By Vestnik Kavkaza
The US and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf intend to hold a new summit in 2016. This was stated yesterday as a result of a meeting between six Arab states and President Barack Obama in Washington. According to the President, it was decided to “hold a similar meeting next year.” According to ITAR-TASS, President Obama confirmed that an “open and broad” discussion of topical Middle East problems, including conflicts in Syria and Yemen, took place in Camp David.
Meanwhile, according to the Deputy Director of the Institute of Projection and Political Settlement, Alexander Kuznetsov, “the bombings lasted over a month but they have not solved the political crisis in Yemen. At the same time, they have worsened the humanitarian situation in one of the poorest Arab countries. The infrastructure and the economy are seriously damaged, more than three thousand people have died. According to international practice, based at least on the last twenty years, no one conflict can be solved in such a crudely forceful way.”
Kuznetsov thinks that there are very serious reasons behind the Yemeni conflict: “It is not an inter-religious conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. It is a struggle for power, when the faction of the Houthis, political allies, and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh decided to seize power in Yemen by force. It is very dangerous, because Yemen is a very difficult country, there are a lot of tribes, clans, gangs. And each of them has its own interests. Undoubtedly, imposing your views on one group and interests on another cannot lead to good results. The very beginning of the armed operation, which took place at the initiative of Saudi Arabia, ignores a very important point.”
Kuznetsov says that we are experiencing a transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world: “The unipolar world is characterized by the hegemony of the United States of America. The US imposed its views on other countries and their allies, and more or less controlled the situation. Saudi Arabia is one of those allies. We told them what they were allowed to do. This time Saudi Arabia acted alone, but has considered the consequences. External factors also cannot be ignored. The Yemeni crisis is caused mainly by internal factors, but the policy of a number of countries and a number of regional powers, including the United States, is at least ambiguous… The USA has significantly reduced its presence in the Middle East in the last twenty years. In fact, we have left the Middle East. The US has been there, including in Yemen. They armed both Saleh’s army, and the Republican Army. They supplied a significant number of weapons, training camps, in order to fight the terrorists in Yemen and Al-Qaeda. But we know that there is an insignificant number of terrorists in Yemen. No one knows whether these people fought against al-Qaeda. But the fact is that they are destroying their own compatriots, killing them with American weapons and with militants who were trained by American instructors.”
The expert believes that there are attempts to draw Iran into the conflict and turn it into a large-scale conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia: “Now the US is changing its tactics in the Middle East. They have decided to stop frontal pressure on Iran and watch a fight between two regional countries: Iran and Saudi Arabia. They want to add Yemen to the existing bridgehead of the confrontation with Iran and Syria.”
