Eid Mubarak!

"What did you cook for Eid?" I asked my sister.

Of course, there is no Eid celebration in the traditional Hindu household.  But, she played along.  "I should have cooked mutton."

The month-long Ramadan fast comes to an end.

Here's a thought: Have you asked yourself how people in Yemen or Syria might observe Eid when they are in the middle of terrible wars?  Especially in Yemen, which the United Nations has declared as one hell of a humanitarian crisis?

First, a recap of conditions in Yemen:

Yemen’s civil war has already led to what the United Nations described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis — at least three million displaced by fighting, a cholera epidemic that is now the largest outbreak ever recorded, and eight million people on the brink of starvation.

You think people there were thinking about Eid in such a situation?

Source

And, guess what?  Saudi Arabia, which is where Islam began, and the country leading a coalition in order to fight the proxy war against Iran, decided that such a humanitarian crisis is not enough.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and UAE-backed Yemeni forces launched an assault to retake Hodeidah, a Houthi-held port city through which 70 to 80 percent of commercial and humanitarian supplies enter Yemen.

Why is this a big fucking deal?

“A military attack or siege on Hodeidah will impact hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” Lisa Grande, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, warned in a statement  before the offensive began. “In a prolonged worst case, we fear that as many as 250,000 people may lose everything — even their lives.”

The misery is well into three years now:

The Saudis and Emiratis intervened in the war three years ago with hopes of a quick victory over the Houthis, whom they see an Iranian proxy. Instead, the two nations have been stuck in a quagmire.

Perhaps you wonder what the US is up to here.  After all, America rarely stays away from any opportunity to bomb the shit out of brown people, as George Carlin liked to say.  Right?  Especially when we now have a President who hates brown-skinned shitholers and he also hates Iran.  So, this Yemen war is a twofer:

With little public attention or debate, the president has already expanded US military assistance to his Saudi and UAE allies – in ways that are prolonging the Yemen war and increasing civilian suffering. Soon after Trump took office in early 2017, his administration reversed a decision by former president Barack Obama to suspend the sale of over $500m in laser-guided bombs and other munitions to the Saudi military, over concerns about civilian deaths in Yemen.

But, don't ever think that Obama was any angel of peace.  I have blogged a lot about that when was the President.  In this August 2016 post, for instance, I worried that Obama's legacy will include droning the shit out of brown people!

While who is the Oval Office might make a difference in domestic affairs, when it comes to dropping bombs over brown people, it is a free-for-all.

From 2009 to 2016, the Obama administration authorized a record $115bn in military sales to Saudi Arabia, far more than any previous administration. Of that total, US and Saudi officials signed formal deals worth about $58bn, and Washington delivered $14bn worth of weaponry.
Much of that weaponry is being used in Yemen, with US technical support.

trump has merely taken that to a whole new level!

Like much of his chaotic foreign policy, Trump is escalating US military involvement in Yemen without pushing for a political settlement to the Saudi-led war. His total support for Saudi Arabia and its allies is making the world’s worst humanitarian crisis even more severe.

So, at best, it will be a subdued Eid celebration in Yemen :(

No love, in the time of cholera!

I went to graduate school because of my naïveté.  Living in my own bubble, I thought that the causes of the miserable human condition all around me in India and elsewhere had not been clearly understood, and that graduate school would lead to a breakthrough.

Turned out that I did learn a lot through my six years--problems continue primarily because of politics that prevents us from doing the right thing.

I don't mean politics as in elections and voting, but politics as in how we as individuals and groups prefer to view the world and, therefore, how to respond to the human condition--whether it is at the street corner or in a far away country.

Consider cholera, for instance.  Sure, once upon a time humans thought that this disease and fatality was some mysterious event.  But, a cholera outbreak in London during the height of its Industrial Revolution and urbanization was also when we humans figured out what was going on.  It is a story of geography and maps.  (Wikipedia can help, if it interests you.)

My point is this: If there are people dying from cholera in the year 2017, it ain't because we don't know what causes cholera.  We know all too well.  We know how it spreads.  We know how it kills.

So, why do people die from cholera?  Politics.

