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[Zangi]

snipers

You'd have active military 'boots' on the ground.  Its a heck of a lot harder to justify 'notreallyawar' when you have troops killing other troops on the ground. 
Then their would be questions of why not just go all the way?  And the usual GTFO my country.

[RedKing]

Since it seems to have gone unnoticed in the thread, Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh has left the country. Apparently he was in talks for a handover of power to someone in the military or senior levels of government anyways, but a rocket attack on the compound he was at sorta accelerated things.

He's now recovering from injuries in Saudi Arabia. He has not formally renounced power, but it's difficult to imagine him coming back to Yemen without all-out war erupting. (Although Saudi TV is reporting that he is planning to return...) Even the rank-and-file in the military and police have reportedly been celebrating his departure. So now the question is...what next? Yemen was on the verge of a Libyan-style civil war, with a loose coalition of armed tribes fighting the government security apparatus. The leaders of said tribes are all now in various political parties that have sprung up, and it's those political parties which are going to hammer out how to hold a democratic election and field the candidates for it.

Because of the fractious nature of Yemen's tribal politics, this thing has massive clusterfuck written all over it. But I do wish them well.


So...the Arab dictator watchlist stands as:

Tunisia: Gone.
Egypt: Gone.
Yemen: Gone.
Libya: In progress, stalled.
Syria: Simmering hot, but suffering from distinct lack of weapons for the opposition and lack of fractures within the ruling elites.
Bahrain: Effectively quelled.

Most of the other countries in the region have found that buyoffs (everybody gets a $100 check this month!), promises of reform and maybe a few shufflings of Cabinet members have been effective in calming things down.

[Bouchart]

Put Greece on that watchlist.  It'll get ugly over there real soon.

[Zorgn]

Since when was Greece an Arab dictatorship?

[Bouchart]

I mean the mass civil unrest thing.

[nenjin]

Guess the hopes for Yemen going down like Egypt are out of the question. I don't know a lot about the tribal situation in Yemen. Are there like, sworn blood enemies out there? Is the economic disparity between the cities and the tribes through the roof?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Guess the hopes for Yemen going down like Egypt are out of the question. I don't know a lot about the tribal situation in Yemen. Are there like, sworn blood enemies out there? Is the economic disparity between the cities and the tribes through the roof?

Let me put this into perspective. Saudi Arabia build a giant concrete wall on their southern border, which is a region of Saudi Arabia known as the Empty Corridor due to being a desert where no one lives, because they were desperate to keep the Yemenis out of their country. The Saudi Arabian government considers the Yemenis to be brutal and crazy. Think about that for a second.

[RedKing]

Yeah, Yemen is one of those places where they still used to kidnap people for fun and profit. Literally. For a short while in the late 1990's, they actually became an adventure tourism place, where people went to GET kidnapped, because the Bedouin tribes reportedly always treated their captives well, and they were usually released without harm for pretty piddly amounts of ransom (couple hundred bucks would suffice). I think people saw one too many old movies and thought it was romantic and/or a great anthropology outing.

Then al-Qaeda moved into the area, and shit got *real* real fast.


Also, big news in Syria as we have what appears to be the first troop mutiny among Syrian Army forces, in the town of Jisr al-Shughour. Dissidents claim the area is "effectively outside the control of Syrian security forces now". It'll be interesting to see if Jisr al-Shughour becomes a Syrian Benghazi, as the hub of an anti-regime uprising.

[Nikov]

I'll confirm that about Yemen. Its like the 1200's out there, with AK's.

By the way, is Libya going to wrap up any time soon? I'm beginning to worry there isn't an exit strategy besides "look good for a week, be boring for a month, quietly redeploy the carrier group on a moonless night".

[Aqizzar]

Not exactly, aside from bombing Tripoli to oblivion, and hoping somebody important dies.  NATO pulled out all the stops over the weekend, and they're running out of targets to bomb.  Russia is taking point on convincing Qaddafi to leave, alongside Italy and South Africa, but he's making a round of "Fight to the death" radio speeches, and after all this, I'd take him at his word.  I think at this point, the exist strategy is to keep shooting until there's nothing left to shoot at, and hope some announcement of Qaddafi's death surfaces in the process, then declare victory and run like Hell.

[Bouchart]

Apparently Saleh of Yemen was injured worse than was originally reported, with head trauma and burns on about 40% of his body.  Maybe he should look into early retirement.

[nenjin]

So is there no modern influence in Yemen then? Because that to me is always the counter point to these crazy ass revolutions, is the moderates who either have to be convinced or forced by whichever side comes out on top. Is there no modern influence there to serve as a counter point to the tribes? In reading over stuff I'm left going....ok, are they going to form a tribal council? Is the remaining security apparatus going to fight on behalf of non-tribal factions for control of the cities and resources? I keep picturing Afghanistan where there's a pretty sharp divide between city dwellers and the people out in the countryside. They were caught in the middle in the fighting between the Taliban, government forces before and after the start of the War on Terror and the Northern Alliance.

[Bouchart]

Saleh is in Saudi Arabia, I believe.  He hasn't formally given up power but he's basically out of commission.  Yemen is basically in a state of anarchy and I'm surprised that Western media isn't talking much about it.  Actually I'm not that surprised.

[RedKing]

So is there no modern influence in Yemen then? Because that to me is always the counter point to these crazy ass revolutions, is the moderates who either have to be convinced or forced by whichever side comes out on top. Is there no modern influence there to serve as a counter point to the tribes? In reading over stuff I'm left going....ok, are they going to form a tribal council? Is the remaining security apparatus going to fight on behalf of non-tribal factions for control of the cities and resources? I keep picturing Afghanistan where there's a pretty sharp divide between city dwellers and the people out in the countryside. They were caught in the middle in the fighting between the Taliban, government forces before and after the start of the War on Terror and the Northern Alliance.

Sana'a (the capital) is somewhat modernized. There's a university, radio and TV stations, etc. But it's literally one of those situations where once you get outside the city, the day-to-day lifestyle is straight-up "people living in mud huts with camels and chickens". And AK-47s, as Nikov mentioned. So the moderates exist in Sana'a, but the real armed power (outside of the Army) is in those mud-hut guys with the AK's. The hope is that with Saleh gone, the Army and police apparatus (concentrated mostly in Sana'a) will side with the moderates to form a new government, and the tribes will go back into the desert. Dunno how realistic that is.

Further news on the Syrian uprising is less promising. There was a troop mutiny in Jisr al-Shughour, but it was the mutineers who were slaughtered, not the Assad loyalists. And now there's reports of another couple of battalions worth of troops heading from Damascus towards Jisr al-Shughour. I sense a massacre on the horizon. The Assad family is fond of pulverizing towns that give them trouble (see Hama, 1982).

[olemars]

Sana'a (the capital) is somewhat modernized. There's a university, radio and TV stations, etc. But it's literally one of those situations where once you get outside the city, the day-to-day lifestyle is straight-up "people living in mud huts with camels and chickens". And AK-47s, as Nikov mentioned. So the moderates exist in Sana'a, but the real armed power (outside of the Army) is in those mud-hut guys with the AK's. The hope is that with Saleh gone, the Army and police apparatus (concentrated mostly in Sana'a) will side with the moderates to form a new government, and the tribes will go back into the desert. Dunno how realistic that is.

It's a society where you have no honour unless you carry a 12 inch curved dagger at all times. RPGs and SA-7 SAMs are common yemenite household items too. There's some interesting wikileaks cables on it, but I'll refrain from linking to them so RedKing don't get a surprise visit from a DHS sanitation crew.