PAUL JAY: Welcome back to the Real News Network. We're continuing our series of interviews
with a short history of Yemen. I'm going to quote one more time from the article Proxy
Morons: The Demolition of Yemen. It's actually a piece I already quoted in the previous segment,
but it's worth saying again. It's going to pick up where we left off in the story.
"What went wrong is what usually goes wrong, no matter the context, when you have a history
of colonialism, ongoing interference from outside forces, sectarian blindness, and massive
wealth at the service of mischief." Now to give us a history of that mischief, joining
us is Daniel Martin Varisco. Thanks for joining us again.
DANIEL MARTIN VARISCO: I'm glad to be here.
JAY: So let's pick up. You were saying when you were there, I guess you were saying, in
the early '70s, Yemen seemed filled with promise. So what went wrong?
VARISCO: Well, several things. One of them was that it was a very poor country, as we
all know. There was development aid coming in from everywhere. The Americans were there,
but so were the Chinese, and I mean Communist China was there. The Russians were there.
But it was also a country where there was no strong central government. There was a
series of military dictators.
I had mentioned earlier, or you read about [al-Houthi]. He was a very popular leader,
but he was assassinated, some say the Saudis had a hand in that, in 1977. I arrived in
1978, and about a month or two after I was there, the fellow who had taken over, a Col.
al-Hashmi, was actually blown up by a suitcase bomb that was sent from the president of South
Yemen. Whether or not the president sent a suitcase bomb or it was switched, we don't
know.
I remember, I actually walked by the Giada, or the military headquarters, the day that
happened. And then I was talking to the people on the street, and they said, well, we'll
see who takes over. Which military guy takes over. And a couple units sort of faced each
other, and the guy that came on top was Ali Abdullah Saleh. And at the time, people said,
yeah, give him a week, two weeks. This guy's not going to last. He was sort of a nobody.
33 years later, he showed that he was pretty adept at surviving in North Yemen.
What went wrong. Well, you've always had some external power on the outside trying to dictate
what was going on. The Saudis were very involved there. The Americans also were very interested.
It's a strategic location on the horn of Africa. And so all kinds of shipping that comes down
to the Red Sea goes through that narrow bottleneck, which is the Bab el-Mandab. And it's right
across from Ethiopia and Eritrea, which are not exactly in Somalia. Not exactly the most
peaceful places on earth.
So it's had a lot of foreign interests, shall we say. But we can move forward. You had the
first Gulf war, which brought, as I said before, brought many Yemenis back home. And that's
when things really started to go sour. Yemen is not producing much oil today, even though
they have had it since the 1980s.
But I think it's very important to remember that there were Yemenis who went to fight
in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And when they returned, they were radicalized. And
many of them were radicalized against the government, and against the United States.
We had the bombing of the USS Cole. Ali Abdullah Saleh basically allowed the Americans to come
in, and to investigate.
And Saleh at that point was very eager to have American arms. And so he said, well,
I will fight al-Qaeda for you. And actually, for a couple of years, he rounded up many
of them. Several were put into prison. Most of those escaped later on. Whether he had
a hand in that or not, we don't know. But it was to Saleh's advantage not to really
go after all of al-Qaeda, because as long as al-Qaeda was there, then he could get military
weapons and support.
JAY: I think $140 million just in 2010.
VARISCO: Oh, absolutely. And he was, you know, he was using that to build up his Republican
Guard. You know, what would protect him, more than going after al-Qaeda. He sort of had
a deal with them. You guys don't come and attack me, and you know, I'll sort of lay
off and pretend I can't find you.
All of that, of course, changed during the Arab Spring. Saleh was on the ropes, certainly,
and that allowed al-Qaeda, particularly after he was removed from power, to take advantage
of the insecurity and gain quite a bit of ground in the South, in the Abyan area. Or
at least sympathy from people.
So you know, when you're talking about what went wrong in Yemen, you have to consider
that it's not independent from what had been going on in the Gulf wars, in the war in Afghanistan.
There was a growing resentment of the American military involvement in the area. And then
the Houthis come on the scene, they are very much influenced by Iranian rhetoric, you know,
death to America, death to Israel, and all of this is happening at a time when Yemen
is economically very depressed. The oil that they had was not sufficient to really keep
them going.
