The Scale Of Trump’s Yemen Botch
by Barkley Rosser (originally published at Econospeak)
The Scale Of Trump’s Yemen Botch
It is becoming clear that the scale of the botch by Donald Trump in Yemen in his first effort at a foreign military action is much greater than .first reported, as reported by Juan Cole. Right from the start we heard that people in the military were complaining about poor vetting of intel and how there was more military resistance than expected, with one American dying and three getting injured. There was the embarrassment of a bunch of civilians getting killed, with the latest estimate of those now as high possibly as 30. On top of this we had the absurdity of the whole thing being decided mostly over a dinner with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner the main parties to it, although supposedly SecDef Mattis signed off on it, followed by the bizarre business of Trump not even going to the Situation Room for this his first military outing. Maybe he thought that since there were so many pictures of Obama there, and even with Hillary, that this is not something he wanted to do.
Of course there was pushback from the Trumpisti over this, claiming that the whole thing had been planned by Obama, who had just not quite had enough time (or maybe even guts) to finally sign off on it, and furthermore that some bad leaders of the target group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), were killed. The latter may be true, although as Juan Cole reports, the main target of the raid, AQAP leader Qassim al-Rimini, was not killed and has since put out an audio publicly mocking Trump.
But now Cole further reports (as have others) that Obama had apparently not decided to do the raid. It was long planned, but it was not just a matter of waiting for more intel. They thought it was not a wise effort, and indeed it has not turned out well.
On top of that, now the Yemeni government led by Mansour Hadi that the US and Saudi Arabia support has just forbidden the US from engaging in any further ground military assaults. Oh. Cole suggests that aside from the matter of civilian casualties, there is the matter of Trump’s insulting Muslim immigration ban, which Cole reports has the leaders of this US-backed Yemeni government “disgusted.” Oh.
Before just signing off on this as an unsurprising botch by our horrendous new president, I thought it might be worth looking more closely at the Yemen situation and also the policies of Obama and earlier presidents in connection with it. This ties to what I consider to be the worst thing that Obama did during his presidency, the drone wars. Data on this is not all that available, but thebureauinvestigates has some estimates for whatever the are worth. In 2016 Yemen was second after Afghanistan for being on the receiving end of such drone strikes. There were far more in Afghanistan at 1071 to 38 in Yemen, 16 in Somalia, and only 3 in Pakistan, although back in 2009 Pakistan was the top recipient, with 2010 the top year for such strikes overall. When it comes to estimated civilian casualties, Afghanistan was up to 65-100 for 2016 and Somalia had 3-5, but there were estimated to be zero in both Yemen and Pakistan, although over the whole period since 2009 there may have been up to 100 in Yemen total.
So there we have Obama’s seriously morally questionable drone war policy causing an estimated zero civilian dead during 2016, but within two weeks of becoming president, Trump manages to have as many as up to 30 civilians killed in an operation reportedly more generally botched. No wonder the Yemeni government we are supposedly supporting does not want us around on the ground at all.
Let me add just a bit of historical background and discussion of the current situation in this troubled nation. The Yemenis claim to be the “true Arabs,” and Ptolemy called the place “Arabia Felix,” meaning “Arabia the Happy.” Home to the ancient Sabaean Kingdom that presumably produced the Queen of Sheba, it was and still is the wettest and most fertile part of the Arabian peninsula, which made it well off in the ancient world, along with being a major producer and exporter of spices. Now it has the lowest real per capita income in the Arab world, under $4000 per year and even behind pretty pathetic Sudan and Mauretania.
There are two important things that seem to have held true about Yemen over time as it slid from the best off Arab nation to the worst off economically. One is that it has long been very divided with local groups controlling their own territories, even as the place was supposedly ruled by a long string of outsiders up through the Ottomans in the early 20th century. The other has been that those outsiders wanted to control it because of its location at the southern end of the Red Sea, making it a crucial location for controlling trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. While the Ottomans officially ruled it from the 1500s onward (it had a brief period of independent and unified rule in the 1300s), they never controlled its highlands, and the British from 1850 on controlled the crucial seaport of Aden near the southern tip. The split between a northwestern part controlled (sort of) by the Ottomans and a southeastern part controlled by the British is pretty much where we are at now with the official capital of Sana’a in the north controlled by rebel Zaydi Shia Houthis, and Aden and the southeast mostly controlled by the official government of Mansour Hadi, backed by the US and Saudi Arabia, with Iran semi-supporting the Sana’a based regime.
