Will Obama Order an Invasion of Yemen?

For now, United States President Barack Obama is discarding plans to send U.S. soldiers to Yemen and Somalia, even though both countries represent serious risks in the war on terrorism.

Regardless, the American president hasn’t completely dismissed the possibility for the future, according to his statements to People magazine, published on January 11.

Instead of a military intervention, the White House plans to strengthen assistance to the Yemeni government for the fight against terrorism, doubling its financing for counter-subversion operations (up to $130 million per year) and training Yemeni security forces.

It is apparent that this is much better than throwing bombs, which would destabilize the situation throughout the Horn of Africa.

The most intransigent factions of the Republican Party insist that Obama must immediately punish Yemen, the root of the failed Christmas Day attack on an airplane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The United States established that the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who transported the explosive, was following orders from an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Senator Joe Lieberman, who declared himself an independent Democrat several years ago, even proposed launching a preventative attack on Yemen.

The U.S. government has needed to learn, more than once, the lesson of the accidents faced during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. With time, we will know if the White House has really drawn the necessary conclusions.

In response to the emerging terrorist threat that emanates from Yemen and Somalia, Obama confirmed that his government does not have plans to send soldiers to those countries.

The resident of the White House assured us that he would not discard other options and explained that the deployment of troops will be postponed as long as local governments continue to be “effective partners.”

It sounds strange. It is difficult to imagine that the government of Yemen, the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula, could be an “effective partner” of Barack Obama.

The president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, elected for the first time in 1999 and re-elected for his second term until 2013, controls barely 40 percent of the country, which is whipped by unstoppable corruption, and where various Al Qaeda operatives have been pardoned. A civil war continues in the northern part of the country.

Regarding Somalia, it is ridiculous to speak of an “effective partnership” with a government that hardly even controls the capital.

The cited statements of Obama would seem confused if the international community didn’t realize the history of all “fronts” the U.S. opened to battle terrorism.

It would be an exaggeration to open a new war-front in Yemen, taking into account that the United States continues to be swamped in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all while launching anti-nuclear threats against Iran.

The Yemeni territory (528,000 square km) is greater than that of Iraq, although smaller than Afghanistan. The majority of U.S. analysts agree that U.S. intervention in that region could have very serious consequences because it would give fire to international terrorism and Muslim anti-Americanism.

It is possible to damper the activities of the Al Qaeda groups in Yemen but, according to the country’s own inhabitants, no one can exterminate them.

Al Qaeda has the support of powerful clans, and the majority of the population believes a U.S. invasion would be much more dangerous than those clans. For Yemenis, Al Qaeda is a natural result, derived from aggressive U.S. anti-Islamism.

It is worth remembering that Yemen is the country of origin of Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden.

Most analysts believe that an invasion of Yemen would implicate an inevitable attack on Somalia because the nucleus of Al Qaeda’s forces would quickly cross the strait and establish itself in the territories outside of the Somali government’s control.

In case of attacks on Yemen and Somalia, the United States would have to occupy a territory equivalent to 75 percent of Western Europe, and Washington does not have access to the resources nor the troops necessary to do so. It also does not have the will and audacity to run such a high risk, taking into account the foreseeable augmentation of anti-American sentiment that would dissolve these campaigns in the Muslim world.