Yemen--Afghanistan Redux?

An article in today’s Washington Post discusses the failures of the United States with regard to al Qaeda in Yemen, yet the article, while dissecting missteps and mistakes (for example, the firing of a Hellfire missile that exploded a car carrying six al Qaeda suspects in eastern Yemen), does not address the larger component of the failure—a failure that marks most of our efforts in the international arena. By and large, as a nation, we do not demonstrate the capacity for an internationalist view, so our actions across the world are driven either by ignorance or disregard. Over the past century, perhaps only three presidents had any level of internationalist view—Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Bill Clinton.

With regard to al Qaeda, the blame must be placed where it almost entirely lies—with the Bush-Cheney (hereafter BC) administration. While (willful) inexperience may account for many of the administration’s early failures, most glaring is the complete surrender of policy to ideology, malfeasance, and opportunism. From the larger view, one might argue that the first two on this list were motivated primarily by the last. The determination to wage war on the cheap benefited such corporations as Halliburton (of which Cheney was CEO until he was tapped for the vice presidential slot on the Republican ticket), corporations which have not suffered from the economic meltdown of the past two years. Recent reports have suggested that as early as spring 2001 the BC administration bragged that they would have boots on the ground in Afghanistan by the fall. At the center of this was something near and dear to the hearts of both Bush and Cheney—petroleum, in particular oil pipelines like the Afghanistan Oil Pipeline, the proposed Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, and HBJ Pipeline—the latter associated with both Enron and Bechtel. (Enron, of course, was the disgraced corporation headed by “Kenny Boy” Lay, a Bush crony, and Bechtel, a company that once had Caspar Weinberger—Secretary of Defense under Reagan—as a vice president and for which Donald Rumsfeld—Secretary of Defense for BC—traveled to Iraq to negotiate a pipeline deal. The visually impaired could connect the dots.)

What we should have recognized after 9/11 was that our actions in the world—particularly in the Arab world—have consequences. This is not to excuse the inexcusable but to try to determine why al Qaeda exists. Our history—right on the heels of imperialist conquests by Western European nations, most notably, in the Muslim world, England—has trammeled native populations in order to line the coffers of large companies; imperialism once joined with capitalism would not recognize any limits to their greed. Anyone who’s read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has had a glimpse into practices that endured well into the twentieth century—well into today. What the general populace of Western nations do not see because of the mainstream gloss over genocide and pillage in the name of profit operating under the flag of nationalism is the disregard for and suffering of the indigenous peoples of such countries as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Because we do not see it, we think that Islamist extremists are merely insane—driven by a psychotic religion to wreak violence on innocent Americans. This, of course, serves the powers that be. Without this blind, we might demand accountability for our national actions, and a true accounting would not pass muster.

One sentence in the middle of the Post article pretty much sums up the problem: “Yemen is a conservative tribal society with deep sympathies for al-Qaeda’s core message of protecting Islam.” Yemen is not alone in this regard. Most Muslim nations are also conservative, and the people feel their greatest loyalty toward their tribe, not toward the nation. After all, most of these “nations” were determined by European imperial powers and bear no relationship to actual native affiliation. (This shouldn’t be that hard to imagine since the United States is rapidly becoming a nation whose allegiances are just that partisan and parochial.) What we see in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the problem that will not go away, is that the successful internal applications of national power have derived from tribes or factions that have grown large and powerful enough to impose their will across the board. Once we toppled Saddam, there was nothing capable of filling the vacuum.

Sadly, the primary legacy of 9/11 is that it afforded the BC administration the cover to conduct its imperialist policy without recourse to other excuses. How much easier to justify invasions of targeted nations when they could claim national security and get away with little close oversight because of the national anger over an attack on our soil. Our actions, however, only increased the brand al Qaeda. We waged a War on Terror that we implicitly marketed as a war on Islam, when we were actually conducting a War for Profit. For ordinary Muslims, the last two were not easily separable because they were all too familiar with the profit motive and saw that, if not directly anti-Islam, it moved without regard or respect for their deepest held beliefs.

Consider whether an American retaliation into Yemen is the best action we could undertake. It will perhaps salve our national need for action, to put, as Toby Keith so succinctly sang, “a boot in [their] ass—it’s the American way.” On the flip side, it will just reinforce Muslim perceptions about America and American policy, insuring that al Qaeda will never have to look too far for more men willing to die the martyr’s death—whether or not they expect to see those 72 virgins.