As if Yemen needs any more bad news in addition to the war on the Iranian-affiliated Huthi rebels and the emergence of Al Qaeda on the country's northern hills to which dozens of its members come from every direction. There is also the issue of Yemen's southern secessionists who are taking action towards [establishing] their own country. In a matter of weeks, two serious incidents occurred and both were connected to Yemen; the first was the Arab American, Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 and injured dozens of his colleagues in a mass shooting at the US Fort Hood military base, and the second was the young Nigerian Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab who attempted to blow up a US airliner bound for Detroit. Both convicts have been linked to an American preacher of Yemeni descent. Because Abdulmutallab said he was trained in Yemen on explosions, Sanaa is being mentioned the most in international news.
Al Qaeda's success in entering Yemen is relatively old; last summer, news leaked that Al Qaeda had begun to transfer some of its activities to northern Yemen and this was later proven to be true. When Al Qaeda moves to any part of the world, it is only normal that military, intelligence, and security groups from several countries pursue it. Practically, Yemen has become the prime target, and the importance of this country was further consolidated by the [US] airliner incident. This incident caused US President Barack Obama to deliver three speeches in one week, end his holiday and accelerate his political battle with his opponents from the Republican Party who accuse him of slacking in the fight against extremists.
Therefore, Yemen will be the place for upcoming battles, regardless of whether the Yemeni authorities accept this or not. The Yemeni side must be well prepared before it finds itself a spectator in its own country. Moreover, the groups that used to deal with Al Qaeda and the Huthis should reconsider their position very carefully before they find themselves the prime target of pursuit. Everybody knows that there are groups in Yemen that trade in weapons and power and they believe that the crisis will create a lucrative financial market. Today, the game is bigger and it would be difficult to haggle in such a climate of tension and state of international war -- a war that is yet to be declared officially but has actually begun. There will also be operations targeting whoever works with Al Qaeda and the Houthis and this is what happened recently in secret.
Despite the several evidences and claims of interference, the US is insisting on dealing with the Yemeni problem in a way that is less ostentatious and emotional. The Obama administration does not want the Americans to look like a combatant army in Yemen. Without doubt they will have a major role in Yemen's current wars, especially its war against Al Qaeda. However, the Americans are avoiding public appearance and want Yemeni troops to take control of the war on the ground, whilst the Americans assist with information, planning and support. This will save the Sanaa government political embarrassment and will avoid US losses. Joint cooperation may prove to be the ideal way to confront Al Qaeda, the Huthis and others.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/17/2010 00:00 ||
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I guess we just need to ignore the long history of human rights and abuses of government authority that Cuban dictators have perpetrated over the last half century or so and we could all get along just fine. And just think, this process could be accelerated if the US government continues any further down the parallel path it has started down.
In Latin America, Cuba stands out as one of the most effective deployers of soft power. Rather than exporting revolution, Cuba today exports doctors -- with more than 30,000 Cuban doctors working in more than 100 underdeveloped countries around the world.
Cuba has become a marquee provider of catastrophe-related medical assistance around the world, particularly after tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes -- and no doubt will send large contingents of medical personnel to earthquake-ravaged Haiti in coming days and weeks.
Moving beyond the still active Cold War stasis in U.S.-Cuba relations is an Obama administration foreign policy priority, and the devastation in Haiti provides a platform not only to provide relief for a nearby nation in desperate circumstances, but also to build confidence between Cuban and American authorities in a potential collaboration of effort in a third country.
Many great American voices -- from Brent Scowcroft and George Shultz to Jackson Browne and Bill Richardson -- have said that the U.S. embargo on Cuba makes no sense as foreign policy, that the right of Americans to travel anywhere in the world should not be suspended in the case of Cuba, and that Cuba's exports of doctors rather than arms should be more than enough reason to strike Cuba off of America's state sponsors of terror watch list.
But change in a relationship as charged and historically toxic as between Fidel Castro's Cuba and 11 U.S. presidents will take narratives to move.
