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Iraq, then Afghanistan....and next stop Yemen?

"There is ominous use by American politicians and commentators of the phrase "failed state" in relation to Yemen, as if this some how legitimised foreign intervention. It is extraordinary that the US political elite has never taken on board that its greatest defeats have been in just such "failed states"', not least Lebanon in 1982, when 240 US Marines were blown up; Somalia in the early 1990s when the body of a US helicopter pilot was dragged through the streets; Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein; and Afghanistan after the supposed fall of the Taliban.

Yemen has all the explosive ingredients of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. But the arch-hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, was happily confirming this week that the Green Berets and the US Special Forces are already there. He cited with approval an American official in Sanaa as telling him that, "Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If you don't act pre-emptively Yemen will be tomorrow's war." In practice pre-emptive strikes are likely to bring a US military entanglement in Yemen even closer."

It sounds all too familiar. The same catch-cries and criteria for the US - and possibly its allies - going into a country.

Patrick Cockburn explains in an op-piece "Threats to Yemen prove America hasn't learned the lesson of history" in The Independent something about Yemen and warns that America will be sucked into another debacle if it thinks "going into Yemen" will eradicate those terrorists or other undesirables.

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