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. (more…)

Few issues could be more contentious than the question of how the United States should “deal,” in the broadest sense of that word, with terrorism. If the U.S. takes a purely ad hoc approach to squashing terrorist cells, it is likely that untold numbers of American citizens will expire at the hands of these committed extremists. On the other hand, if the U.S. opts to take a preventative approach, obliterating suspected terrorists before they actually act against its citizens or interests, many believe international law will ineluctably be breached. The puzzle, then, is this: Complete security comes at the cost of breaching international law, yet complying fully with international law will require the unnecessary loss of human lives.

Abraham Sofaer, the George P. Shultz Fellow in Foreign Policy and National Security Affairs at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, argues in The Best Defense (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2010) that the key to unraveling this puzzle is approaching it from a fresh vantage point. According to Sofaer, modern terrorism poses a stiff challenge to the existing architecture of international law. Because existing rules only permit states to take military action against “armed attacks” – that is, attacks from state actors – countries besieged by terrorists feel as though their hands are tied. Since terrorists are often not aligned with particular states, taking military action against them, especially without the approval of the United Nations, would appear to violate the UN Charter. Lives or the law, what is to take priority? (more…)