And Yemen has one of the largest military budgets in the region. It's extraordinary.
And at one point they had over 400,000 individuals in their army, so it's, there was a lot of
emphasis on the military.
JAY: And there's also this weird, you know, dual kind of relationship with al-Qaeda, where
the Saudis would also, if I understand it correctly, ally with al-Qaeda against the
Shia, against the Houthis.
VARISCO: Well ... okay. Well, the reason that you have al-Qaeda in Yemen is that they were
basically forced out of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis got very good at driving these people
out, and a number of the leaders of al-Qaeda, it's called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
were actually coming down from Saudi Arabia.
I'm not sure they were supporting al-Qaeda in any direct way. And the Saudis basically
want to be able to control whoever is in power in Yemen. It's on their border. They certainly
don't want ? the Zaydis are fine. They have no problem with the Zaydis. They don't want
to find an Iranian proxy. From the Saudi point of view, Iran has messed up things in Iraq,
they're into Syria, certainly Hezbollah, which has a strong relationship, is in Lebanon.
That's bad enough.
But to have on their Southern border a state that at least in terms of its rhetoric, even
if there was no direct military support, was pro-Iranian, that simply was not in the cards.
JAY: The ... the Houthis are rhetorically, ideologically, have connections, sympathy
with Iran. But how much are they actual Iranian proxies, versus they have their own agenda?
VARISCO: Well, I think that if you go back to the founder of the movement, who's saying
he was really enthralled with Khomeini, he basically became Ithna-Ashari, or a Twelver
Shia.
His brother who is in power now, Abdul-Malik, isn't quite, at least in public, isn't quite
as pro-Iran. The thing is that Iran has given them moral support. And where else were they
going to turn? You know, the Saudis were not really, they had a real problem with the Saudis.
The West, you know, Europe, the United States? They were not very interested in what the
Houthis were doing. They were supporting Hadi. And the Gulf states, as well. So really, there
was no one else the Houthis could turn to for any kind of help or support but Iran.
I do think, however, that Iran did not expect the Houthis to gain what they did, and again,
they only gained it because they joined up with Ali Abdullah Saleh. I think Iran was
taken by surprise on this. I don't think it was a calculated move to come to the border
of Saudi Arabia and somehow come over the border. I think they sort of got caught up
by events.
JAY: So is this a case of the Saudis interfering in what is essentially a civil war?
VARISCO: Well, I guess so. Well, it's -
JAY: The Arab, the pan-Arab alliance, this military alliance they've created, you know,
this is all positive in this language of Iran is gobbling up country -- you can quote Netanyahu
on this, because this is another interesting twist in all this, the convergence of Saudi-Israeli
interest. But this language that this is Iran gobbling up country after country, and Yemen
is an example of Iran gobbling up a country. Or is it you've got an indigenous movement
that's fighting for power, it gets moral, maybe some material support from Iran, but
it's fundamentally a civil war and this pan-Arab military alliance is interfering in it?
VARISCO: Yeah. It's primarily a civil strife. I mean, the real issues there are who is going
to control Yemen? And there are some rather strong disagreements on that.
I firmly believe that if Ali Abdullah Saleh had not been allowed to stay in Yemen with
immunity, basically, from any prosecution, and given that most of the army even though
Hadi tried to reassemble it was carefully put together by Ali Abdullah Saleh. They were
supporting him. That was a recipe for disaster from the beginning. Was a huge mistake to
leave Ali Abdullah Saleh over there.
He is for himself. And at one point, it made sense to be with the Americans. At one point
it made sense to be with the Saudis. But now he's trying to angle to get his son Ahmed
into power, and he'll ally with the devil in order to achieve that. But the insecurity
that came with the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh has allowed these, this strife to sort of
spill over into other areas. The [Hadi amount] is basically on its own now. The South has
a lot of activity by al-Qaeda. Yemen is being torn apart. It's imploding, if you will.
JAY: All right. Thanks very much for joining us, Daniel.
VARISCO: I'm very glad to have been here.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.