The worst of that politics is being played out in Yemen:

The Yemeni farm laborer was picking crops in a hot field when the call came. His children, all seven of them, had fallen gravely ill.
Some were vomiting, others had diarrhea, and all were listless, indicating that they had fallen victim to the latest disaster to afflict this impoverished corner of the Arabian Peninsula: one of the worst outbreaks of cholera infection in recent times.

No amount of graduate schooling by any number of eager-beaver students can help, when we are hell bent on making the human condition miserable.

For much of the world, cholera, a bacterial infection spread by water contaminated with feces, has been relegated to the history books. In the 19th century, it claimed tens of millions of lives across the world, mainly through dehydration and electrolyte imbalance.
That ended with modern sanitation and water systems. When it pops up now, it is usually treated easily with rehydration solutions and, if severe, with antibiotics.

Yep, we thought had condemned killing by cholera to history.  And then we watch it happen in real time:

Since a severe outbreak began in late April, according to Unicef, cholera has spread to 21 of the country’s 22 provinces, infecting at least 269,608 people and killing at least 1,614. That is more than the total number of cholera deaths reported to the World Health Organization worldwide in 2015.

How fucked up are we humans!

In October, the government stopped paying civil servants, prompting strikes from sanitation workers and leading to garbage pileups and septic backups. That contaminated the wells that many Yemenis rely on for water, providing the ideal environment for cholera to spread. The outbreak picked up speed in April, after dirty rainwater further polluted the wells.
Not everyone who is exposed to cholera will contract the disease. But in places like Yemen, where more than 14 million of Yemen’s 27 million people lack access to clean water and 17 million do not have enough food, people are far more vulnerable — particularly malnourished children.
“The average person lives on tea and bread. It’s just one meal a day,” said Jamie McGoldrick, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Yemen. “They are in a weakened state, and that is why they are getting sick.”
Making matters worse, the war has damaged 65 percent of Yemen’s medical facilities, denying more than 14 million people access to health care.

You have to wonder why we can't seem to get along, right?

Meanwhile, acute resource constraints in a remarkably rich world:

The United Nations says it needs $2.1 billion for its work in Yemen this year, but it has received only 29 percent of that amount despite repeated pleas for donations from aid groups.

In addition to shedding my naïveté, there is one huge difference between the graduate school me versus the me now--I am not a starving graduate student.

So, I did the only thing that I could--I donated, to my favorite group that does phenomenal work in such situations: MSF.

The World According to Saudi Arabia

Five weeks ago, I included the following photograph in this post:

,
That NY Times photo ran with the caption: "A woman with cholera was treated at a hospital in Sana, Yemen, on Sunday."

Yes, cholera!

Over the five weeks, the president made a triumphant return to the country after having gained even more confidence from touching the orb.  Saudi Arabia, which is one the main reasons why Yemen is in a completely messed up state, also gained in confidence from the president touching the orb, and decided to let Qatar and Iran know who the big dog is in that part of the world.

Meanwhile, nobody cared about Yemen.

Is it any surprise that things have become worse, as if that is even possible?

Seized by violence and teetering on the edge of famine, Yemen is grappling with another danger that threatens to outpace them both: cholera.
"We are now facing the worst cholera outbreak in the world," international health authorities said in a statement Saturday.

Cholera is one of the easiest to stop, if you think about it.  Right?

The disease should not be so ferocious. Preventing cholera is pretty simple in theory: wash your hands with clean water, drink clean water, and eat food that has been boiled or cooked.

But ...

But clean water in Yemen is a luxury. Municipal workers in Sanaa have not been paid in months. And so we have no electricity, rubbish piling high in the street, and a crippled water system.
The sewer system stopped working on 17 April. Ten days later, cholera hit.

How terrible!

Yemen now suffers three-way tragedy: a population under siege, suffering the violence of war and unable to work or access nutritious food or health care; an economic collapse that has led to a rise in criminality; and now a devastating health crisis.
This all leads to what could be the largest cholera outbreak of our lifetime.

