Seems the old hunter's eye was off-target a wee bit.
The U.S. is seriously considering sending elite "hunter-killer" teams to Yemen following the foiled mail bombing plot by militants in Yemen. The covert teams would operate under the CIA's authority allowing them to kill or capture targets unilaterally, The Wall Street Journal reports. Support for an expanded U.S. military effort in Yemen has been growing within the military and the Obama administration, according to The Journal.From Time's Robert Baer:
If indeed al-Qaeda's base is now in Yemen, we're facing a whole new dynamic. Yemen's well-armed and notoriously independent tribes are even less likely than those of Pakistan to stand for a sustained aerial campaign against the militants. Angered, the tribes can be all but counted on to move on Yemen's capital Sana'a and other major cities, dragging the country into a full-fledged civil war. Or they will increase their attacks on America's ally, Saudi Arabia.By coincidence, or perhaps not, The New York Review of Books had a recent review article that dealt with Yemeni history. To be honest, I had never really thought much of anything at all about Yemen. What I took away from the article was that even a cursory repeat of the high points of that history belied all sorts of complications that might prove insoluble. While I understand the visceral desire for striking at those who have struck at us, it might be a nice idea, rather than sharpening our knives, to take a long, slow look at all sorts of alternatives short of sending in SEAL teams.
If this is an accurate assessment of what's happened — the battlefront has moved to Yemen — the Obama Administration had better start boning up on Yemeni tribal politics.
We currently have a nasty war that isn't going well in Afghanistan. We still have 50,000 troops in Iraq, a situation that is ripe for trouble. Now, it seems, journalists and pundits have decided that Yemen will be the next . . . whatever.
