Losing Yemen
” The last US special forces have been withdrawn from Yemen without exciting much notice from the US press. Max Boot tweets: “All US SOF evacuating Yemen. Huge win for AQAP, huge defeat for US. How many foreign policy disasters can we handle?” Reuters reports, “the United States has evacuated its remaining personnel, including about 100 special operations forces, from Yemen because of the deteriorating security situation there, U.S. officials said on Saturday.” This means that the last vestiges of what the Obama administration only recently touted as their model counter-insurgency operation are gone. The collapse has flown largely under the media radar.
Last week Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported that $500 million dollars in American supplied weapons are now in the hands of “Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda”. The Islamist blitzkrieg is living off huge quantities of captured US materiel.
BS News reported that an “Obama administration’s senior counterterrorism official acknowledged Thursday that the U.S. intelligence community was surprised by the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Yemen.” Nobody saw it coming, but the very same people assure the public they know what is to come. They’re in intelligence, right?
Nick Rasmussen, who directs the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Yemen’s American-funded army failed to oppose advancing Houthi rebels in the same way the U.S.-supported Iraqi military refused to fight Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants last year.
What happened in Iraq with the onslaught of ISIS “happened in Yemen” on “a somewhat smaller scale,” he said. “As the Houthi advances toward Sanaa took place… they weren’t opposed in many places…. The situation deteriorated far more rapidly than we expected.” “
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