America couldn't care, even though the world knows that we are an accomplice in Yemen's deepening humanitarian crisis:

"There's a U.S. imprint on every civilian death inside Yemen that's caused by the Saudi bombing campaign," Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told NPR's Michele Kelemen last month after the U.S. signed a new arms deal with Saudi Arabia.
"The Saudis simply could not operate this bombing campaign without us," he continued. "Their planes can't fly without U.S. refueling capacity. They are dropping munitions that we've sold them. We are standing side by side with them often when they are reviewing intelligence about targets."

As Fareed Zakaria noted, "Saudi Arabia played Donald Trump":

The United States has now signed up for Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy — a relentless series of battles against Shiites and their allies throughout the Middle East. That will enmesh Washington in a never-ending sectarian struggle, fuel regional instability and complicate its ties with countries such as Iraq that want good relations with both sides. But most important, it will do nothing to address the direct and ongoing threat to Americans — jihadist terrorism. I thought that Trump’s foreign policy was going to put America first, not Saudi Arabia. 

Shame on us, and on the 63 million voters!

The 'never again' bullshit

We humans are a bizarre bunch.  We are aware of acute food shortages and malnutrition, yet we keep going with our own lives.  We live the "let them eat cakes" lives of affluence.

We are even willing to bomb the shit out of people trapped between prick-waving maniacs, which then leads to more than mere food shortages.  We use the "f" word: Famine, which the United Nations defines as:

A famine can be declared only when certain measures of mortality, malnutrition and hunger are met. They are: at least 20 per cent of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope; acute malnutrition rates exceed 30 per cent; and the death rate exceeds two persons per day per 10,000 persons.

How depressingly clinical, right?

Yemen has reached that famine stage:

More than two years of civil war in the country has triggered a humanitarian crisis, with almost seven million people on the brink of famine.
A resurgence of a cholera outbreak has also resulted in 60,000 suspected cases since April and 500 associated deaths.

Let them eat cakes!

the suffering of Yemenis was not a coincidence, or the "result of forces beyond our control" - but rather the fault of those involved and inaction by world powers.

Let them eat cakes!

As Amartya Sen noted, famines are often the result of human (mis)management.  In the case of Yemen, too:

“If there was no conflict in Yemen, there would be no descent into famine, misery, disease and death — a famine would certainly be avoidable and averted,” Mr. O’Brien told the United Nations Security Council.
He depicted the crisis as man-made, implicitly placing part of the blame on the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition that has been bombing Yemen’s Houthi rebels and their allies for over two years.
He also blamed the Houthis.
“The people of Yemen are being subjected to deprivation, disease and death as the world watches,” he said.
Mr. O’Brien also implored the Saudis to avoid an attack on Hodeidah, the only port in Yemen that can still handle shiploads of food and medicine. Virtually all of the basic needs in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, must be imported.

It is not as if we were caught unaware.  This is not like a 9.0 earthquake that suddenly happens.  We have systematically created this famine, and are making sure the misery will get worse:

Donald Trump ran for president as the world’s greatest dealmaker. His first international destination as president, Saudi Arabia, is where he reportedly registered eight companies during his campaign. Yet by announcing one of the largest arms-sales deals in U.S. history during this visit, Trump is revealing to the world a dark side to his boasts of creating jobs: He may be helping to create a famine as well.

Let them eat cakes!

If our dealmaker in chief ever had leverage in a negotiation, it would be this one. With a hundred billion dollars’ worth of U.S. planes, ships and precision-guided munitions on the line, Trump could simply demand that the Saudis end the blockade, refrain from bombing Yemen’s major port and enter into a U.N.-brokered political settlement in exchange for the U.S.-made weapons. But he doesn’t have to listen to a progressive Democrat like me — these are precisely the policies that Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) has been calling for. Even Trump’s own appointee to the World Food Program, former South Carolina governor David Beasley (R), argued that in light of the president’s visit, “it’s very, very timely that the United States apply all the pressure it can with regard to all parties involved, including Saudi Arabia.”

Let them eat cakes, while we sell more arms to kill them all!

Caption at the source:
A woman with cholera was treated at a hospital in Sana, Yemen, on Sunday.