One such narrative could evolve from tying American resource coordination and financial support in a regional multilateral effort with other Latin American nations -- particularly Cuba's deep bench of natural disaster-experienced medical corps.
After Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans and southern Mississippi, Castro offered relief support from a 1,600-person medical team called the Henry Reeves Brigade, named after an American doctor who fought in Cuba's war of independence. The U.S. predictably turned down the offer in September 2005.
Shortly after, in October 2005, the Reeves Brigade was dispatched to help provide much-needed medical relief after the devastating Kashmir earthquake that tore through the Himalayan mountain region along Pakistan and Kashmir. The United States and Europe each sent teams of doctors to Pakistan, each with one base camp deployed for a month. The Cubans deployed seven major base camps and 30 field hospitals in the fundamentalist Islamic region of Pakistan, a nation with which Cuba did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Today, the Cubans and Pakistanis have embassies in each other's capitals.
Bruno Rodriguez, the new foreign minister of Cuba, who was then the deputy, headed the mission and lived in Pakistan's rugged mountains for that full year.
The Cuban medical teams reportedly worked constructively and positively with personnel from the U.S. and Europe -- and this kind of collaboration, even if informal, could be the kind of confidence-building narrative to move U.S.-Cuba relations out of the gridlock they have been in for decades.
As a step in the direction of pushing reset in this relationship, on Friday the White House announced that Cuba will allow US aircraft into its airspace for medical evacuations. The United States could take another step and offer to airlift Cuban doctors to Haiti.
Haiti is in trouble today -- the 7.0 earthquake devastating the capital city of Port-au-Prince and highlighting what was already a human development disaster. The UN Development Program's offices have been destroyed, with hundreds unaccounted for. Notwithstanding any casualties among its own citizens in Haiti, Cuba has 408 doctors providing services there.
Now is the time for the U.S., Cuba and other major Latin American nations to throw their weight into stopping a worse human tragedy in Haiti than already exists -- and to potentially unite American and Cuban soft power efforts in a way that creates greater positives for Haiti and for longer-term, 21st century U.S.-Cuba relations.
The American middle class will not spend its way out of disaster, if only because it can't. There are no savings.
Cash savings are up, actually, and having been rising as both a dollar amount and a percentage of monthly income since the first quarter of last year, if not earlier.
The house is worthless.
Only if one needs to sell it.
The credit cards are gone. Jobs are disappearing. Today is bad and tomorrow looks worse. People are nervous, frightened, worried. They are behind in the mortgage, and struggle to make health insurance payments. All the while, they watch the stock market explode, the bonuses arrogantly roll on, and their government lie to their faces that the "recovery" is underway. China is booming, so is India and Brazil. Beneath the hope, patriotism, and the flag, the American middle class can feel it all slipping away.
It's not good, it's not going to get much better so long as the lot in charge continue their present path, but few things outside the hard sciences actually travel straight-line graphs. Look at global temperatures.
#4
The house is worthless. Only if one needs to sell it.
Au contraire, Mon Ami. Something I learned when we bought our place in November is that the market for average houses (at least here in SC, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country) has not only not gone down, it's actually rising. The market that HAS collapsed is the one for mid-6 figure and up McMansions, which is all that builders were putting up for several years...and are STILL putting up because they've invested so heavily in the market.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
01/17/2010 15:38 Comments ||
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#5
We can turn it around IF we bring an end to the dual-party oligarchy under which money-fiddlers captured large swaths of our governments and turned our economy into one based on asset-flipping rather than designing, building and selling high value-added products that the world actually needs and can actually afford with ready money.
Both left (cf James Fallows, back from China, writing in The Atlantic, or Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone) and right (cf VDH, Steyn et al) are beginning to converge on the same diagnosis: there's nothing fundamentally wrong with American society;the problem is our corrupt, stupid, mendacious and completely bought political class.
