Doomed: Saudi Arabia Will Fail in Yemen
Sitting comfortably in his luxury hotel of exile, President Hadi continues to condone Saudi bombings even as a staggering number of his countrymen have become internal refugees and are suffering a humanitarian crisis of serious proportions. Rather than garner additional public support for President Hadi, the Saudi bombing campaign has only increased the skepticism of his remote government and has instead played into the hands of Houthi propagandists. All the while, it does not seem that the military capabilities of the Houthi tribesmen or the segments of the Yemeni army still loyal to Saleh have been greatly diminished.
Not only have the Saudi’s not been able to slow the Houthi advance, but on June 6, Scud missiles launched by Houthi forces hit King Khalid Air Base, Saudi Arabia’s largest air base and the operations center for the current bombing campaign. Although Saudi officials tried to downplay the attack, which was shrouded in secrecy, it soon became known that Saudi Air Force Commander Lieutenant General Muhammad bin Ahmed Al-Shaalan was killed during the attack. This was particularly shocking to the Saudis as the Shaalan family is nationally prominent and connected through marriage and political alliance to the ruling Saud family.
The attack exposed the disturbing unreadiness of Saudi air defense capabilities and the limits of their air force’s ability to affect military and political outcomes in Yemen. Since the beginnings of the bombing campaign in March 2015, Saudi-coalition planes have faced little anti-aircraft fire, hardly a test of the pilots resolve or training. Even though the Houthis lack armed surface-to-air resistance, the recent Scud missile attack reinforced the fact that the Saudi aerial campaign has failed to eliminate the Houthi coalition’s large-scale military capability.
What emerged from the Scud missile debacle was that an American team is operating a Patriot missile defense system in the vicinity of the King Khalid Air Base, which is also the command center for the U.S. drone campaign in the region. It has been reported that several of the fired Scud missiles were intercepted by U.S. Patriot missiles, the first instance where American forces and Houthis exchanged fire, albeit indirectly. Additionally, the U.S. Air Force has been providing Saudi-coalition planes with satellite imagery and intelligence related to Houthi targets. The emergence of these details has reinforced a propaganda line reiterated on the Houthi cable channel al-Masirah that refers to the Saudi coalition as the “Saudi-American coalition.”
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/doomed-saudi-arabia-will-fail-yemen-13176
= new reply since forum marked as read
running "unopposed"
Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi (‘Abd Rabbuh Manṣūr Hādī; Arabic: عبد ربه منصور هادي [ʕæbd ˈrɑbːʊh mɑnˈsˤuːr ˈhæːdiː]; born 1 September 1945) is a Yemeni general and politician. He has been the President of Yemen since 27 February 2012, and was Vice President from 1994 to 2012.[1]
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Hadi was born in 1945 in Thukain, Abyan, a southern Yemeni governorate.[7] He graduated from a military academy in the Federation of South Arabia in 1964.[8] In 1966 he graduated after receiving a military scholarship to study in Britain, where he learned to speak English fluently.[7]
In 1970, he received another military scholarship to study tanks in Egypt for six years. Hadi spent the following four years in the Soviet Union studying military commanding. He occupied several military posts in the army of South Yemen until 1986, when he fled to North Yemen with Ali Nasser Mohammed, president of South Yemen, after Ali Nasser's faction of the ruling Yemeni Socialist Party lost the 1986 civil war.[9]
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Hadi was the sole candidate in the presidential election that was held on 21 February 2012. His candidacy was backed by the ruling party as well as the parliamentary opposition. The Electoral Commission reported that 65 percent of registered voters in Yemen voted during the election. Hadi won with 99.80% of the vote and took the oath of office in Yemen's parliament on 25 February 2012.[11] He was formally inaugurated as the president of Yemen on 27 February 2012, when Saleh resigned from the presidency and formally ceded power to Hadi.[12]...
Full Wiki entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_Rabbuh_Mansur_Hadi
Yemen is a dictatorship and always has been. And America supports this crap....
