Misunderstanding Wars in Yemen, Vietnam, and Yemen Once Again | J. Dana Stuster

Misunderstanding Wars in Yemen, Vietnam, and Yemen Once Again

By J. Dana Stuster, NSN Policy Analyst
April 6, 2015 | Foreign Policy

There’s an moment in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War in which former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lays out what he got wrong in Vietnam. “We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War,” he says. “Not what they [the Vietnamese] saw it as: a civil war.”

I thought of that the other day as I listened to Adam Baron, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, talking about the Saudi intervention in Yemen. “This is treated as a sectarian battle between Iran-backed Shia and Saudi Arabia-backed Sunnis, but really when you look at the essence of Yemen’s problem, that’s not really it,” Baron told NPR. Iran actually has very little stake in the Yemeni Houthi rebels, which ousted the country’s transitional government from the capital in January and had been advancing toward Aden until the Saudis began airstrikes last week. The war in Yemen is a struggle between domestic forces: the Houthi rebels; the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was ousted in 2011 and whose support has been essential to the Houthis’ success; the current nominal president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi; as well as a host of others, include a secessionist movement, Islamist politicians, and a branch of al-Qaeda looking to exploit any opening it finds.

Saudi Arabia has always seen Yemen as a weakness — a chink in its armor as it tries to maintain control of the Arabian Peninsula — and it has been vigilant about any opening to protect its sphere of influence. In a previous generation, Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen to counter the influence of its then-rival Nasserist Egypt. Riyadh sees a similar threat to its peninsular hegemony in the influence of Iran among the Houthis.

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Yemeni President Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi address reporters before their bilateral meeting at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. [State Department, 7/29/2013]