Category Archives: Yemen

Arab Revolutions, GCC, North Korea, Yemen

Yemeni Elections and Swiss Cheese from North Korea……..

_9OJik4N_normal Sharqeya-Baneen-15    DennyCreek2

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Speaking of Houthis and Yemen (my last post): In 2012 General Hadi won the presidential election arranged and supervised by the freely-elected Saudi princes and UAE Emirati rulers. He won by 99.8% of the vote: my Sana’a source reports that the other 0.2% voted for Minnie Mouse (she seemed serious). She also claims Kim Jong-Un called Hadi immediately after the election results came out to ask how he did it, speaking technically not politically. He reportedly offered to send Hadi a huge box of his favorite snack: Swiss Emmental cheese in exchange.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Economics, Finance, Iran, Sanctions, U.S. Foreign Policy, Yemen

A Western Addiction to Sanctions? SWIFT-ing the Houthis of Yemen………

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“Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it…….” Newton’s First Law of Motion (one version)

“Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Wednesday accused the United States of being “obsessed” with sanctions against his country, on the eve of new bilateral talks on a nuclear deal……….”

Apparently imposing these financial sanctions (actually blockades) can become addictive. Anyone who does not know any better, and that probably includes me, might think that the Obama administration has become addicted to inflicting sanctions on other nations and entities and corporations and whatever and whoever catches its fancy in the wrong way. The U.S. Congress is an even more avid imposer of these sanctions, it leads the way: its hawkish threats scare and force the administration to be “proactive” in these matters.

Governments and despots (only a few of them) and peoples and groups and parties and unions and gangs and possibly bad musicians, probably even alumni associations are targeted. From East Asia through Russia and Iran and Lebanon and Syria and Africa and into the threatening little superpower of Cuba, after passing through the mighty empire of Venezuela. Even as the Iran+P5+1 talks were resuming this summer, some evil genius somewhere in Washington was churning out new plans for tightening the screws on the Iranians. Just to keep the mullahs on their toes, or maybe just to let the hotheads in Congress and Knesset know that they have nothing to worry about.

Yesterday, reports came out that the US (and possibly other Western powers) are considering imposing sanctions against the Houthis of Yemen. The Houthis? They are one of the many tribal/political/ethnic/religious factions that dot the Yemeni landscape. But they have nothing to do with Al Qaeda or any other Wahhabi terrorist groups: in fact they are their enemies. They have no goals beyond their own region of Yemen, so what would they be sanctioned for? Sanctioned for daring to protest against their fundamentalist military government and marching on the capital Sana’a. I would have thought the Western powers had their hands full trying to drone the Saudi-Yemeni Al-Qaeda (AQAP) out of existence (often taking a passel of innocent Yemeni civilians along as collateral damage). Or maybe someone in Washington got a persuasive call from someone with a golden telephone in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi.

Anyway, it is not clear how financial sanctions can affect the Houthis of the rugged territory of northern Yemen. As I recall from my past days of extensive travel, the economies of some remote regions are not very monetized, unlike Washington DC (not so many lobbyists with a lot of money hanging around Sanaa or Ouagadougou). These fellows are not known to fly to Las Vegas or Nice or even Dubai, or to own foreign property. Unlike the petroleum princes and potentates, they do not even frequent the diversion-filled joints of Beirut or Cairo or Bangkok. Unlike the Saudi princes, they never fly into the sin-filled cities of Morocco. So, they don’t have as much need for access to foreign exchange, be it dollars or euros or riyals.

Personally, sometimes I think they impose some of the sanctions jut because they can. The mechanisms and the people are in place, so there is some bureaucratic inertia involved, unless acted upon by an external force, as Isaac Newton taught us so long ago. There are no other world currencies that compete with the dollar, and no institution that can compete with SWIFT. SWIFTing a country or an organization is easy. But the Houthis?

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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MENA, Yemen

War of Terror: Yemeni Chopper Pilot Lands at Edgeware Road to Buy Qat………………

         

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Yemeni Pilot Lands Jet to Buy Qat (Gat). Report tells of a Yemeni air force pilot who needed some Qat (Gat) to chew urgently. he needed to get high. So, he landed his military helicopter in a village, seeking to get some of the chewable drug (apparently every Yemeni village, block, and street, has its own dealers). This scared the hell out of the villagers in South Yemen, used to drones, planes, trains, and everything else bombing them whenever more than 5 people gather together. Based on the suspicion that they might be Yemenis or just a wedding party that might include some wayward American youth.
Anyway, the pilot found what he needed near a gas station, purchased it, and flew away. Back to his mission of making the Middle East safe and secure for the American and the Saudi ways of life (Yemenis can multitask like that, have been doing it for some time).
I recall the Qat was once easy to import into Britain. I heard that some Arab shops on Edgeware Road in London used to sell them. The Brits thought it was just some kind of an herb like mint (it was for a while, until they banned it because it was taking business away from the nearby pubs).

