From Yemen to Detroit, A Grim Year Ends

VILNIUS, Lithuania -- In my desire to get a fresh perspective on the Middle East and also enjoy a white Christmas and New Year's eve full of snow, my wife and I traveled to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and succeeded in achieving both aims, along with seeing some dear old friends. The view of Vilnius in the snow is enchanting, but the view back towards the Middle East is frightening. An end-of-year glance around the region suggests that -- hard as it may be to believe -- political conditions have deteriorated to a large extent in many parts of our region, and very few countervailing improvements can also be noted.

While existing conflicts and tensions in Palestine-Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Lebanon continue to plague those lands and ripple out to neighbors, I have no doubt that the single most troublesome new development during the past year has been the escalation of the fighting in Yemen. Almost imperceptibly, with little international media coverage, 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.

Just when we thought things could not get any worse in the Middle East, they do. This should not surprise anyone, because this has been the pattern for over three decades -- ever since the combination of the 1967 war results and the advent of the oil boom in the early 1970s cemented the modern Arab security state order, Israeli colonial policies, direct American military involvement to protect the global energy reservoir, and the slow disintegration of Arab citizens' expectations that they had rights provided to them by their state and government.

The fighting and ideological confrontations in Yemen are only the latest and most glaring examples of the wider underlying forces of tension that continue to plague the Middle East. The year now ending is not only a sad one that generates concern; it should also be a learning experience to help us probe why the Arab world persists as the only collectively turbulent and non-democratic region in the world. In that respect, 2009 highlights the three principal issues that drive the conflicts that continue to proliferate across the region.

In my view, these three vectors of turbulence and conflict are, in their order of importance:
1) the brittle states that define the modern Arab order, with their fundamental autocracy, occasional illegitimacies, prevalent corruption and mismanagement, and widespread mediocrity in meeting citizen needs;
2) the persistent direct or indirect interference of foreign powers, militarily, economically and politically; and,
3) the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on public opinion and state policies alike.

It is not mere coincidence that the year ended with an attempted attack on an American civilian airliner over Detroit, committed by a Nigerian former student in London who apparently prepared for his crime via links with an Al-Qaeda-related group in Yemen. The gravity of the attempted crime and the complex web of relationships that allowed it to reach implementation point cannot be explained by any single or simple reason, whether related to the psychology of a single young man, the foreign policy of a single country, or the pressures on citizens of any one Middle Eastern or African country.

The end of 2009 sees the United States actively involved in four wars -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. If this is not a wake-up call for Americans, I do not know what is. But it is a greater wake-up call for the people of the Arab world themselves, who remain fractured and in disarray due to their own domestic national incoherence and also the persistent need among many to actively resist American-Israeli policies and those of some allied conservative Arab governments.

This year ends with Yemen and Detroit beckoning us to try harder and act smarter in understanding the root causes of our wars, conflicts and profound irrationalities and excesses, reflected in our common savageries: Arabs oppressing and killing each other and trying to kill civilians in distant lands, Israelis colonizing and killing Arabs, or American armed forces attacking and killing simultaneously in four distant lands. Unraveling the madness starts with connecting the dots, because these are not isolated, unrelated dynamics.