¿Incompetencia?

El tiempo nos va poniendo suspicaces. Del blog "The Vineyard of the Saker" tomamos la primera parte del post de hoy, relativo a la evacuación del personal civil de distintas nacionalidades en Yemen. Nos preguntamos: ¿Incompetencia? Acá va la nota:


Título: Yemen as yet another example of US military incompetence

Texto: It has become rather obvious to the world that the latest events in Yemen are yet another illustration of the phenomenal inability of US foreign policy to get anything done.  For a quick primer on this topic, seethis excellent Cross Talk show or this article of mine.  Today I want to comment on something usually less discussed: the mind boggling cowardice of the US military.

The US military has been using Yemen for a long time now as a base for its so called “anti-terrorist” operations.  For this purpose, US special forces and other units were deployed in what was then afriendly environment.  In military terms this, by definition, means that the entry conditions were ideal and that the US military had all the time and resources to establish a solid presence in Yemen.  And yet, as soon as the proverbial bovine excreta hit the fan, all these “tough” super-dooper, secret and oh so “special” forces ran for their lives.  The US diplomats at the local Embassy also ran for their lives.  Which would have been fine, had they not left 4000 US citizens in the country under the pretext (official – from the Pentagon!) that it would be “too dangerous” to evacuate them!   In a bizarre twist, three human rights organizations in the USA are now suing (what else?) the Obama Administration and the Pentagon over such a cowardly decision.

Think of it: the US Special Forces ran first and the civilians were simply abandoned!  Is this how a self-respective empire behaves?

Compare that to the Chinese who without asking anybody’s permission send their own (real) special forces in and evacuated their citizens without suffering a single casualty.  Then came the Russians who did the same and who even evacuated a large group of foreign nationals from 19 different countries in the process (including 18 US nationals).
Even the usually spineless and incompetent Europeans have evacuated their nationals in numerous occasions, especially from conflict zones in Africa, sometimes in very dangerous conditions (as in Rwanda for example).

Lest that somebody think that Russia had an easy time because the locals were pro-Russian I want to remind everybody here that the insurgents overran the local Russian embassy and used it as a command post.  As for the local al-Qaeda franchise, it is no less anti-Russian than it is anti-American.

Finally, Russian and Chinese forces had to act alone without any hope of support from their national militaries.  The US forces could have counted on the full power of CENTCOM including air support from fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, USN vessels, electronic warfare and intelligence, etc.  In  Yemen the US truly “had it all”.  And yet they ran abandoning 4’000 of their own nationals because evacuating them would have been “too dangerous”.  And this is the single biggest difference between the (regular) Russian and Chinese soliders and the US forces (including the “special” ones!):  Both the Russian and the Chinese commanders know that they can give the following order to their troops and that they will be obeyed: “enter the conflict area, evacuate all our nationals at any cost, including your own lives, even if all of you have to die in the process”.