Cheers
mhg

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Culture, Religion, Yemen

Crazy Holy Hair from Hijaz to India: Buffalo Bill and the Wichita Lineman……

   

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                          Neck of the woods
“I am a lineman for the county and I drive the main road

Searchin’ in the sun for another overload

I hear you singin’ in the wire, I can hear you through the whine
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line……”  Wichita Lineman (James Taylor)


The Yemeni Deputy Minister of Culture for Manuscripts and Books has announced that a hair of the Prophet Mohammed has been found at a religious school in Zubaida. The vice minister said that the hair had been described in a historical document found early this month (July) which had mentioned a hair of the Prophet in Yemen more than one hundred years ago………..

This business of the hair of the Prophet is no doubt a hoax and the hair is a fake. Otherwise how the hell would a hair, one hair, of the Prophet reach Yemen, hundreds of miles away from where he hung around in Hijaz? I recall some violent riots in Pakistan years ago about another hair of the Prophet Mohammed that was supposedly stolen…. “In December 1963 a sacred relic, allegedly a hair of the Prophet Mohammed, who was the founder of Islam, was reported stolen from the Hazratbal Shrine in Srinagar. This alleged theft resulted in numerous demonstrations and riots by Muslims in Kashmir, Pakistan, and India…..”
This last one is even more ridiculous, since there is no way the Prophet could have ever gotten to India. They can always do a DNA test, but that requires access to the tomb of the Prophet in Madinah, a highly unlikely thing.
Back to the USA: I hear that some Republicans have found a hair of Ronald Reagan in American Samoa, inside some Methodist church. My unreliable source also just informed me that they may also have found a hair of Calamity Jane (Canary) in Wichita, Kansas. There is a dispute over that one: someone claimed it was in fact a hair of Buffalo Bill Cody.
Cheers
mhg
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Iran, Yemen

Revolutionary Guards in Yemen………..

   

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                       Neck of the woods
“President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi on Thursday told Tehran to stop meddling in Yemeni affairs after the defence ministry said the authorities had uncovered what it called an Iranian espionage network. “An Iranian spy network that had been operating in Yemen for seven years under the leadership of a former leader in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards” has been dismantled, the ministry’s news website 26sep.net reported late on Wednesday. Quoting informed but unnamed sources, it said the network was “conducting espionage operations in Yemen and the Horn of Africa.”…..….”
Cheers
mhg
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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, Hezbollah, Iran, Saudi Arabia, US Foreign Policy, Yemen

The Usual Suspects: Hezbollah and Hamas in Yemen and Casablanca………….

    

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Captain Renault: “Major Strasser’s been shot. Round up the usual suspects.“  Casablanca

“Washington believes Iran is working with Shi’ite Muslim rebels in northern Yemen and secessionists in the country’s south to expand its influence at the expense of Yemen’s Gulf neighbours, the U.S. envoy to Sanaa was quoted as saying on Sunday. The pan-Arab daily al-Hayat cited Gerald Feierstein, in an interview in London, as accusing Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas of helping their backers in Shi’ite Iran at the expense of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a bloc in which Sunni-led oil giant Saudi Arabia’s influence is dominant. “The Iranians want to build influence in Yemen… both internally and more broadly in the region by establishing a foothold in the Arabian Peninsula,” the paper quoted Feierstein as saying in remarks published in Arabic. “It’s something that’s naturally regarded as a security threat to Saudi Arabia and the rest of the GCC states.” Feierstein told Reuters in an interview last month that there were signs of greater Iranian activity in Yemen, There is evidence that Hezbollah and Hamas support this Iranian effort ……….”

