Saturday, September 03, 2016

We Now Resume Our Usual Programming

The Saudis seem unwilling to endure the casualties to defeat the Shia Houthis backed by Iran. But the Saudis are also unwilling to let the Iran-backed group win the Yemen civil war.

Cue up the negotiations:

Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said on Wednesday the Iranian-allied Houthi movement would not be allowed to take over Yemen, as he accused Iran of seeking to sow unrest around the region.

The head of a Houthi-backed ruling council pledged readiness on Monday to resume negotiations on ending Yemen's war but reserved the right to resist attacks by a Saudi-backed exiled government seeking to unseat it.

So it seems likely that Yemen will muddle through and resume its normal status that doesn't inspire me to follow the situation too closely:

I don't spend a lot of time blogging about Yemen, as I've noted before. It is a country split between Shias and Sunnis and has actually been North Yemen and South Yemen in the recent past.

Indeed, it is so ugly that at one time Egypt sent an army to fight in that territory where they even used poison gas.

So I think of Yemen not so much as a front in the war on terror but as a local mess where locals will fight each other. Constantly. It is simply a place where al Qaeda jihadis can thrive and where we can try to kill them when the opportunity presents itself to keep them too off balance to attack us at home.

And of course, Yemen could resume being President Obama's "model war" with intensified drone strikes on al Qaeda (and now ISIL) targets (not that he likes to bomb brown people!).

UPDATE: We are trying to get back to normal:

Yemeni security officials say a suspected U.S. drone has bombed a home in the central province of Marib, killing nine alleged al-Qaida fighters.

Killing jihadis is a necessary if insufficient task to defeat jihadis.