Opinion

Idle America makes for Mideast mess

For a sense of why the Middle East is sliding into a new dark night, look at Yemen — where everybody and his brother is meddling, while America mostly stays away.

Yemen is a long way away from its glorious Queen of Sheba past. It’s now an inhospitable country, dirt poor, waterless and immersed in eternal war.

Yet everybody in the region and beyond is trying to establish presence there.

The Turks are investing huge sums in development. The Saudis this week erected a border barrier against a flow of refugees, but they nurture their own Yemeni allies, too. Other gulf states send in arms and money. The UN is trying to promote democracy. China is interested — you get the picture.

America is no absentee, either. The CIA and State Department send quality reps to Yemen to fight the good battle against terrorists who are trying to establish a beachhead there.

Nevertheless, with President Obama projecting benign neglect toward the region as a whole, no one believes America’s cavalry will ride to the rescue if and when the forces of evil threaten to take Yemen over.

But others might ride in — if not to the rescue.

One reason: geography.

Iran, for one, thinks of Yemen strategically. Tehran’s Shiite regime is quite active in Yemen, a mostly Sunni country, especially in Aden in the south.

Abdel Salim al Beidh was the last president of Southern Yemen before it reunited with the north in 1990. Now exiled in Lebanon, Beidh clings to dreams of returning to power by splitting Yemen in two again.

And Iran is his main backer. Beidh lives in the Dahia section of Beirut, the stronghold of Hezbollah, Tehran’s puppet terror group. His Iranian-backed TV station, Aden Live Now, has a huge following at home, where southern Yemenis who enjoy Tehran’s largesse heed his separatist message.

Iran clearly hopes to dominate a future Beidh-led independent south.

And that could increase Tehran’s influence in the area, bolstering the regime’s hopes of becoming a predominant power in the region and beyond.

Because when you control Aden, you can open or shut at will a key shipping lane. The Red Sea (where tankers transit from one of the globe’s main petroleum regions en route to Europe and Asia) narrows there to form a small strait, Bab el Mandeb (Gate of Grief). Control that strait, and you can stop not only the flow of oil, but also wreak havoc on much of the globe’s commercial shipping.

And if you’re also a nuclear power, just threatening to do so may be enough.

And so Iran invests and meddles in Yemen despite its poverty and crazy politics.

And again, it isn’t alone. Others flock over to that land of no plenty by the droves.

Why? Because they can.

Like Iraq and Afghanistan once, like Libya more recently, and like Syria, Lebanon and other currently disintegrating Mideast entities, Yemen is a mess. Politically it’s even more fractured along tribal and sectarian lines than all of the above. Loyalty to clan runs far deeper than pride of flag.

Until last year, a sometime Western-backed tyrant, President Ali Saleh, managed to keep Yemen together by oppression and political cunning. Now each Yemeni clan is seeking an external sugar daddy. And the world is full of eager candidates.

There are faint signs of hope, such as a UN-backed conference in the capital, Sana, that started last month and is to run months more: 565 leaders of the country’s interest groups — from educated jeans-clad students seeking democracy to fire-breathing Islamists — are trying to forge a new national compact.

Also, save for the occasional flareup (and America’s fully justified terrorist targeting), Yemen right now isn’t bleeding as badly as Syria.

Yet it’s one of those top Mideast’s “problems from hell” to which no one — least of all Washington — has a solution. That’s good enough for everyone around it, and some far away players, to seek a seat at Yemen’s table.

But while the signals America sends to Yemen (and to Syria, Egypt, Tunisia et al) change almost daily with maddening speed, they add up to a fairly clear message: You’re on your own. The superpower is out to lunch.

Until, that is, some big bang happens — say, the Iranians manage to get south Yemen to split off.

Better pray they won’t. Because prayer is what’s replaced strategic thinking in Washington’s Mideast policy-making circles.