The northern highlands have long been the home of the Zaydi (Zaidi) Shia, who converted in the 800s. This is the most moderate branch of Shi’ism, the closest of them to Sunnism, 8-Imam Shi’ism in contrast to Iranian 12-Iman Shi’ism. No outsiders have been able to control them, although many have tried, including the Saudis early in the 20th century, who managed to carve off part of their territory, Asir province, home of most of the 19 Saudis who participated in the 9/11 attack on the US.
After the British pulled out in the early 1970s, their former Aden protectorate became a Marxist regime. The area was traditionally Sunni of the Shafi orientation. However, the two Yemens unified in 1990 under the leadership of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had led the northern Sana’a-based nation since 1978. He was tossed out in 2012 with the support of the US as a result of Arab Spring uprisings the previous year. But then the Houthi tribe of Zaydi Shia revolted and took control of Sana’a, with the official government of Hadi retreating to Aden. Then the Saudis and the Iranians got involved, with the Saudis doing lots of destructive bombing with support from the US. Juan Cole claims that the claims of Iranian support for the Houthis by the Saudis and US are exaggerated, although one of Sean Spicer’s more flagrantly false remarks was to turn a Houthi attack on a Saudi ship into an Iranian attack on a US naval vessel, sheesh. Oh, and to top this off, Saleh is back apparently helping out the Houthi regime in Sana’a, if not quite in charge.
Then, of course, on top of all that mess we have al Qaeda, with it long argued and agreed that the Yemeni branch of it was and has been the most powerful one outside of the Afghan-Pakistani home base, and maybe more so now than there. In late 2000, while Bill Clinton was still president, they successfully attacked the USS Cole. In January, 2001, the Yemen government of Saleh launched a campaign against them. In 2009 they officially joined with the weaker Saudi branch to become AQAP as they continue to be. They long ago managed to gain control of territory in the eastern part of Yemen, which they supposedly still control. Both the Saleh and Hadi governments accepted US intervention there in the form of the drone strikes, even as later the Hadi government would get bogged down in its fight with the Houthi rebellion, which was far from where AQAP operates.
So, big surprise, this is a horrendously complicated and tragic situation, one that obviously took a lot of attention from Obama while he was president, who apparently had managed to get the civilian deaths in the drone war against AQAP down to zero even as civilian deaths in the Houthi-Hadi war have grown, with the US involved through the Saudis on the Hadi side. But now Trump has really botched it, so much so that the Hadi regime says we are not to mess there, and this is an outfit that has planned direct attacks on the US. For all of what Trump claims he wants to do, this really is a massively serious botch, far bigger than was initially reported. Will he and his team learn anything from this? I do not know, but this one will not be easily fixed anytime soon.
Day later addendum: Juan Cole has now posted more from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who sent people into the attacked village of Yakla five days after the attack. The number of dead civilians appears to be 25, including 9 children under the age of 13 and 8 women, one of them heavily pregnant.
I’m sure that was an aberration since all his other moves have been so carefully planned and well executed.
“…one that obviously took a lot of attention from Obama while he was president…”
There is the problem in a nutshell, the very idea that this is even America’s problem to “solve.” More than 15 years out from 9/11, the way stop the escalating cycle of violence is to stop intervening altogether. No, Trump isn’t going to do that, but perhaps by the time the next president takes office Trump will have screwed up so badly and destroyed relations with our feckless “allies” in the region to the point where he/she will have no other choice.
So you’re saying President Trump should not have believed his intel agencies?
@Warren,
No, I think the message is that Trump *should* have believed his intel agencies when they told him that Obama didn’t think this was a good plan. Trump chose to react by doing whatever was the opposite of Obama. Ergo, a clusterf***.
“On top of this we had the absurdity of the whole thing being decided mostly over a dinner with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner the main parties to it . . . ”
So Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner were his “intel agencies,” Warren?
“Right from the start we heard that people in the military were complaining about poor vetting of intel….”
You tell me. What INTEL is meant here?
” What INTEL is meant here?”
As I read this, the intel was military intel regarding defense and fortification of the site attacked and the access to the attack target.
