YEMEN: TOUGH LOVE FOR AL QAEDA

It is reported that Yemen, now thought to be the main base for Al Qaeda operations on the Arabian Peninsula, has just released 170 men they had arrested for being Al Queda terrorist operatives. But to ensure that they wouldn't do it again, Yemen had all these men sign an affidavit saying they were through with terrorism. That ought to do the trick. Why didn't we think of that? Sure would have saved us a whole lot of time and effort, no?

We've spent countless money and man-hours detaining terror suspects, squandered our good reputation torturing some of them and creating secret prisons when we could have solved the whole terrorism deal with a bunch of signed oaths. How embarrassing is that? The local tribal leaders in Yemen even guaranteed the good behavior of those released. That's reassuring. If you can't trust local Yemeni tribal leaders, well, what is this world coming to?

It's about time we let somebody who understands these people handle the terrorists. The day will never come when Americans understand the mind of a suicide bomber, or the mindset of blaming the fact that you live in a barren wasteland on people who don't happen to live in barren wastelands. We just don't get them, and never will. Killing them just seems to make them happy, which sort of makes it a pretty pointless exercise. Is there a Middle Easterner worth his salt who doesn't have a centuries-old vendetta against somebody, even if it's only another slightly different kind of Middle Easterner?

The pursuit of happiness is a foreign concept to many of these people, unless your idea of happiness is murdering your enemies in their beds along with their entire families. It's just hard for us to picture a set of circumstances where these jihadists could get together for a barbecue and some laughs, maybe throw some horseshoes and sing songs around a fire. That is, a fire that is not consuming somebody's house and everyone in it. There just doesn't seem to be an overabundance of Hallmark Moments in their world.

Which is another pressing reason to let the Yemenis and their tribal leaders handle these people. Perhaps there is more to the sworn oath than meets the eye. After all, these guys aren't happy unless they're miserable, so provisions would have to be made to provide them with an all-consuming hatred of something or their lives would be meaningless. No doubt the Yemenis know exactly how to provide them with some other unbearable stain on their honor to be carefully nurtured and taught to their children as their sacred duty to avenge. Fine, as long as it doesn't involve killing us. But we Americans would have no idea of how to provide them with that sort of thing. We'd probably want to rehabilitate them, educate them and give them the opportunity to work at rewarding jobs and raise their families in peace.

Wrong wrong, wrong! Where's the bitterness in that? Where's the soul-searing insult? You just can't pass down any decent amount of hatred to your succeeding generations with a legacy of peace and prosperity! Yemenis have had centuries of experience dealing with maladjusted wretches. We, on the other hand, think everyone is sort of like us, wanting the same things out of life and desiring to get along with our neighbors. Turns out that's not the case at all for a lot of people in this world, that type of person that desperately needs someone to condemn as a subhuman dog. They require somebody else to blame for the squalor and poverty of their surroundings and their own personal ignorance and backwardness.

Getting off their asses and doing something for themselves, their families and their country doesn't seem to occur to the type of person drawn to terrorism. That would take an admission that hatred isn't the answer to every problem, and that just doesn't sound right to such people. Besides, working to improve and build your own society takes work, thought and open-mindedness, maybe even questioning the way things have been for untold centuries, with wealthy decadent rulers lording it over the poverty-stricken uneducated masses. That doesn't seem like a realistic expectation either. We Americans have no clue how to reach such people.

Fighting these guys with armies seems to only justify and perpetuate their world view, that everyone's against them. When somebody really is shooting you down and blowing up your stuff, that sort of confirms it. And when you take such a person prisoner, whole new worlds of hatred, malice and vengeance open up to him, gifts more valuable than gold to these people. When you release such a prisoner, what you've got is a real live rootin'-tootin' lifetime terrorist. Unless of course you hand them over to the Yemeni authorities, who make them sign a paper promising they won't do it again. Which is probably just as effective as anything we've been able to come up with so far. Outside of killing them all, that is, a full time job if ever there was one since for every one you kill another two pop up. Hopefully, we've got better things to do than soil our hands and our souls with such people and such activities. If we don't stop, then what separates us from them? Nothing is what.

There's nothing worse we can do to them than to leave them alone to be the miserable bastards they will be for the rest of their lives. The Middle East has been a train wreck of a region for centuries. Leave them to their mutual misery and tell them we'll be here when they come to their senses and want to play nice again, maybe when they stop enslaving and "honor-killing" their women and chopping people's heads and hands off and killing and dying for the pure joy of it. There's so little in it for us and it's just not worth it. We can walk away and be just another disgruntled customer for their oil, not caring one way or the next about their fate since they don't seem to either. It's sad, but some things in life are just sad and beyond our capacity to make it otherwise.