NEXT STOP: YEMEN

WASHINGTON -- When We visited Yemen in the mid-1980s, We flew from Cairo to the capital of San'a on Yemeni Airlines, and it was not long before We realized what a strange "journey" We was indeed on.Almost all of the passengers were Yemeni men in their immaculate white robes, and almost every one carried a huge radio on his lap, purchased in Egypt with dreams of modernity. For some reason, everyone liked peanuts, which were generously served, but once they ate the nuts, they threw the shells up in the air in glee. The entire trip consisted of avoiding the rain of peanut shells.Finally, as we swerved and switched and very nearly smashed into the San'a airport, We saw half a dozen wrecks of old Yemeni Air planes ditched on both sides of the runway. "Hmmm," We thought. "We must be the first ones to make it in a while."The capital was a beautiful place in those relatively happy days. In fact, San'a is historically famous for its ancient architecture of fine brickwork with brilliant white and blue lines around the windows and doors. Just outside the city, We saw valleys so exquisitely beautiful We thought myself in a Garden of Eden.But all that is over now. We know that the most recent would-be plane bomber, theigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had trained in Yemen and that the U.S. has now named the small country at the bottom of Saudi Arabia as our next "target," most assuredly of American drone bombings. But what does that mean Does such dangerous business really make sense Yemen is far more miserably poor than when We visited. It is a microcosm of the environmental disaster President Obama sees coming: zooming overpopulation (its 23 million people, half under 30 and half illiterate, with 35 percent unemployed, will double in only 20 years) combined with such severe water shortages that it may be the first country to run out of water. It is also a "country" split into bits by rampant, violent tribalism, which has displaced 175,000 people.ot surprisingly, al-Qaida found this new "failed state," which is also the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, to be a natural new homeland for itself. But let's go deeper than that. The American military says that there are no more than 200 al-Qaida members in Yemen, but that is misleading. In fact, at least 2,000 Arab al-Qaida members who fought in Iraq escaped to Yemen and are there preparing to strike again. The country already hosts 200,000 refugees from Somalia, which is torn asunder by Islamic and clan wars. Under both presidents Bush and Obama, the U.S. has inexplicably released small numbers of Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo to their homeland, where they would supposedly be detained, despite the fact that the Yemenis who struck at the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 easily escaped from prison there under various pretenses. Most have, not surprisingly, returned to terror groups.Now, in the wake of theigerian bomber's accidental apprehension, American officials are talking blithely about a "partnership" with the Yemeni government; immediately, we upped U.S. aid from $67 million to double that next year, and we say we will fund the Yemeni government in developing a coast guard and counterterrorism units. We have already had unnumbered "secret" drone strikes in Yemen. We hear first that these strikes killed top leaders of al-Qaida -- then we hear that they "only" killed civilians.ow there will be more of them. Are they done in conjunction with the Yemeni governmentobody "knows." In fact, the only thing we really do KNOW is that random air strikes like this make everyone on the ground hate you.So what are we doing Due to one foolish and impressionableigerian student who probably wouldn't recognize Chicago on a map of the U.S., we are in the process of moving from two unfinished wars supposedly against al-Qaida, to a third one, in a country most Americans would not recognize on a map. Since we