If it is Saturday, it must be ... Yemen!

The older I get, the more it seems like growing up when I did and where I did was quite a blessing.  Consider the simple, daily habit of reading the newspaper.  A habit that goes back as far as I can remember.  The news about places that I didn't even know existed, and about politicians who seemed immensely larger than life, fascinated me to no end.

So well developed was this habit that once, as an adult, when I visited with a family in the expansive tree, I was shocked that they did not subscribe to a newspaper.  There I was, up in the morning and no paper to read.  That was a torture from Torquemada's playbook ;)

The Hindu was international in its news coverage.  Its left-of-center sympathies resonated well with my own political preference of those days.  It was through that paper that I even knew that there was a country called Yemen--those were the days of a war between North Yemen and South Yemen, which was yet another war between the commie sympathizers and the others.  Recall all those proxy wars during the Cold War years?

With all the refugee crisis related to Syria, the world seems to be overlooking Yemen.  The violence there is not one between the old Cold War enemies, but is also a proxy war of a different kind.  It is a Shia-Sunni war.  Iran (Shia)-allied Houthi movement versus the rest backed by Saudi Arabia (Sunni, and that too a strict, fundamentalist version) and,, of course, the United States.  Makes you wonder why the US is always pals with the "frenemy" Saudis, right?

A few weeks ago, Amnesty released a report on the "collateral damage" that civilians have become in this unholy war.

Amnesty International has documented hundreds of cases of civilians, many of them children and women, killed or injured while asleep in their homes or going about their daily activities – fetching water, buying food, visiting relatives. Scores were struck in the very places where they had sought refuge after having been displaced from their homes by the conflict. ...
Entire neighbourhoods have virtually emptied as residents fled their homes in fear of attacks or because strikes on civilian infrastructure left the areas without water, electricity and other essential services. In some neighbourhoods, as residents fled the conflict other civilians displaced by the fighting elsewhere moved in for lack of better options. Many have been unable to relocate to safer areas due to lack of resources. With frequently shifting frontlines, residents have struggled to keep out of harm’s way, often finding themselves in the line of fire where they thought they would be safe.
The sick and wounded have faced restrictions in accessing medical care due to the shortages and high prices of fuel and medicines and to difficulties in securing safe passage through checkpoints manned by the different armed groups. The parties to the conflict have hindered the delivery of humanitarian aid to areas controlled by their opponents, causing a sharp deterioration in the humanitarian situation.

I bet that since then the damage has worsened.  Makes me wonder, as always, why humans engage in wars and why we continue to develop more and more ways to kill each other.  This world needs a lot more pacifists to counter the warmongers all over, especially here in the United States--the US sells those killing devices all over the world and seems intent on feeding the global war monster.

The BBC reports that all the chaos in Yemen has provided ISIS--yes, those maniacs--with a golden opportunity!

Human Rights Watch cites reports that on 23 August, IS dressed a number of Houthi prisoners in orange jumpsuits, placed them in a boat which was then towed out into the harbour.
Reportedly watched by local residents of Aden, the boat carrying the prisoners was then blown up, killing those on board, the report says.

As if all that wasn't enough for you to yank your hair out:

For now, it seems that the jihadists of AQAP and IS have largely put aside their differences to fight their common enemy, the Shia Houthi rebels.
Ironically, they are being aided by air strikes from the very countries - Saudi Arabia and the UAE - who normally oppose them.

Wait a second.  The US is allied with the Saudis in the Yemen conflict.  But, the Saudis are working with the Islamic State because they want to defeat the Iran-backed Shia Houthi.  So, in a way, the US is on the same side of the barbaric Islamic State?

When I reach such conclusions based on what I have read, I wonder if the newspaper reading habit from when I was a kid has not helped me.  I could have been oblivious to the happenings all around, gone ahead with a career in engineering, enjoyed a remarkably affluent life, and not worried about a damn thing.

Nah.  as Bob Dylan said, "it ain't me, babe."

(ps: my oldest post on Yemen dates back to January 2010!)

