The always statesmanlike and deliberative Obama administration has once more demonstrated its uncanny ability to appear totally adrift at the policy level. The instant case is Yemen. For weeks the White House, Foggy Bottom, and the Pentagon have been singing the same song: We support our key ally in the global war on radical extremism, the President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Of course, every lyric of support has been followed by an obbligato chorus, We deplore violence and call upon all sides to show restraint and a commitment to dialogue.
As the bullets have shot downrange and the bodies piled higher on the square near the university in Sana, the lyrics and chorus have remained unchanged. Even as the US aircraft bombed and strafed the forces of Brother Leader in Libya, the song stayed the same. The conventional wisdom became simply that the US had no choice but to stick with Saleh given the threat presented by al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP.) Additional arguments were adduced in support of the basic contention. Among these was the ability of the ever-wily Saleh to dance on the heads of vipers as his decades of survival in Yemeni politics have shown.
Saleh the survivor joined with Saleh the partner. We seemed to be welded to the guy come what may. There didn't seem to be any alternative. We had to hang together else Yemen would join with Somalia as one more failed state in the grasp of a group espousing violent political Islam.
Well a funny thing happened on the way to our eternal relationship with Saleh. As the NYT reported, the Obama administration did what it has been so good at of late--changing its mind. Quietly, without taking the American public into its confidence, the Deep Thinkers of the current administration shifted its message to Saleh. The new word is: "Time for you to saddle up and get out of town, pardner."
The policy seems to have been a low visibility version of what the Obama folks did in Egypt. "We are with you all the way, Hosni" on Monday. On Tuesday it was all about, "We are with the people of Egypt and we always have been."
The gales of derisive laughter which met the new Obama position within the ranks of the Egyptian demonstrators may be the reason the approach in Yemen has been low key. This way when the belated change from pro-status quo to pro-opposition did not buy any good will from the men and women who had done the heavy lifting, faced the gun fire of snipers, and bled for what they believed in would not be so embarrassing.
The Obama administration's support for the Saleh status quo defies rational understanding. The most cogent explanation is the Deep Thinkers became overly fixated on a lesser problem--Saleh's lack of general legitimacy--and overlooked the larger, catastrophic one--Yemen is a collapsing state. Period. (This dynamic, obsessive focus on a lesser problem which prevented appreciating a larger, fatal one, was at work in the crash two years ago of Air France flight 447.)
The obsession with AQAP has resulted in tunnel vision regarding the totality of Yemen. While the Western looking youthful demonstrators in Sana have captured the photos and imagination of the West, these individuals, many of them quite secular, are not representative of Yemen taken as a whole. Nothing, no one set of individuals, no one group, no single ideology, religious or secular, certainly no leader can be taken to represent Yemen as a whole.
Why? You ask.
There is no such political entity as Yemen. Get a grip on it. You cannot take Yemen as a whole because there is no such critter. At best Yemen is a geographical expression in which several different polities, societies, ideologies coexist in an environment of friction and animus.
It was the inherent divisions which typify Yemen which allowed Saleh to hang on to power for so long. He understood and exploited the differences, the rivalries, the animosities between tribes and within tribes, between and within regions, between and within religious groups well enough to stay in power, dancing, as he once said, on the heads of vipers.
When the predominantly young, very often Western looking and leaning youth of the Yemeni Khat Revolution came hot on the heels of the paradigmatic Jasmine and Lotus revolts, it introduced not simply a new snake of a different color to the nest of vipers on which Saleh danced, but also perturbed the delicate balance between the older, larger rivals with results which constituted a cascading failure for the status quo. The longer and less successful the suppression campaign became, the more the ancient opponents of Saleh saw prospects for change.
Old and trusted comrades, members of the status quo in good standing, suddenly had a great desire to embrace the goals of the young men and women serving as targets for Saleh's snipers. Tribes whose leadership had battened fat and rich from the troughs controlled by Saleh felt the warm winds of freedom and without warning had a yearning to breath longer and deeper of the heady new atmosphere.
The vipers no longer were bunching together in a fine dance floor for Saleh's nimble feet. They parted company, each looking for advantage. Each showed a very real willingness to exploit the fruits of change growing from the blood of the kids of the Khat Revolution. Saleh may have been both willing and able to keep on dancing--but there were no longer any snakes upon whose heads he might.
Not that the rapid disintegration of the Saleh dance floor really mattered. All it did was to hasten the day when the basic reality of Yemen's non-existence had to be recognized by the US and others. Right now, today there are at least four Yemens within a common border.
There is Houthi-land in the north. This Shia derived sect has been waging defensive insurgency for several years now with the long range goal of reconstituting the historic Houthi monarchy in at least some of its former range.
