President Ali Abdullah Saleh got what he wanted. Indeed, after months of bickering and maneuvers - which did not exceed the level of street hoaxer scams - he was able to push Yemen toward civil war. From the empty reform suggestions to the attempts to outsmart the Gulf initiative, and from the adoption of the demands of the protesters on the squares to the opening of fire on them and the dispatch of the thugs to discipline them in accordance with Saleh's morals, the Yemeni crisis proceeded from one complication to another on the beat of the president's refusal to recognize the expiry of his term as a leader over Yemen. The war option did not come as a surprise, considering that Saleh and his opponents both warned against it since the first day of the demonstrations that erupted in February and called for the changing of the regime and the departure of the president. Those who made these warnings relied on Yemen's long history of civil, tribal and sectarian wars, as well as on the wounds that have not yet healed and that were caused by the fighting with the Houthis. The history of these wars is based on a frail tribal, sectarian and regional structure, a strategic position which controls some of the most important passageways in the world, a demographic boom, and two concomitant problems, i.e. the environmental and economic crises. In the meantime, it was not difficult for Saleh to hijack the country and take it as a hostage whose life he linked to his stay in power. Indeed, the international and Arab climates encouraged him to proceed in this direction, while the international powers seemed unable to do much for the country which is almost free of oil but full of difficulties and problems. Moreover, the precedent established by Muammar Gaddafi in Libya allowed Saleh to resort to blunt violence to maintain power. It is the same experience repeated today by more than one Arab tyrant, through the deployment of tanks in the face of unarmed people amid babbling and useless talk about the “silent majority” which was showcased on the squares to glorify the rulers and call on him to continue adopting his corrupt methods to the point of rottenness and decay. As for the threat pointing to the actions of Al-Qaeda organization against the entire world if Ali Abdullah Saleh is toppled, it is the twin pretext of the talk about the flow of millions of refugees from Libya to Europe if Gaddafi is toppled, and the talk about the danger threatening Israel's stability in case the “Salafi group” were to come to power in Syria if Al-Assad is overthrown. The shocking similarity between the pretexts is only matched by the blocked horizon which Saleh, Gaddafi and Al-Assad want for their youth (unlike Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's belief in Syria's openness to “great” reforms). What are the promises any of those three can make following the death of thousands of Yemenis, Libyans and Syrians with the bullets of the “security” forces and the flow of thousands of refugees to Tunisia and Lebanon? The only promise which Saleh (and his likes) can respect is to stay in power and sustain his history, which features corruption, the deepening of popular divisions, differentiation between the tribes and the regions and leading Yemen toward pits that are deeper than poverty, backwardness and all sorts of desertification. It is important at this level not to be led toward the illusion of the innocence of people such as Sadek al-Ahmar among others, as the peaceful demonstrations of the Yemeni youth who are seeking democratic change and the promotion of political life in the country, were targeted by the project of an authority whose facets are represented by Saleh and Al-Ahmar. In this context, the tribal reaction conveyed by the Hashed tribe cannot be dissociated from an action of the same type adopted by Saleh, while the second does not acquit the first or eliminate its threat.