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive

Cartoon of the day: Obama's wars

Why Somalia, you ask?  Because:

A U.S. drone aircraft fired on two leaders of a militant Somali organization tied to al-Qaeda, apparently wounding them, a senior U.S. military official familiar with the operation said Wednesday. ...
The airstrike makes Somalia at least the sixth country where the United States is using drone aircraft to conduct lethal attacks, joining Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.

Yemen ... I know ye from my posts

With all the news updates about the protests and proto-civil-war in Yemen, here are a few of my own posts about Yemen over the past few months:

About President "Uncle Ali" ... a Yemeni version of Musharraf
How even students in my class got all worked up about the status of women in Yemen--and this was in a class way back in March 2010!
Back in July 2010, the NY Times Magazine had a lengthy piece titled, "Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?" ... to which my response then was, as is now, "The answer is a no-brainer!"

There is something seriously wrong when a bloke like me is able to follow events in a far away country and blog about them, only to realize that our government lags way behind in its policies.  If that is my case, imagine then the frustrations of phenomenally informed and qualified commentators like Juan Cole!

BTW, recall these Jon Stewart classics on Yemen?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Terror 2.0 by Yemen - Sad Libs
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Terror 2.0 by Yemen
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

bin Laden is dead. Two days later ... Now what?

Soon after my first blog-post related to bin Laden's death, a high school classmate from India, who still lives there, commented:

Dont really feel happy or want to congratulate the US for something that they created.

Juan Cole reviews that history my friend refers to, first before he gets to what next:

Usama Bin Laden was a violent product of the Cold War and the Age of Dictators in the Greater Middle East. He passed from the scene at a time when the dictators are falling or trying to avoid falling in the wake of a startling set of largely peaceful mass movements demanding greater democracy and greater social equity. Bin Laden dismissed parliamentary democracy, for which so many Tunisians and Egyptians yearn, as a man-made and fallible system of government, and advocated a return to the medieval Muslim caliphate (a combination of pope and emperor) instead. Only a tiny fringe of Muslims wants such a theocratic dictatorship. The masses who rose up this spring mainly spoke of “nation,” the “people,” “liberty” and “democracy,” all keywords toward which Bin Laden was utterly dismissive. The notorious terrorist turned to techniques of fear-mongering and mass murder to attain his goals in the belief that these methods were the only means by which the Secret Police States of the greater Middle East could be overturned.

Cole's essay is a must read--he even notes how his blog itself began after 9/11.  Cole adds:

if Bush had gone after Bin Laden as single-mindedly as Obama has, he would have gotten him, and could have rolled up al-Qaeda in 2002 or 2003. Instead, Bush’s occupation of a major Arab Muslim country kept a hornet’s nest buzzing against the US, Britain and other allies. Now that Obama has eliminated the monster Usama Bin Laden and vindicated the capability of the United States to visit retribution on its dire enemies, he can do one other great good for this country abroad. He can get us out of Iraq altogether.

Yes. I hope the anti-war Democrats and libertarians will increase the volumes of their demands to end our military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I am not sure whether Gaddafi is seeing this OBL story as his moment to use more force when the world is distracted, or as a sure sign of how he himself will end up if he doesn't step aside soon.  Similarly in Yemen, Zimbabwe, ...

How are Obama and Congress going to use this valuable opportunity?  Cole ends his lengthy piece with this:

The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don’t want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil.
If Obama can get us out of Iraq, and if he can use his good offices to keep the pressure on the Egyptian military to lighten up, and if he can support the likely UN declaration of a Palestinian state in September, the US will be in the most favorable position in the Arab world it has had since 1956. And he would go down in history as one of the great presidents. If he tries to stay in Iraq and he takes a stand against Palestine, he risks provoking further anti-American violence. He can be not just the president who killed Bin Laden, but the president who killed the pretexts for radical violence against the US. He can promote the waving of the American flag in major Arab cities. And that would be a defeat and humiliation for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda more profound than any they could have dreamed.

Quo vadis, Obama?

Hey Libyans, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Tunisians, Egyptians ... we have not forgotten you ...

