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In August 1990, the United States linked a UN vote on Iraq sanctions to aid packages to poorer countries who were temporary members of the Security Council – such as Ethiopia, Zaire and Yemen. Yemen voted against the resolution and three days later found that the US had cancelled its entire aid programme to the country. The Yemeni ambassador to the UN was told: “That will be the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast.”
But expensive to whom? Twent years on, Yemen is seen as one of the biggest sanctuaries for Al Qaeda terrorism.
A brilliant review by Andrew Cockburn in the London Review of Books on Joy Gordon’s Invisible War: The United States and Iraq Sanctions
7 Responses to “The Yemen story”
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July 17th, 2010 at 2:48 am
Every bad event that occurs in the world is the fault of the United States of America.
The job of an analyst like Cockburn or Gordon is to take any bad event and find something that the United States did 20, 40, 60 years ago that explains why the bad event occurred.
In the case of a good event, it’s the job of the analyst to find what Ahmadinejad or Chávez did to bring it about.
John
July 17th, 2010 at 7:55 am
It’s about real politik. This was more of a decision than an event — to cut all aid to Yemen, Yet aid, if it’s to work, has to be planned through a couple of generations, as it was with Germany and Japan. It can’t just be turned ond and off according to a single UN vote. Yemen has since become a dangerous near-failed state, and should a similar threat be made today, the government concerned would simply get the aid money from China.
I don’t buy the line that every bad event is the fault of the US. But I do believe that great societies at the top of their game often find it hard to learn from their mistakes.
July 17th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Dear Humphrey,
I’m sorry, Humphrey, but the connection between AQAP moving to Yemen recently and a decision 20 years ago to end aid is so attenuated as to lack any credibility. Do these analysts claim that if the aid had continued, then AQAP would NOT be in Yemen today? How would they have any idea? And if they don’t have any idea, then how can they be so sure of causality in the other case? They’re just making things up to support an ideological point.
Now if they want to claim that ending the aid somehow triggered the 1994 civil war in Yemen, then that argument would at least have a little bit of credibility. But even there, the analysts would be required to show that if the aid had continued, then the civil war would never have occurred, and they have absolutely no way of showing that, and it’s not credible anyway.
These ideological causality arguments are almost always easily shown to be fallacious. One that we hear all the time today is that the real estate bubble was caused by Greenspan’s low interest rates in the early 2000s. Well, if that’s true, then how come the much lower interest rates today aren’t causing a new real estate bubble? People are constantly making up dot-connecting exercises to prove some ideological point that doesn’t even make sense. In this case, it’s easy to show that the real estate bubble actually began in the mid-1990s.
As far as AQAP in Yemen, there are far more significant causes: the Great Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Iran/Iraq war shook the Sunni Muslim world to its core; the extremely bloody 1990s ethnic civil war in Afghanistan gave rise to the Taliban and enormous visibility to al-Qaeda; and the increased hostilities between Hamas, Hizbollah and Israel have energized the whole Arabian peninsula. Even the civil wars in Sudan were probably much more significant than the aid cutoff.
By the way, I have some news. I’ve received an award from Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) for a paper I submitted on using Generational Dynamics forecasting to gain a competitive advantage in international marketing and trade. This is a major endorsement of generational theory.
And even though I’m about the most non-political person you know, the Tea Party is taking notice of Generational Dynamics as a way of understanding what’s going on in the world. I played a major part in their documentary movie, “Generation Zero,” on the causes of the financial crisis.
And now I’ve been asked to be a regular contributor to Andrew Breitbarg’s new web site BigPeace.org. I’m a little nervous about it because I don’t agree with the point of view of most of the other contributors, who tend to blame Obama for everything. From the point of view of generational theory, the great events of our time can be neither caused nor prevented by politicians, but are like tsunamis that were launched decades and sometimes centuries ago, and that are just reaching us now. I’ve discovered that not many people of any political stripe like that view, since everyone has a politician or country that they’d like to blame.
Anyway, I hope you’re doing well on your worldwide travels and visits to exotic faraway places with strange sounding names.
Sincerely,
John
GenerationalDynamics.com
July 25th, 2010 at 11:02 am
Dear John,
Firstly many congratulations, specifically being brought on board to challenge the regular contributions.
I must disagree with you about the lack of connection between AL Qaeda and aid. Admittedly other factors come into play, but Western aid over the past forty years has been a constant in the Islamic societies of South East Asia that have developed to become economically viable new democracies with no substantive threat from Islamic terror. The Bali bombing and other incidents do not reflect the groundswell of a grassroots movement.
Both in Pakistan and Yemen, the West has linked aid to strategic policy, often withdrawing it, with the result that both countries are now fragile, dangerous and hostile places. If we are to give aid, it has to measured in decades and it must be constant. It cannot be turned on and off according a single UN vote.
Best wishes
Humphrey
August 8th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Dear Humphrey,
Sorry I haven’t responded sooner. I didn’t even know that you had
posted this until an online correspondent mentioned it.
Writing for BigPeace is an interesting experience. I wrote an article
on Kashmir, and someone posted a comment saying, “Muslims can’t
produce anything on their own other than mayhem, murder, and misery.”
I argued with him and ended up calling him a total moron. Later, I
was afraid that I’d insulted some bigwig (since he was using a fake
handle), but apparently people were happy that I stood up to the
idiot.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you about the lack of connection between
al-Qaeda and aid, only the tenuousness of such a connection over a
period of 20 years.
Sure, I’ll agree with you that cutting off aid is going to make
al-Qaeda and other people angry. But whenever you’re policemen of the
world, then you have to use whatever tools are available to you. I’ll
bet there are many occasions when cutting off (or threatening to cut
off) aid worked well. I assume that you approve, for example, the
boycott of South Africa in the 1980s, which involved both government
and private aid, even though it got some South Africans angry.
As policemen of the world, we do what we have to do. Maybe we should
have let North Korea engulf South Korea. Maybe we should have let
Iraq annex Kuwait. Maybe we should have let Saddam refuse to allow
U.N. WMD inspections. I mean, why should we care?
Well, for one thing, you won’t let us. When a crisis occurs, you
expect us to be there, and you say so. When things go well, it’s
forgotten. When things go poorly then you blame us for 20 years or
more.
I propose a little test. It now appears that the situation in Darfur
is deteriorating, and it seems possible that the current situation
will collapse into anarchy and bloodshed.
If/when that happens, what will Humphrey Hawkins’ report be?
You might say, “Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and they
brought it on themselves.”
Or, you might say, “Hundreds of thousands of people killed each other,
and America just stood by and watched, when they should have been
trying to stop it.”
I’m willing to bet the report will be closer to the second statement
than the first.
Finally, is Pakistan really a fragile state because America links aid
to strategic policy? Then how would you explain the 1971 war with
India, and the repeated coups and corruption in Pakistan politics? I
just don’t see it, but if you’re right, then the solution would be for
the U.S. to stop providing aid, stop being policemen of the world, and
just let people kill each other if they want to. After all, why
should we care?
I hope you’re doing well.
Sincerely,
John
August 12th, 2010 at 12:54 am
Sorry — I meant “Humphrey Hawksley’s report”. Blame it
on old age.
John
August 12th, 2010 at 7:10 am
Dear John,
Your fifth paragraph is the nub of the issue. You care because ultimately it impacts on the US. The trick therefore, rather that be taken by surprise, is to work things on long term thinking such as was done with post-war Germany and Japan and with Taiwan and South Korea, rather than on the short term as has been done with Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan.
All best
Humphrey