If and when we start electing people who actually have real skills-- not lawyers or community organizers or lifelong pols or shills for this or that industry-- we will finally get our government back, and then we can rebuild. A big "if", though....
As usual for Steyn - evisceration with style...HT to IOTW
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/17/2010 10:25 ||
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#1
Obama is a shooting star, that for sure. A wise friend once told me to be cautious around shooting stars. Because shooting stars are actually burning up and burning in. Obama is proving his advice to be acccurate.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
01/17/2010 11:23 Comments ||
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#2
Maybe the Senate should have Coakley (if she wins) sit in a little chair in front of a permanently empty "Teddy's Seat".
#3
Obama is a shooting star
Give him points for understanding a) the moment, and b) Americans' weird psychology of race.
Re. the moment, all he had to do was not be Bush and not be Hillary to get on the short list. To win, he reprised the formula he hit upon when he conned Harvard Law students into giving him a position he did nothing to earn, and subsequently disgraced by not even writing a single law review article. That formula was to OTOH "bargain", in Shelby Steele's formulation, with nervous/guilty white Americans desperate to show blacks they're not racist, and OTOH to show blacks enough "authentic" blackness in the form of urban radical politics symbolism and other dog whistles so as to make them think he's one of their own.
Never did other factors-- like, say, a record of leadership, legislative accomplishments, mastery of even one complex national political issue-- enter into the message of Obama. It was and remains all about his heritage, his absent dad, his Most Amazing Lifestory.
What a complete BS artist. Someday a movie will be made about this. "Face in the Crowd, Pt II" perhaps.
#1
the 2007 NIE was wholly created as a political weapon to bash Bush and keep the US from doing anything about Iran. The authors and researchers should be exposed, fired, stripped of their pensions, and sent to Israel as human shields to enjoy the fruits of their perfidy.
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/17/2010 10:18 Comments ||
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Excerpt: Brown is exactly what Washington needs -- someone who will vote his conscience rather than spew party rhetoric.
The notion of change as an important ingredient here cannot be underestimated, not because the Democrats are necessarily on the wrong path, but because good government is enhanced by two viable parties.
In the special Senate election on Tuesday, we recommend Scott Brown.
From a Friend at the Brown Rally in Worcester [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
"It's an absolute mob scene. The police have closed off the streets. It's mind blowing. The hall is already full, and it holds 3,000 people. There may be another 1,000 people outside."
I got a call from Brown campaign today asking me to come to this. I live 15 mins from the venue and figured I get there a half hour or so early. I got turned away by the police downtown Worcester was absolutely mobbed!!! I couldn't find a place to park within walking distance.
PS OT the Mechanics Hall where the rally was held is one of the best halls for classical music in the country. It rivals Boston's Symphony Hall. Been to many concerts at both, really great place.
#3
And Barry is speaking at a campus auditorium at some Boston school with a capacity of 1,100! They have had to turn away students looking for a quiet place to study. Full of purple shirts, no doubt.
#4
Correction, it was Northeastern University, the capacity is 3,000 and the hall was not filled, even including the hecklers who interrupted The One and made him lose his place on TOTUS.
#1
If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
From the U.N. Whadja expect?
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/17/2010 7:49 Comments ||
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A leading climate scientist today accused the Indian environment ministry of "arrogance" after the release of a government report claiming that there is no evidence climate change has caused "abnormal" shrinking of Himalayan glaciers.
Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, released the controversial report in Delhi, saying it would "challenge the conventional wisdom" about melting ice in the mountains.
Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN agency which evaluates the risk from global warming, warned the glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could "disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner".
Posted by: john frum ||
01/17/2010 7:52 Comments ||
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#3
And another domino falls. I wonder exactly how much science was in that scientific report.
#4
not much, CS: In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research
smell The Consensus?
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/17/2010 9:21 Comments ||
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#5
The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain's 1999 interview with the New Scientist. ... Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.
That would be the World Wildlife Federation - the Environmentalist / Socialist Advocacy organization with the TV ads claiming that the Polar Bears are drowning (a flat out lie).