Also sprach the US ambassador quoted by Saudi semi-official daily al-Hayat (owned by Prince Khalid Bin Sultan).
Yemen is much more complex than the picture this ambassador paints. Al-Qaeda has become a major disruptive force across Yemen now, including the once secular south. That is what 20 years of union with the tribal north Yemen has done to the rest of the country. That and nearly twenty years of Saudi Wahhabi influence.
The fact is that the GCC (Saudi) plan that the West supported in Yemen does not meet the aspirations of most Yemeni people (excluding Tawakkol Karman). The killings by regime forces continue, except that Arab and Western media are not covering them anymore. The people want a regime change, but they had a reactionary status-quo GCC plan rammed down their throats. Clearly they are not accepting it.
There is some Iranian involvement and influence in parts of Yemen, just as there are Saudi influences in parts of Yemen. And there is American influence, especially in the skies. But it is not clear how Hamas and Hezbollah got together in Yemen. Hamas is Muslim Brotherhood Sunni, Hezbollah is Shi’a. Maybe the ambassador has some evidence he can’t share with the public. It is also quite likely he is just mouthing the same old manta the Yemen regime has been repeating for the past two or three years. The “foreign interference” mantra most Arab regimes repeat when they are in trouble in places like Bahrain and Syria and before them in Egypt and Libya.
Of course, this is not to say there is no Iranian interference, there probably is some of that (the theory of political vacuum and all that). But Hamas and Hezbollah? That sounds like a 2012 American presidential campaign slogan, produced by AIPAC.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Politics, Iran, Syria, Terrorism, US Foreign Policy, Weapons deals, Yemen

Iran in Yemen and Syria: Quds Force vs. Qat Force, Plot in DC with Mexicans and Islamic Heritage Revival Society……

 

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““Iran is really trying to play a big role in Yemen now,” the Yemeni official said from his office in Sana, the country’s capital. American officials say the Iranian aid to Yemen — a relatively small but steady stream of automatic rifles, grenade launchers, bomb-making material and several million dollars in cash — mirrors the kind of weapons and training the Quds Force is providing the embattled government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. It also reflects a broader campaign that includes what American officials say was a failed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States in October, and what appears to have been a coordinated effort by Iran to attack Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia earlier this year. Iran has denied any role in the attacks. “They’re fighting basically a shadow war every day,” Gen. James N. Mattis, the head of the military’s Central Command, told a Senate hearing last week. “They are working earnestly to keep Assad in power,” he said, explaining that in addition to arms and scores of Quds Force trainers and Iranian intelligence agents, Iran is providing the Syrian security services with electronic eavesdropping equipment “to try and pick up where the opposition networks are.”………..”

Fine and dandy, the mullahs are probably supplying some arms to a Yemeni faction. Yet I don’t buy the bit about supplying weapons to Syria. Not because they would not be happy to keep Bashar al-Assad in power; no doubt the Iranians are doing their best to keep the Baath regime in control. There is no need for Iranian arms. The Russians have a naval base in Syria, and the Black Sea is nearby, and the Russians make much better weapons than the Iranians, and the Russians have always supplied Syria and still do. So why would Bashar need mediocre Iranian weapons when he has access to better Russian ones? Ditto for the spying and communications equipment. (Unless there is a money/payment angle). The New York Times needs to make a better case for this.
As for the rehash of the so-called plot to blow Adle al-Jubair the Saudi ambassador to smithereens in an overpriced but mediocre Georgetown restaurant: I thought we had gone over that one and refuted the allegation. I recall even refuting any involvement of the Mexican drug cartels, drunk Texan used-car dealers named Jack, Colombian FARC rebels, Hezbollah, Society of Islamic Heritage Revival, the Nabati Poets Diwaniya, and Mitt Romney. This just makes no sense. The Saudi ambassador al-Jubair is not an important person, he makes no decisions or policies except when to have lunch or get a haircut. It is all decided by the princes.
As for the ‘Qat‘, it just popped up…….
Cheers
mhg


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Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Persian-American Gulf, Saudi Arabia, US Foreign Policy, Wahhabi, Yemen

Of Iranian Mullahs, Saudi Princes, the Old Ikhwan, and Walled Cities on the Gulf…..

“For, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, US and Saudi foreign policy has been almost single-mindedly dedicated to destabilising Iran. Indeed, there is a way to understand the post-1979 political history of the region stretching from Pakistan to the Red Sea as permutations of an ongoing and devastating battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The export of the battle keeps expanding: sectarian violence has become ubiquitous in countries where it had been non-existent. Colonial powers may have engineered sectarian strife into the geography of countries like Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, but what of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and even Bahrain? The expanding battle field tells us something about shifts in Saudi ambitions, and the anxieties that shape them. The Kingdom that exports terrorism is also the Kingdom of the terrified………. Saudi Arabia has never fought a war. In fact, as the embarrassing flight from Al Khafji well ahead of a badly battered Iraqi brigade demonstrated, the Saudi army is not capable of managing even a scrimmage. However, the government has been engaged in proxy wars more or less continuously since 1962……………..”

She says: “US and Saudi foreign policy has been almost single-mindedly dedicated to destabilising Iran….“  Yet that is also what the USA and the Saudi regime accuse Iran of doing around the Middle East. My humble guess: they are both doing it to each other. But the weapon of sectarian divisiveness and hatred is a specialty of the Saudi regime, and they have used it effectively in the Gulf region in the past few years.