Funny quote of the day: on Juan "I fear Muslims" Williams

Will Juan Williams now be fearful every time he sees a toner cartridge, even though most toner cartridges are not evil? 

That is Professor Daniel Drezner commenting on the latest al Qaeda failure.  Looks like he has shifted his humor from his fascination for Salma Hayek :)

BTW, recall these Jon Stewart classics on Yemen?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Terror 2.0 by Yemen - Sad Libs
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Terror 2.0 by Yemen
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Your next vacation spot? NOT!

What a wonderfully scenic photo, right?  Doesn't it make you want to pack your suitcase, dust off that passport, and head to the airport right away?

Don't.

This, says the NY Times, is a photo of
The village of Rihab in Wadi Dawan, a valley that is the ancestral home of Bin Laden.

I have blogged quite a few times about Yemen.  (editor: do you know if anyone actually reads them though?!!!)
Anyway, back to Yemen, which is where that bin Laden village is located.  I loved this description of the country in that NY Times piece:

Beneath the familiar Arab iconography, like pictures of the president that hang in every shop, there is a wildness about the place, a feeling that things might come apart at any moment. A narcotic haze descends on Yemen every afternoon, as men stuff their mouths with glossy khat leaves until their cheeks bulge and their eyes glaze over. Police officers sit down and ignore their posts, a green dribble running down their chins. Taxi drivers get lost and drive in circles, babbling into their cellphones. But if not for the opiate of khat, some say, all of Yemen - not just those areas of the south and north already smoldering with discontent - would explode into rebellion.

If not for the fact that this is one messed-up country, this paragraph would qualify as one of the best travel-writings ...
Oh, BTW, the title of the NY Times piece?  "Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?"
The answer is a no-brainer!

Yemen, women, and ... students in my class?

So, a couple of weeks ago, when we were discussing demographics in my intro class, I remarked that countries like Yemen have high fertility rates, and high fertility rates--at levels way higher than a 2 or 3--are typically in societies, like Yemen, where women don't have rights, or have limited rights.

Naturally, I asked them if they knew where Yemen was and, slowly, through a little bit of critical thinking a couple of students figured out that it was in the Middle East, in the Arabian peninsula.

Coincidentally, this came at the same time that Jon Stewart had fun with the underwear bomber and how we come to know about a country only when somebody from there attacks us.  Yes, of course, I played his video in the classroom :)

Now we are in the final instructional week, and a student "S" was excited about something she came across about Yemen, women, and women's rights .... in the People magazine.  She gave me the piece that she had torn out before rushing to class--that is the scanned image on the left.

It was a coincidence that "S" brought this to class on March 8th, which is International Women's Day!  I wonder if People had also featured this story as a part of the Women's Day issue--you think?

Click on the scanned image or here to purchase the book from Amazon.

Nicholas Kristof wrote about this remarkable Yemeni girl and her ordeal:

For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.
He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.
Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.

Speaking of Kristof, click here for a video from him on the "Congo workout plan"--the hard physical work that women do, while men sit around and drink beer.  Kristof then attempts to carry that load and gives up!  As I noted once before, at least, we men--sometimes--are good for nothing and only create hassles for women :(  It is simply awful that such conditions exist in the world today. 
More than anything, this being the second time a student has linked something in the world outside to the discussions we had inside the classroom, I am ready to call this term a success.  Was worth all the trouble of preparing the syllabus, lecturing and leading discussions, waking up students in the class (!), grading and grading and grading .... a good term all in all ...

Meet "Uncle Ali": the Yemen version of Musharraf!

The president of Yemen is Ali Abdullah Saleh .... but is more well known as Uncle Ali:

Yemenis call him "Uncle Ali," and he is the only president in Yemen’s chaotic modern history whom they’ve had time to get to know on a first-name basis. Ibrahim al-Hamdi, who led a military coup that toppled the civilian government of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and became president in 1974, was assassinated three years later. His successor, Ahmad al-Ghashmi, lasted barely eight months before he was blown up by an exploding briefcase. Saleh, a former army tank driver with a primary school education who grew up in the dusty tribal village of Bayt al-Ahmar, was elected by a committee to the presidency of the republic later that same year. He stayed in office until 1990, when the north and the formerly Soviet-allied South Yemen rejoined, and has held on to power as president of reunited Yemen ever since.

