Time Magazine
By Bobby Ghosh /
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Floundering regimes always blame their plight on enemies, real or imaginary: the more anxious the autocrat, the more fictional the foe. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak fingered the Muslim Brotherhood. Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa pointed to Iran. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi alternates between youth on hallucinatory drugs and al-Qaeda. And on March 1, Yemen’s President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, his 32-year reign threatened by the popular uprising sweeping across the Middle East, accused … No, you’d best hear this in his own words. “There is an operations room in Tel Aviv with the aim of destabilizing the Arab world,” he said in a speech at Sana’a University. The operations room in question, he added, is “run by the White House.”
But a day later, Saleh seemed much less defiant as he accepted a proposal to ease him out of office. A government spokesman told TIME the President had agreed to a five-point plan suggested by opposition parties — although…
Our Wars Are Not Your Wars
Dire warnings by a flailing regime should not be taken at face value, but there’s good reason to worry that any new government in Sana’a may not take AQAP as seriously as Saleh has belatedly done. Yemen faces two other internal dangers: a Shi’ite rebellion in the north and a separatist movement in the south. Most Yemenis regard those as greater existential threats than any posed by AQAP. “Our priorities,” says Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism official who has spent a great deal of time in Yemen, “are not necessarily their priorities.”
That point was made more vividly by a pro-American Yemeni sheik I met in Sana’a last November. “I support al-Qaeda,” Abdullah al-Jamili told…
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