There is AQAP-stan in the southeast. In that part of Yemen AQAP has come into the open. It operates as the de facto government. Its' fighters control at least some of the towns and all of the interurban roads. It collects taxes, administers "justice," and generally behaves as a government. To say that AQAP has ambitions not limited to the hot and sandy wastes of the southeast is to belabor the obvious.
In the southwest is to be found the remnants of the old Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) which existed as a soviet style independent sovereignty for decades only to be more or less forcibly folded into greater Yemen while Bill Clinton warmed the Oval. The aging one time commissars of the PDRY may have wrinkled with the passage of years, but they have not lost the dreams of youth--as their armed insurgency has demonstrated repeatedly in recent years.
This leaves "Yemen." In the center of the map, this "Yemen" is the fighting ground of several tribes each of which seeks to be first among equals. This "Yemen" bests represents the cynical but accurate description once applied by an Egyptian observer to Arab states generally--"An assemblage of tribes under a common flag."
The profound centripetal forces afflicting Yemen assure its collapse. Saleh himself recognized this as he manifested a while back when he eschewed reelection ambitions. All the events of recent weeks have done is to accelerate the process. The support or non-support of Saleh by the Obama administration is utterly irrelevant.
The policy pivot will not gain the US any particular influence over whatever government emerges in the post-Saleh days. Even if the belated embrace of the protesters' cause did gain influence for the US, it wouldn't matter. That is because no successor government will be any more able to overcome the powerful impetus to disintegration so deeply embedded in the political, social, and cultural matrices of the place and the people.
Yemen as it exists on paper is an artifact. It is the creation of outsiders along with a miniscule number of Yemenis, most of whom were in closer touch with the West than the tribal majority at home. Like Sudan or Somalia or Iraq or Libya, Yemen is not an organic creation, a product of strictly local manufacture. As such, Yemen has been a collapsing state in the making since the day of its creation.
As if the internal frictions and rivalries were not sufficient to make Yemen an ungovernable place and the Yemenis an ungovernable people, there are other considerations of more recent vintage. Yemen is poor. Well, it worse than simply poor. It is a desperately impoverished place in which poverty is exacerbated by exceptional mal-distribution of the riches that do exist.
Worsening the situation is the reality that Yemen's microscopic oil reserves are dipping rapidly to empty. The oil bucks will stop flowing in the very near future.
Then there is water. More accurately there is the lack of water. The combination of normal drought, overuse of subsurface water, and the waste of water in non-productive agriculture (the growing of khat) have combined to present Yemen with the stark possibility of running out of this most essential of materials in the near future.
The lack of economic development--caused in large measure by the corrupt diversion of oil revenues to personal pockets rather than generally beneficial projects--combined with unsupportable population growth has assured that the best employment opportunities for Yemenis are to be found outside of Yemen. More and more Yemeni economic success will be measured in the amount of the remittances sent home by Yemeni working elsewhere.
Considering the totality of the circumstances (as lawyers are wont to say) there are ample reasons for Yemen to collapse. At the same time there are few, if any, reasons to argue that a mere regime change will benefit either the place or the people.
The policy conclusion is not hard to make. The US and other countries (such as Saudi Arabia which has the biggest bull in the herd here) can pump money beyond count into Yemen in the hope of purchasing some fair simulacrum of stability. Or, the US can wait on the sidelines. Wait for the inevitable, the official collapse of Yemen.
The second course of action implies that the Yemen Question will be dropped on the laps of (1) the Arab League, (2) the Gulf Cooperation Council, (3) the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and, (4) the UN. In the event that one or more of these groups decides that the collective interests of its members requires a nation-building effort in Yemen, the result will be a future very much like the past--an artifact imposed from outside which will be inherently non-stable.
The only direct interest of the US and other Western states in the Yemen Question is that of security against terror threats from AQAP. This implies that the policy of the US and other similarly situated states must focus narrowly on preventing such acts or punishing the actors and their facilitators after the fact. The US would bear no responsibility for the political, social, economic, or cultural "rehabilitation" of Yemen and should vigorously reject any such involvement as the result would be a replay of the past few years.
Yemen, like Libya, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan and numerous other "states" demonstrates the futility of building a nation-state. Only nations can build a state--and then only their own. For Yemen to become a nation-state it must first become a nation--not a group of tribes with a single flag. Yemen has a far piece to go before it can be called a nation. That means it has a long, long way to go before it can claim the status of nation-state.
It is very important for our future as well as that of the Yemeni that the US (and other well-intentioned states) get a grip on a very compelling but equally unpleasant truth: You cannot build a nation or a nation-state from the outside.
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