caused to their nation, what then would the CIA dare to do next?
For the Yemen Civil War has been won, the educated upper half of society has been thrown out of power and no longer can such a greed driven class keep the lower half enslaved by poverty.
The downfall of Empire USA? Could very well be, for keeping the impoverished laboring-class lower half enslaved so that the upper half can hoard all the wealth, this is what our Empire is now doing in each and every country where our terrorizing drone killers are in action.
Simple solution. The US needs to counterspin this, call it terrorism, claim some missing WMD's, and then turn Yemen into another Iraq.
Again DC loses a war because it pays damn all attention to the interests of anybody in the country.