 What kind of a ruler is he?  He is the Yemeni Pervez Musharraf:

The best reason Saleh has not to push hard against al Qaeda may be a paradoxical one: if he were to eliminate America’s enemies in Yemen, he wouldn’t be able to fight them anymore. If the group remains a threat, Saleh’s cash-strapped government receives huge sums of money and pledges of political support from the international community, so why would Saleh slaughter his cash cow? "So long as there is al Qaeda, no one will let him fail. It’s simple," said Naif al-Gunas, the speaker of the opposition coalition, the Joint Meetings Party. A war against a dissolute enemy like al Qaeda also allows Saleh to use counterterrorism funds and military resources to battle his internal enemies—the Shiite rebel group in the north, and the separatists in the south—simply by accusing them both of being allied with al Qaeda, which he has done repeatedly. (The alliances are mostly unproven, but, as one parliament member put it, "Shared enemies make unlikely bedfellows.")

At the end of the day, Saleh’s ability to sell his own temporary allegiance to the highest bidder is his main political asset, and for the time being the U.S. seems to have secured the dubious prize. While the concern, following the attempted Christmas bombing, was that Yemen would be the next Afghanistan, and Saleh the next Hamid Karzai, in truth the Yemeni president resembles no one so much as former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Like Saleh, Musharraf took vast amounts of American military aid intended for the fight against terrorism and spent it on his own military priorities, including an arms buildup against India and a secret nuclear weapons program. Like Saleh, he balanced occasional crackdowns on al Qaeda with a broader live-and-let-live gentleman’s agreement, allowing the organization to thrive and metastasize in the tribal areas. And like Saleh, he was seen by Washington as the best available partner we had, regardless of his flaws—which, perhaps, he was, at least for awhile. In Yemen, as in Pakistan, the only thing more daunting than the odds of the alliance producing anything of value is the lack of other options.

And we know how well the pro-Musharraf angle worked for the US and Pakistan, don't we?

Can the CIA kill American citizens?

Apparently the answer to that question is ... "yes, we can"

The global war on terror, which led us to torture, Blackwater, drones, ..... now takes us to wondering about the legality of the CIA targeting an American citizen, not for capturing so that we might try the American in our courts but, instead, for assassination.  During Barack Obama's presidency?

I first came across this in Greenwald's post at Salon. Boy, that Greenwald is an excellent writer, with a clear logic.  Anyway, Greenwald writes:

The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports 

that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people."   ...

But buried in Priest's article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military,authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

I wonder if this is the change for which Obama won the presidency.
Greenwald further writes:

Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests."  They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

The point is not to condone terrorism; but the fact that the President can simply order "off  with your head" as much as a king could do back in the 15th century--even though we are not a monarchy, and the Constitution establishes a due process .... Hmmm....
The LA Times adds:

Decisions to add names to the CIA target list are "all reviewed carefully, not just by policy people but by attorneys," said the second U.S. official. "Principles like necessity, proportionality, and the minimization of collateral damage -- to persons and property -- always apply."
The U.S. military, which has expanded its presence in Yemen, keeps a separate list of individuals to capture or kill. Awlaki is already on the military's list, which is maintained by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command. Awlaki apparently survived a Dec. 24 airstrike conducted jointly by U.S. and Yemeni forces.
The CIA has also deployed more operatives and analysts to Yemen. CIA Deputy Director Stephen Kappes was in the country last month, just weeks before a Nigerian accused of training with Al Qaeda in Yemen boarded a jetliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day.
From beginning to end, the CIA's process for carrying out Predator strikes is remarkably self-contained. Almost every key step takes place within the Langley, Va., campus, from proposing targets to piloting the remotely controlled planes. 

How Americans learn world geography :(

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Terror 2.0 by Yemen - Sad Libs
www.thedailyshow.com
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Yemen: "A new enemy is like a new girlfriend" :-)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know an Enemy - Yemen
www.colbertnation.com
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