Botched blast opens up Yemen for AMERICAN WAR, By Ameen Izzadeen

Behind the revelry that welcomed 2010, the reality seems to belie the hopes of billions of people who wished each other a happy and prosperous new year. The reality is that 2010 may not be much different from 2009 which began with much hope but ended in deep disappointment. The disappointments were largely because US President Barack Obama failed to deliver world peace though he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Copenhagen climate conference also failed to produce a binding treaty that would have saved the planet.

In this New Year, it is likely that Obama’s focus will be on war and more war rather than peace. He may say that he is fighting a war for peace. But in reality, his war for peace will bring death and destruction, misery and mayhem and disease and disappointment like every war does. The irony is America’s war on terror is spreading far and wide beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of ending in a final victory against terrorists. Last year saw the war coming to Pakistan in full force and this year, the US war on terror is likely to go to Yemen, if it has not gone there already.

The Christmas Day attempt by a gullible young Nigerian to blast a US-bound flight from Amsterdam has given an opportunity for US hawks, especially the neocons, to beat the war drum again. They are calling for tough military action in Yemen. The neocons and their Republican supporters accuse the Obama administration of endangering American lives by being soft on security measures. Obama hit back, saying the system had failed and ordered a full probe.

But to attribute the incident where the 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab tried to blow up a US passenger flight to intelligence failure is an insult to intelligence. A deeper analysis of the incident and events associated with it may raise a question as to whether an unholy nexus between the so-called Islamic extremists and the US neocon war mongers exists.

Suspicion is strong, especially in learned and leftwing circles, that al-Qaeda is a US monster created and let loose to produce opportunities for US troops and capitalist vultures to move into target countries. The ingenuity of the scheme is such that al-Qaeda leaders or followers themselves do not know that they are being used.  It is because of al-Qaeda that the American troops are in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. And now, thanks to al-Qaeda, Americans will go to Yemen.

Terrorism is a political weapon, no doubt. But it needs to be condemned because terrorists try to achieve their objectives by harming civilians. Whether terrorism is practised by an individual, a group or even a state, it should be eliminated and the perpetrators punished.

The Nigerian youth was a typical Manchurian candidate, well coached and brain-washed. He probably did believe that his mission was a jihad. But he certainly did not realise that he was being used by secret operators via a medium called al-Qaeda.

What can one deduce from Obama’s admission that as early as August the Untied States was alerted that a Nigerian was being trained in Yemen to carry out a terrorist attack on a US target? The Nigerian’s father himself personally went to the US embassy in Nigeria and warned officials there that his son was an extremist and could be dangerous. A Washington Post report yesterday said that although electronic intercepts from Yemen indicated that an unnamed Nigerian was being groomed for an al-Qaeda mission, and other communications spoke of plans for a terrorist attack during Christmas, none of this information was flagged in a way that would have linked it to the father’s warning.

Either the US intelligence services which comprise the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Counterterrorism Centre and special units at the Pentagon, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, are a waste of US taxpayers’ money or the failure itself was part of the game — in other words it was deliberate.

Deliberate or otherwise, the failure to act on intelligence was a repeat. In 1941, it invited an attack on Pearl Harbour and in 2001, it led to the attack on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, analysts pointed out that the United States failed to act on intelligence reports that extremists were planning to use civilian aircraft as missiles to blast US landmark buildings. Some reports said the George W. Bush administration deliberately ignored such warnings. In hindsight, these failures were opportunities for wars scripted by US capitalists to fill their coffers.

If the 9/11 intelligence failure led to the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq, the alleged Christmas Day intelligence failure was a drumbeat for a war in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arabian peninsula. Yemen, which lies south of Saudi Arabia (see map), has a population of around 24 million. More than half of its people live below the poverty line. Yemen has an unemployment rate of 40 percent while every other person in this country is an illiterate.

Indications are that 2010 will see an escalation of the multiple civil wars that have been going on in Yemen. The Yemeni government, headed by the brutal dictator, Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh, who, according to human rights group, even executes children, is fighting a separatist movement and the so-called al-Qaeda operatives in the south. In the north, the government has launched an all-out war, with the help of Saudi Arabia and the Untied States, against the Shiites, who once dominated Yemen’s politics. The Houthi rebels, who have taken up arms to promote the separatist cause of the Iranian-backed Zaidi Shiite population, say that last month alone, US war planes carried out 30 air strikes.

Reports also said US planes were also in action in the south. On December 17, a US air attack, according to Yemeni civilian sources, killed 60 civilians, including 28 children. A New York Times report said the CIA had dispatched “several of its top field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country,” while “some of the most secretive Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics.”

The mainstream US media, meanwhile, are whipping up public opinion for some sort of military action against targets in Yemen. They are trying to connect all the missing links to prove that the war on terror’s next target is Yemen. They claim that the Muslim US Army major, Nidal Malik Hasan, who shot dead 17 of his colleagues at Fort Hood, acted on the advice of a Yemeni American mullah, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has gone into hiding in Yemen.

Independent Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman, who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told the rightwing Fox television, “Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, that Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war. That’s the danger we face.” Another Congresswoman, Jane Herman, told the same Fox programme, “Yemen is the new FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan).”

Even Obama was setting the stage for a massive military operation when he pledged to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us — whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the US homeland.”

So a US war on terror in Yemen is more of a certainty this year. Beneath the veneer of the war on terror lie moves to prevent the disintegration of this pro-Western country. It certainly does not want an Iranian-backed Shiite state coming up at the underbelly of Saudi Arabia, one of the staunchest US allies and Washington’s key oil supplier. The US believes that if this happens, not only will Saudi Arabia have a security headache, but the West as well, because in times of war, the Iranian-backed Shiite state could pose a threat to ships sailing through the Suez Canal, carrying vital supplies, including some 3 million barrels of oil a day.

With Obama coming into power, many believed that the neocons had been confined to the dustbin of history. Far from it, they are active, directing and implementing the Project for the New American Century —  a project that called for US military presence throughout the world, especially in resource rich and strategic regions.

Yemen is a certainly a key strategic country. The presence of US troops there also gives an assurance to Saudi Arabia that US help is at hand to crush any form of Islamic rebellion against the monarchy.