Yemen Via Al Jazeera

A’s For Al Jazeera, becasue AJ is one of the best news channels. If I could get Al Jazeera, I’d spend much less time ferreting for facts absent from American “news” media.

Writes Marwan Bishara: “As the US and Britain prepare for covert war on Yemen, and following on their failures in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemenis might wonder if the joke is becoming a reality.

One does not have to be a Yemen expert to tell you that further destabilising Yemen along the lines of Pakistan or Somalia is not sound policy, and that Yemen’s proximity to the Gulf and the Horn of Africa does not bode well for regional stability.

But that is exactly what will happen if the US/UK “counterterrorism” policy focuses on providing military support to a three-decade-old government that presides over an unstable and decentralised country.

By offering more military training, arms, naval patrolling, intelligence sharing and possibly shared offensive operations, the West might help prolong and sustain an autocratic regime that faces secessionist movements in the North and South.

Mostly, though, it will aggravate a fragile state of Yemen into a failing state.

Even if estimates are exaggerated (Yemen’s interior minister in 2002 put the number of guns at 60 million), Yemeni tribes are better armed than any other in the region and will not surrender their weapons quietly to the central government, especially in light of the declared foreign intrusion into their country’s affairs.”

[SNIP]

I don’t know who Marwan Bishara is, but do Brush up on reality with his Al Jazeera analysis of the “Onward To Yemen” impetus, courtesy of the neoconservatives and their neoprogressive philosophical soulmates.

Distrust my recommendation? My fervently pro-Israel father is surely credible on this front. According to dad, the only fair shake Israel ever gets in the media broadcasting in the democratic South Africa is from … Al-Jazeera.