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| Arabia |
| Yemen leader basks in U.S. favor as drone strikes fuel rage |
| 2013-08-14 |
| [REUTERS] As Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi cements his ties with Washington, Yemen's interim president risks alienating his own people, who resent the U.S. drone war on al Qaeda in their country. It wouldn't be Arabian without rage. Hadi's White House visit on August 1, a mark of favor from the United States, coincided with an intensification of U.S. drone attacks on suspected members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemen-based group seen by the West as one of the global bully boy movement's most aggressive branches. The State Department also temporarily closed its embassy in Sanaa and withdrew some diplomats over warnings of a potential al Qaeda attack, with other Western embassies following suit. Yemen at first decried these measures as exaggerated. But it later said it had foiled an AQAP plot which also involved seizing energy facilities and a lovely provincial capital, a claim which a government front man in Washington later played down. Drones have killed at least 37 people in just over two weeks amid extra security measures that have frayed Yemeni nerves. In Sanaa, a U.S. reconnaissance plane buzzed overhead for hours each day and security checkpoints mushroomed across the capital during the normally joyous Mohammedan Eid al-Fitr feast. "Hadi has done nothing for Yemen, except to let American planes kill people whose guilt is not known," complained Majida al-Maqtari, a Sanaa school teacher who said she had voted for Hadi in the last election but would back an opponent next time. LONG-RUNNING TURMOIL Hadi took office with firm U.S. support after protracted unrest forced veteran President President-for-Life Ali Abdullah Saleh ... Saleh initially took power as a strongman of North Yemen in 1977, when disco was in flower, but he didn't invite Donna Summer to the inauguration and Blondie couldn't make it... , once also a U.S. ally, to step down in late 2011 after 33 years in power. A southerner with a military background, Hadi was Saleh's vice president for nearly two decades. So far he has kept the support of Saleh's friends and foes alike and has met little serious opposition - not even from Islah, an Islamist party linked to the Moslem Brüderbund. Hadi inherited a country in utter disarray. The anti-Saleh uprising and ensuing power struggles had brought Yemen's tattered economy to its knees. Islamist snuffies had taken over swathes of the south. Many state institutions had collapsed. He moved swiftly to clear an estimated 3,000 al Qaeda and allied fighters from southern towns in a U.S.-backed offensive. Hadi knows, as Saleh did, that pleasing the United States boosts the flow of military aid and badly needed humanitarian support. Washington allocated $345 million to Yemen in 2012 and is expected to give $250 million in 2013 and the same in 2014. But many Yemenis who opposed Saleh are dismayed by the drone attacks and their country's continued dependency on Washington. "These strikes project Hadi as implementing the agenda of his predecessor, and for sure affect his popularity," said Yahya Qasseb bin Sahl, law professor at Aden University. "They also channel the Yemeni street's feelings in favor of al Qaeda." |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Hey! We think the deaders are mostly bad guys and a few are even pseudo-Americans. How can we be more fair than that? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2013-08-14 11:51 |
| #1 See also WORLD NEWS > [Newstrack India] YEMENIS ANGERED AT US FOCUS ON BEHEADING AL-QAEDA [e.g. vee Drone Strikes], NOT DEVELOPMENT. And thus little Virgina, we learn once again why "Imperialism", "Nation-building/National Rexconstruction", + "Winning Hearts-n-Minds" are neither dirty words nor mutually exclusive. MILITARILY "DESTROYING A [Muslim]COUNTRY(S) TO SAVE IT", BUT NOTHING ELSE = RADICAL ISLAM + MADRASSAS + JIHADI MILTERRS + SOON-TO-BE-NUKULAAR GLOBAL JIHAD, OWG CALIPHATE.......@ETC. WIN. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2013-08-14 00:34 |