As for poor vetting of the intel by the Trump administration, I refer you to this statement:
“On top of this we had the absurdity of the whole thing being decided mostly over a dinner with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner the main parties to it . . .”
Just like when the Bush Administration set up a parallel intel vetting process to stovepipe cherry-picked and fake intel to justify the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq, Trump relied on Bannon and Kushner to stovepipe the cherry-picked intel and spin to justify the Yemen folly.
Hope that helps.
Joel,
I should help, but it won’t.
So, Trump, Bannon, and Kushner should not have trusted the intel our military intel agencies gave them?
The U.N. estimated in November of 2016 that over 10,000 had been killed in the Yemeni civil war. The majority of those (up to 6,000)killed by KSA airstrikes. Who do you think was encouraging those airstrikes, the Trump administration? Who was helping refuel those KSA jets? In the latest U.S. arms deal to the KSA by the Obama administration are you aware of the vote in the Senate to approve that arms sale? Sherrod Brown? “Yea”, Chuck Schumer? “Yea”. Feinstein “Yea”. I could continue but it’s a bit tedious. I looked at Econobrowser but couldn’t find any posts on Yemen and the Obama administration’s position. Maybe you can direct me to one of those posts.
Warren,
What is pretty clear is that they misinterpreted what they got. Obama had seen this stuff and decided it was not wise to do this. Whether or not Trump actually went in because Obama did not or simply could not figure out from the intel that Obama had made a wise decision not to attack, we do not know. But from the very get go after the botch, and it was a very bad botch with a US military attack helicopter going down due to unexpectedly strong ground fire that was how the three US servicpeeople got injured, the reports came out of the DOD that Trump and crew had badly handled and not studied carefully they got, leading to all these unexpected civilian dead plus US dead without the main goal of the attack being achieved, only to be followed by the worse collateral damage of the Yemeni government we recognize and support banning us from trying anything so stupid again.
Botch, botch, botch all the way, about as incompetent as one can imagine.
“So, Trump, Bannon, and Kushner should not have trusted the intel our military intel agencies gave them?”
No, they should have trusted it and decided, as Obama did, that there was inadequate justification for the decision to attack. Itel is data. What you do with data is judgement. Obama exercised good judgement with this data. Trump exercised bad judgement with the same data.
Hope this helps.
Joel,
It should help, but it won’t.
What mission objectives were not met?
Warren:
The objective to be minimally invasive, to accomplish the goal, and leave without being noticed. If we wanted such destruction and causalities, we could have called in something akin to a 155 strike.
They also apparently didn’t kill the guy they were after.
From what I read, it was to get intel, not to kill someone. They just send drones for that.
If it was a success I wonder why he blamed Obama for it.
Warren,
I reported in my post that is here the big thing they failed to do that they wanted to do, which was to kill the leader of AQAP, Qasim al-Rimini (there are other spellings of his name). You did not read my post? Go see links to Juan Cole for sources for this. On top of which al-Rimini put out an audio mocking Trump after their failure to get him.
Again, this was a very big botch, all the way around. Deal with it.
Oh, and where is the infamous ilsm to defend Trump on this. Think this was all due to Victoria Nuland and neocons, or maybe their absence, ilsm?
Looks like the recklessness may continue. Defense Department representatives are apparently floating a possible recommendation to put U.S. troops into Syria in troop strength.
I read the post, and the link, and the links in that link. Perhaps you should have done the same. Had you done so, you would have seen this: “Navy Capt. John Davis also said Tuesday that there was ‘never any intention, hope, anticipation, or plan’ that Al Qaeda leader Qassim al-Rimi would be captured or killed in the raid.” http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-launched-yemen-raid-told-obama-wouldn-article-1.2966736
Warren:
You have a Navy Captain saying they did not think he would be there. At the same time, you have the team saying they were compromised. This comes after the SOD and CJC said the killing of the operative would be a game changer “‘capturing the raid’s intended target would be a “game changer’ an anonymous official told. ” So Obama was not bold enough and Trump was stupid enough, one Navy dead and a bunch of civilian are “collateral damage. Trump missed his target and the other guy is laughing.
Why do you want to taunt Barkley?
Well, Run, if you want to believe anonymous sources and “tribal leaders” over a Navy Captain and a DoD spokeswoman, go right ahead.
Again, SOD and CJC say differently. Navy Captains do not decide these raids, the politicians do.
Show me.