In short the UN's IPCC, which got a Nobel Peace Prize for their work, relied on a (non-peer-reviewed) political organization's propaganda as a 'source'.
#6
In response Pachauri said that such statements were reminiscent of "climate change deniers and school boy science".
Schoolboy science.
Pachauri, a railway engineer, is dismissing the work of Raina, a geologist who has studied glaciers for decades.
Glacier Atlas of India
V.K. Raina and Deepak Srivastava, Geological Society of India, 2008, viii, 316 p, 179 col. figs, 151 black and white figs, tables, ISBN : 81-85867-80-9,
Posted by: john frum ||
01/17/2010 11:17 Comments ||
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In most cases, a religious scholar cannot give preference to one political party over another or interfere in political affairs, using his immunity and status to do so, without actually inflicting harm on the political status quo and the reputation of religion.
One clear example of this is Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, a prominent contemporary Muslim scholar and the "Jurist of the Sahwa" [Islamic Awakening] as described by the researcher Mutaz al Khatib in his book recently reviewed by intellect Radwan al Sayyed in Al Hayat newspaper.
Al Qaradawi recently became involved in a number of political crises. In one of his Friday sermons that he delivered in Doha, which have transformed into a weekly political statement, he attacked Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and sided with Hamas. In fact he even called for punishing Abbas by stoning him to death before moving on to address the Egypt-Gaza border issue. He issued a Fatwa [religious ruling] a few days ago saying that Egypt's plan to build an iron wall along its border with the Gaza Strip is "prohibited according to Islamic Shariah." In response, members of the Islamic Research Academy in Al Azhar issued a Fatwa that invalidated al Qaradawi's Fatwa.
How are we supposed to deal with Sheikh al Qaradawi's opinions? Should we consider them religious edicts that are supported by concrete religious evidence or as mere political standpoints that could change in accordance with ever-changing policies?
Without doubt, they are clearly political standpoints and not Fatwas that have any kind of authority. However, the masses, or let us say the majority of the people, do not look at these views as personal opinions of a political activist called Yusuf al Qaradawi, but rather as instructions given by a great Muslim scholar and jurist. The danger of this lies in the consequences of religious scholars getting involved in political disputes.
It stems from the nature of Sheikh al Qaradawi's political and intellectual formation that is shaped by the theories of the Muslim Brotherhood. But we are under no obligation here to go along with his experience.
Sheikh al Qaradawi is not the only one combining religion with politics; rather let's say that it is a certain interpretation of religion. But there are sheikhs and muftis who disagree with al Qaradawi, the rest of the Sahwa jurists and the Islamists. For example there is Khomeinist Iran, and in Iraq religion, politics and spite have all been mixed together where Sunni and Shia religious figures carried out roles that further compounded the crisis. Talking about Iraq, we all know the magnitude of sectarian violence in that country and the extent to which key political players harbour anger and hostility against one another; even a secular figure like Ahmed Chalabi is hiding behind the cloak of Grand Ayatollah al Sistani, the highest-ranking Shia Marja in Iraq, whilst other Sunnis are calling in their Sheikhs from here, there and everywhere. The current Shia strategy in Iraq plays on evoking fear among the Sunnis and prolonging that fear. That is why the statement made by Saudi religious preacher Mohamed al Arifi against Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani at the beginning of a heated electoral season was ill timed. Al Arifi's statement became material for the election campaigns of Shia parties and to them it was a gift from above. I don't think that this is what al Arifi intended, nevertheless this is what happened.
Saudi Arabia is in the line of fire with regards to electoral propaganda of Shia parties. Needless to say, attempting to belittle religious icons in any society is absolutely unacceptable. However, this should not stand in the way of giving constructive criticism.
I wish our scholars and preachers would calm down a little and focus on explaining jurisprudence and reviving the moral principles of faith rather than getting involved in political wrangling.
This article starring:
Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi
Posted by: Fred ||
01/17/2010 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