Actually the al-Saud clan and their fanatical Ikhwan Wahhabi tribal troops initially waged wars to expand their domain and bite off big chunks of other countries early in the 20th century. They focused on countries that were not part of the British or other European empires. They preferred to attack and invade neighboring countries that were not under any foreign protection. They tried briefly to conquer one country that was part of the British Empire, Kuwait, but were disabused on the notion quickly. (For a long time the Kuwaitis had to build a wall around the old city for protection).
They conquered and annexed big chunks of Yemen, invaded Hashemite-ruled Hijaz (Mecca and Madinah), and occupied and annexed al-Ahsa’a (now part of the Eastern Province). That was early in the 20th century, before the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” was announced.


But all that was then. The Ikhwan fanatics are long gone, disbanded long ago when their usefulness to king Ibn Saud ended. If they were around, the Ikhwan would be fighting against the princes whose corruption and opulent lifestyles would be abhorrent to them. The regular Saudi army is not a force capable of fighting wars. It is one of the best-armed, or most expensively armed, military forces in the world, but that is all. Advanced weapons alone do not make a capable military force, otherwise the UAE would be a superpower. Two years ago they were soundly defeated by the Huthi tribal clans of northern Yemen.

Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Iran, Syria, US Foreign Policy, Yemen

Hillary Clinton and Democracy Hypocrisy: Yemen and Syria and Iran……

 

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“Syria’s authoritarian regime held a referendum on a new constitution Sunday, a gesture by embattled President Bashar Assad to placate those seeking his ouster. But the opposition deemed it an empty gesture and the West immediately dismissed the vote as a “sham.”…..” AP

“U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday hailed the presidential election in Yemen, offering continuous support to the Arab nation as it confronts challenges ahead. …..”
Only one candidate allowed in Yemen and he “won” 99.8% of the vote, and there were many dead. Clinton must think Arabs are stupid. Here are my rantings on Yemen yesterday.

“On June 14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement on repression in Iran and Syria to mark the second anniversary of the disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran….“
Ahmadinejad had three candidates running against him, he claimed less than 60% of the vote, I think about 58%. Arab SpringMuch more democratic than the travesty in Yemen, wouldn’t you say? The difference is that he was not sponsored by the Saudi king and the absolute potentates of the GCC and the Western powers.

So, the new definition of democratic elections is simple: they are the elections that are approved by the absolute tribal polygamous Saudi king and the absolute shaikhs of Qatar and UAE and Bahrain. And they are hailed by Western media (CNN, Fox) as true elections. Cute.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, GCC, US Foreign Policy, Yemen

Electoral Democratic Joke: Yemen’s 99.8% Landslide, a F–king Big Deal………………

   

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The election results were typically Arab: the vice president of Ali Saleh, the man supported by the Saudis and the potentates of the GCC and the democratic Western powers won. He won with a modest 99.8% of the vote. He was the only candidate. Even Ahmadinejad won less than 60% in that disputed 2009 election in Iran (but Ahmadcinejad was not appointed by the Saudis and the West). It was like electing the King of Saudi Arabia or the ruler of Bahrain or Abu Dhabi. Now that is, to quote Joe Biden, a fucking big deal!

Here is what I posted about it before the vote results:
“Yemenis, including Tawakkol Karman, winner of the 2011 Nobel peace prize, go to the polls. Tuesday’s election is the fruit of a US-backed deal that eased President Ali Abdullah Saleh from power in exchange for immunity from prosecution over the alleged killing of hundreds of protesters. Saleh’s deputy, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, is the only candidate………..”

Tawakkol Karman: “This is a day of holy joy!”
This is a Nobel Laureate speaking.

Is the lady out of her blinking fundamentalist mind? Had she been chewing qat? A day of ”holy joy”? So they were forced by the neighboring potentates to vote for one man, maintaining the power of the old regime.

The GCC, with Western support, have saddled the Yemeni people with a continuation of the dictatorship. Of course the potentates of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oligarchies would not want free choice for Yemen. So they have an election with one candidate! One candidate! Did anyone expect the Saudi princes to deliver democracy and freedom to the Yemeni people? When they refuse any mention of it to their own people? When you can vanish if you so much as mention freedom in Riyadh? And they call that travesty freedom? No wonder the Huthis and the Southerners are ready to resume their battle for whatever the hell it is they are seeking.
The Saudis, led by Field Marshal Khaled bin Sultan bin Technocrat bin Rommel were defeated militarily in Yemen. Their most expensively armed military was defeated by a ragtag tribal group armed with WWI and WWII weapons. Now they are trying to win their counter-revolution by diplomacy. It won’t work.
Cheers
mhg


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