Yemen
So, as predicted in this blog and in my book, terrorist training camps are now popping up in Yemen which now looks likely to become another centre of Al Qaeda operations. Whilst we should pay tribute to the success of intelligence and other covert counter measures against terror attacks which have kept the West more or less safe thus far, the extent of the Foreign Policy failures is really extraordinary. Not only has there been no meaningful progress to solve the catastrophic Israel/Palestinians cauldron of violence, suffering and despair, but what about everywhere else?
Iraq remains an unstable and violent mess with a serious potential for Civil War when the Americans go, Afghanistan is such a shambles that Karzai cannot get his corrupt government nominees through the Afghan Parliament, so the country blunders on without a government, undermining the whole agenda of the flawed adventure of foreign intervention. The Taliban are the power in this collapsed state and in the border region, together with Al Qaeda, they occupy a major slice of the Pakistan military, while various factions blow up Pakistani civilians almost every day.
Iran grows more unstable and anti western as protests among its own people against the regime mount. There is no real sign of movement in the negotiations to force it to give up its quest for nuclear weapons, another misguided policy line doomed to fail. It is not possible to navigate the Indian Ocean without risk of attack by pirates from another failed state Somalia, in a weird echo of the dangers of sea travel in the eighteenth century.
Beneath all this there runs a thread. As often stated in these columns the source of Islamic violent fundamentalism is the mess surrounding Israel. But there is another element. The big problem everywhere is the aggressive imperialism of the United States of America. It sees itself as the arbiter of what is right and what is wrong in the belief that its way is best. It is for Americans, but many in the rest of the world have other options they prefer. Containing the U.S is the foreign policy objective of an increasing roll call of the world’s peoples. America believes it is good, it is right and at all times its rampant military are acting all over the world in the defense of their homeland. Obama and Clinton are strugling to put forward a more constructive theme, but zealots on Capitol Hill give them a hard time.The truth beneath it all is very simple. The greatest threat to America is the United States itself.