Yemen: Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam

April 19 | Yamanyoon

Facing a people fighting to defend their homes and families, as the Viet Cong did in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia will find its self in a Yemeni quagmire.

Still stinging from their last military humiliation six years ago at the hands of the Houthi tribal fighters in Yemen, the Saudi Arabian royal family has embarked on what is highly likely to turn into Saudi’s “Vietnam” with their latest attempt at invading Yemen.

In 2009, the Saudi military’s incompetence was exposed when their major offensive against the Houthi’s along the Saudi/Yemen border was routed, and in the following Houthi counter offensive, a large chunk of Saudi territory was captured by the lightly armed Houthi fighters.

The last time a “Pan-Arab Army” tried to invade and occupy Yemen, in the early 1960’s, Egyptian General turned President Nasser was forced to tuck his tail between his legs and pull his army of over 50,000 out of what he was to later sorrowfully admit had become “Egypt’s Vietnam”.

The problems in Yemen are not about Shiite vs Sunni or Iran vs. Saudi Arabia. It’s not about Obama, whose particularly inept administration has been forced to sit on the sidelines as the Saudi royal family launched this ill-advised misadventure.

The problems in Yemen are all about tribal conflicts going back centuries, and the only way to solve them is by a long tedious process of negotiations. Back in 1990, a peace deal was painstakingly constructed that resulted in the reunification of Yemen. This peace deal which held for over two decades was mediated by what was then the leadership of a rag tag band of independence fighter calling themselves the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, a fact yet to be acknowledged by anyone covering the present conflict.

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