The GCC Plan for Yemen: Still Crazy after All These Months
On April 25, the Gulf Cooperation Council proposed a settlement to resolve the political crisis in Yemen. The GCC initiative will not solve the Yemen crisis, only complicate and prolong it. The dogged American persistence in supporting it adds dangerous legitimacy to the agreement and the failing Saleh regime.
Obama’s Cautious Step Forward on Middle Eastern Democracy
To seize the opportunity of this historic moment of political change and support democratization in the Arab world, Obama needs to fill in the details of how the USA and the international community will offer concrete, sizeable and sustained help towards securing political reforms throughout the region in the coming months and years.
Yemen and the ‘Arab Spring’: Moving Beyond the Tribal Order?
The ‘Arab Spring’ is a pivotal moment in the political and social development of the wider Middle East. Some have likened it to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, others to the impact of the 1979 Iranian revolution. Nowhere encapsulates the tensions and contradictory forces now shaping the Arab Spring than Yemen, a state that has become synonymous with the epithets ‘failed’ or ‘failing’.
