Sometimes I wonder if Al-Qaeda sympathizers have infiltrated America’s right wing.

Because ever since the news broke of the Christmas Day attempt by 23-year old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried and failed to blow up a U.S. airliner over Detroit using explosives he had smuggled past airport security in Amsterdam, Netherlands and had reportedly joined a Yemeni affiliate of al Qaeda which trained and equipped him with explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America, there have been calls for America to escalate American involvement in Yemen. People are now saying that broader and more clearly visible retaliatory military action must be taken.

As Glen Greenwald wrote in Salon:

Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we’re fighting five different wars in Muslim countries — or, to use the NYT’s jargon, “five fronts” in the “Terror War” (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, “we will continue to use every element of our national power”).  Add to those five fronts the “crippling” sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even “harsher” than the prior ones, and it’s almost easier to count the Muslim countries we’re not attacking or threatening than to count the ones we are.  Yet this still isn’t enough for America’s right-wing super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of “an allergy to the concept of war.”

Uh, excuse me, but earth calling the Republican Party and Fox News. What exactly do you think the U.S. has been doing in Yemen for the past several years? Sitting down and playing tiddlywinks?

The U.S. has been backing airstrikes against suspected Al Qaeda members in Yemen for some time.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which claimed responsibility for the attempted attack on a US airliner bound for Detroit, is led by a Yemeni who was once a close aide to Osama bin Laden. The group formed in January 2009, when leader Naser Abdel Karim al-Wahishi announced a merger between operatives from Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

The group has been blamed for a series of attacks in Yemen, including an assault against the US embassy in Sanaa, and suicide bombings targeting South Korean visitors. Recently, the group indicated it was ready to take its fight beyond Yemen.

Reportedly, Abdulmutallab claims that he was one of many bombers being groomed by the Yemeni al Qaeda affiliate to attack American-bound aircraft. If this is true then is failed attempt is beneficial insofar as it helps the United States to focus on a real threat.

None of this is to say that the U.S. should be complacent about the state of its domestic security. The, thankfully, failed, attempt has highlighted many deficiencies. Contrary to initial remarks, which, were subsequently recanted, by Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, the system did not work. As she later noted, it “failed miserably.” The suspect was allowed to fly to the United States on a valid visa without extra screening even though he was listed in a terrorism database, — thanks to this father who had taken the extraordinary step of warning American authorities on Nov. 19 about his son — bought a one-way ticket with cash and checked no luggage.

Clearly, there are still gaps in coordination between the State Department, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Department of Homeland Security.   To use the now familiar expression there are still numerous dots not being connected.

Yet while the U.S. certainly needs to assist the Yemen government in dismantling this group it is important to take steps that are appropriate and don’t worsen the situation. Specialists believe the Al Qaeda fighters number there in the low hundreds.  For that you don’t invade a country or launch a bombing campaign.  We already did that in Iraq and, for a time, handed Al-Qaeda a recruiting windfall.

Yemen is a complicated country. As Rami G. Khouri wrote a few days ago:

Yemen has transformed itself into a place where three different political or military contests are underway: the government vs. the Houthis, some secessionists in the south, and a growing Al-Qaeda network. Meanwhile the Saudi Arabian and American armed forces are directly engaged in warfare against two of them — Houthis and Al-Qaeda — and the Iranian government is increasingly weighing in on the side of the Houthis.

Here in one package, at the end of this year we have all the major tension points of the contemporary Middle East converging in a single time and place — Al-Qaeda vs. everyone in the world, Iran vs. Arabs, the United States vs. Al-Qaeda, Shiites vs. Sunnis, rich Arabs vs. poor Arabs, and the failing centralized modern Arab security state vs. it indigenous tendency to disintegrate into tribal or regional units.

The Yemen government is also fragile. Its interests and those of the U.S. are not the same. The U.S. now views Yemen through the prism of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). But Yemen is much more concerned with its own domestic unrest. While, thanks to financial assistance, and U.S. pressure, its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh has allowed more strikes against AQAP he has done so under duress and against his better judgment, Being seen to cooperate too closely with the US will not do him no favors at all, but these are difficult times for him and he has to tread a fine line between appeasing the US and trying to hold the country together.

What you do is what we are already doing. Have your intelligence agencies and military special operations teams help Yemen, provide intelligence, training and weapons ane economic assistance.

Dong more than that risks worsening the situation. The recent US-sponsored airstrikes there serve as an example. They appear to have missed several of the targeted individuals and killed dozens of innocent people, including women and children – which inevitably inflames anti-western sentiment. Yemen does need outside help in dealing with al-Qaida but the less visible it is, the better.

As the Guardian noted yesterday:

Whatever else is done, it’s important to distinguish between measures that benefit Yemen and those that benefit the regime of its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The worst of all outcomes would be to be perceived as propping up Saleh at a time when his power is clearly ebbing away. Saleh, who rose through the army, has ruled northern Yemen since 1978 and both parts of the country since unification of north and south in 1990. He is now in his last presidential term and has to step down by 2013, when he will be 71, unless he changes the constitution – a move that is not impossible but in the present circumstances would probably cause uproar.

Former Vice president Dick Cheney claims that this incident and others goes to show that President Obama doesn’t realize America is at war. I’d say that it is Cheney that is out of touch. When you fight a war both sides suffer losses. American has been remarkably lucky since the 9/11 attacks not to suffer another major attack on American soil. But that luck in unlikely to hold forever.  Sooner or later an attack is going to be successful, even if American was devoting its resources to fulfilling the Cheney one percent doctrine, i.e. fighting a low probability, high impact attack.

Cheney might also want to remember that it is, at least in part, thanks to the Iraq war he championed that Al Qaeda has had a chance to regroup in Yemen.

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