Rubble in the beautiful Old City. Image from timesofisrael.

In the civil war that rocked Yemen in the 1960s, regional and international powers choose sides, and used a local conflagration as a breeding ground for proxy battles, most notably between royalism, as led by Saudi Arabia, and republicanism, led by Egypt and Nasser. Needless to say, there were Cold War mechanisms as well, as there were in every conflict around then. The war in Yemen was considered not just a war for Yemen, but one where the right system could prevail. Nasser was beaten and battered. He lost 15,000 men in that conflict, about as many as in the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel combined, and indeed, the drain of Yemen contributed mightily to the humiliating loss in the Six Day War.

That’s not to say Egypt was the big loser. The chaos and savagery of regional hatred made the war in Yemen bitter and more cruel than it had to be, with Egyptian forces using chemical weapons to try to gain back ground they had lost.  Looking at today’s overlapping civil wars in Yemen, where the Saudis, for both historical and immediate reasons, have pummeled the Yemeni people with a hellish barrage, not much has changed.

Saudi outrages against human rights, particularly the rights of children, in their indiscriminate campaign, led to the UN putting the Arab-led coalition on a child right’s blacklist. This was a big deal, a huge diplomatic strike against any moral ground the Saudis might have had. Needless to say, this provoked outrage, and this week the blacklist was lifted.

A damning investigation by Colum Lynch in Foreign Policy claimed that the Saudis threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in UN funding unless they were removed from the list, a blatant act of bribery (though, from the Saudi point of view, it was sheer interest). Needless to say, the Sauds deny this report, saying “We did not use threats or intimidation and we did not talk about funding,” and that the report was changed after the UN had a joint review with the Alliance.

Interestingly, the UN all but admits that this is what happened. Ban Ki Moon said yesterday that he stood by the report, and that this was the most difficult decision he’s ever had to make, but that he “had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would de-fund many UN programmes.”

This, in a way, is correct, and show the tragedy of power. There isn’t much that the UN can do without money, which gives rich nations like Saudi Arabia, and powerful ones like the US and Russia, all the control. These are games played in air-conditioned rooms over millions of lives, over numbers on a spreadsheet. The UN backing down, almost understandably, demonstrates that blackmail works, and that the way the system is set up blackmail can always work, if you have the money to make it happen. Ban, and anyone else who is thinking globally, and not just about their own little corner, have to do a dreadful balancing act.

It’s the tragedy of Yemeni history writ large, but also strangely small. Decisions that impact it aren’t made in Yemen, and they are barely made with Yemen in mind. The battles that take place on its soil almost ignore local conditions, or rather only see local concerns through the prism of power. Saudi Arabia understands Yemen better than any other country in the world, and understands how to work with and manipulate the tribal system, but even they got sucked into the battle partly because of the idea that Iran was supporting the Houthis (who are, lineage-wise, the same people the Saudis supported in the 60s). And now Saudi Arabia, who has always wanted a Yemen that is divided and weak but still stable enough not to be chaotic, is helping to make sure that there is a vast and heavily-populated failed state on its southern border. That the Saudis, like the Egyptians, will suffer for their heavy-handedness is cold comfort to the people ground down, like so many mountains in the implacable progress of erosion, by powerful forces who see their lives worth pennies on the dollar.

Rubble in the beautiful Old City. Image from timesofisrael.

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the war in Syria as being part of the long arc of Ottoman dissolution, impacted as it was by colonialism, Arab nationalism, the rise of extremism, and other factors. This wasn’t meant to be teleological, or to say that anything was inevitable. Decisions made after the modern fall of ancient empire could have diverted the course of history in any number of ways. But I think it is true that certain conditions are set by the past, whether these are the scars of cultural memory, institutional norms, geographical displacement, environmental relocations, and any number of factors that impact how we live. People act under these conditions, and can change them incrementally, but even “great men” are bound by time and place.

That’s the problem with looking at current events (or history) entirely as decisions made by elites in elegant offices. Those do matter, of course. But we have a tendency to look at those without understanding how those decisions are the outcome of the constraints and the possibilites presented.

That brings us to Yemen, where this is- or should have been- more clear than in most places. Yemen, especially in the north, was shaped by tribal customs developed over centuries. This isn’t a matter of “they were living in the past”; it’s just that government was set by cultural norms. (It’s the same thing in America; our devotion to the cult of states, as if these arbitrary riverine borders mean something, is what allows the weird chaos of the nomination process to seem somewhat normal).  These norms meant wheedling and dealing with tribal leaders and other small groups. It was a very personal and transactional style of politics, based on intricate negotiations. Even a 30-yr autocrat like Ali Abdullah Salih spent most of his time personally placating and playing tribal leaders, depending on what the situation called for.

That’s why this recent report by Peter Salisbury for Chatam House is at once so correct, and so infuriating. (Link is the pdf, here’s the summary.) Salisbury outlines how the post-Salih transition process from 2012-2014 focused entirely on elites, the Hadis and the Houthis, especially in the context of the Middle East “cold war” between the Saudis and the Iranians. These are important factors of course, but in doing so, the rifts on the ground were ignored. What was really ignored were the conditions in which Yemeni politics were played. And because that was ignored, Salisbury argues, the end of the “big war” is just the stage for many little wars, or in his evocative phrase “a chaos state.” Local grievances, the maintenance of which was always the key to Yemeni politics, were ignored, and thus can fire up again.

Salisbury argues that we need to focus on ground-up approaches to nation building, and he is absolutely correct. It makes no sense to focus on what will appease the Sauds and the Iranians equally, and divide the country once again among the elites. What makes sense on the ground is the only way to establish even a rough kind of peace, and to try to staunch a bitter humanitarian disaster. It’s a lesson we fail to learn time and time again. Otherwise, it’s just epauletted men shaking hands on an empty stage while the theater burns down around them.