It's Sunday afternoon and I should probably be watching football, but this Cowboys-Redskins game was so dreadfully boring that I found myself reading about Yemen instead.
I imagine the Obama administration is starting to think about a "Yemen policy" (if it hasn't already). The country is making headlines because of the insurgency in the north and an ongoing problem with al-Qaeda, which reportedly kidnapped a Japanese engineer last week (though the Yemeni government denies this report). And Yemen is also starting to get some attention on the D.C. think-tank circuit -- most recently from the Center for a New American Security, which published a paper on Yemen last week.
Against that backdrop, it's worth asking a fundamental question: Just how much can the U.S. hope to influence events in Yemen? The answer, I think, is "not much at all."





