It’s uneconomic to fight primitive people with modern weapons. Our million-dollar missiles blow up huts in the sand. At some point, some of their $10,000 missiles are going to get through and destroy a billion-dollar warship.
It’s almost always a mistake for foreigners to get involved in another country’s civil war, especially when it has religious overtones. It doesn’t matter which side you back; the people that you’re backing are not your friends, and the people on the other side will really hate you. It’s a no-win situation for the US. None of our business, with no upside. Except for US Government operatives who get to play bigshot.
by Doug Casey
International Man: Yemen has sometimes been called “the Afghanistan of the Middle East” because it is an impoverished tribal society that is well-armed, situated on mountainous terrain, and generally inhospitable to foreign invaders and a central government.
What are your impressions of this country?
Doug Casey: Regrettably, I haven’t been to Yemen and have no plans on going—partly because I’ve seen enough similar flyblown Islamic hellholes. But it’s well known that the country is extremely primitive, poor, tribal, and very religious.
Yemenis take their Mohammedanism quite seriously. No offense to believers, but the more primitive, poorer, and more tribal a place is, the greater the tendency for their lives to revolve around religion. It binds them together and gives their lives meaning. It is not a good place for foreigners of a different race, religion, or culture to invade. This begs the question, why would anybody want to invade it? There’s nothing there of any real value. Maybe there are some undeveloped resources, but the natural resource business is high risk/high cost under even the best circumstances.
You certainly don’t want to invest in a place with unfriendly natives. So, it’s entirely insane for outsiders to care about Yemen.
It has been said that war is nature’s way of teaching Americans geography. That’s true. Not one American in a thousand even knew the place existed until a few weeks ago; now, they all have opinions on what “we” should do, even if they still can’t find it on a map. But fear not. Even as we speak, plenty of reasons why we should care about Yemen are being fabricated in DC.
International Man: Yemen has long been a difficult place for foreign invaders.
Most recently, the Houthis, an Iran-backed group that controls most of Yemen, frustrated the military coalition of Saudi Arabia and its allies.
Though most people are unaware of this war or its details, it is remarkable that the Saudis, who are among the wealthiest in the Middle East and backed by the military and political support of the US, could not defeat the Middle East’s most impoverished people in Yemen.
What is your take on the Houthi–Saudi Arabian conflict and its implications?
Doug Casey: I doubt if one American out of 10,000, or even 100,000, had even heard the word Houthi before last year, but now it’s everywhere in the news. And for some reason, they’ve become our problem.
There used to be two Yemens—North Yemen and South Yemen—that were quite different politically and sociologically. They fought each other, then united in 1990. Now, the Houthis, who are Shia (hence the relations with Iran), are fighting a civil war with other locals. But it doesn’t seem to me Yemen is or has ever been a real nation-state. It’s impoverished, with no industry to speak of or the prospect of getting any. The income it has is from some oil production, and it all goes to corruption and paying the army. It has a large foreign trade deficit and debt. And the population is very young and exploding in numbers. It is, by any and every measure, one of the very most dysfunctional and essentially worthless places in the world.
It’s almost always a mistake for foreigners to get involved in another country’s civil war, especially when it has religious overtones. It doesn’t matter which side you back; the people that you’re backing are not your friends, and the people on the other side will really hate you. It’s a no-win situation for the US. None of our business, with no upside. Except for US Government operatives who get to play bigshot.
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