But now that a civil and a regional wars have broken out, the degree of US influence in Yemen has been exposed as limited, their war on Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in the larger context of political, tribal and regional rivalry, as insignificant.
The failure, if we are to utilize the term, is of course, not just American, but involve most of US allies, who have ignored Yemen’s protracted misery – poverty, corruption, violence and the lack of any political horizon, until the country finally imploded. When the Houthis took over Sanaa last September, a foolish act by any account, only then did the situation in Yemen became urgent enough for intervention.
For a long time, the US seemed invulnerable to what even Yemen analysts admit is a intricate subject to understand, let alone attempt to explain in a straightforward manner. The US drones buzzed overheadindependent from all of this. They ‘took out’ whomever they suspected was al-Qaeda affiliate. President Barack Obama was even revealed to have approved of a ‘secret kill list’, and agreed to consider counting casualties in such a way that “essentially designates all military-aged males in a strike zone as military combatants.”