Follow this link to the story posted on the McClatchyDC web site.

This just adds to the story in my previous post Dire Situation In Yemen.

I never thought I could imagine it, but now I can.  Someday, I can see President Obama standing before a press conference saying, “Why do they hate us so?”

The news story finally hit me over the head with the obvious.  The attack on the U.S. Navy ship Cole, was perpetrated in Yemen.  That I knew.  It just didn’t strike me forcefully enough how long has been our record of trouble with Yemen, how connected this was with Gitmo prisoners from Yemen, and the al-Qaida bomb plot hatched in Yemen. Previously, I had carelessly said that al-Qaida has moved their operations from Afghanistan/Pakistan to Yemen. The point is that they have had an operation in Yemen for a long time. They didn’t just move it there.

The discussion in the Coakley/Brown/Kennedy debate is sounding better and better on Coakley’s part.  Let me take up where I left off in a previous post with David Gergen’s question.

Gergen:

Would you then send troops into Yemen where al-Qaida is?

Coakley:

No, That’s exactly the point.  This is not about sending troops everywhere we think al-Qaida may be or where they are training. We have all kinds of resources at our disposal including CIA, our allies who work with us. The focus should be getting the appropriate information on individuals who are trained who represent a threat to us and use the force necesary to go after those individuals.

34:30

Brown:

Let me explain once again what the mission is. The mission is to make sure that the Taliban and al-Qaida do not join forces, move on Pakistan, get nuclear weapons, and export them around the world number 1. And to think that al-Qaida is not everywhere we’re talking about and we should not be going and addressing these very real concerns is naive.

Coakley:

I think it is naive to think that we have the troops to send everywhere and they are the best way to go after people who are terrorists who disappear into the night  who do trainings and who get on planes frankly with bombs in their shoes and other pieces of clothing.

Maybe we need Martha Coakley to go to Washington to explain a better way to fight this war with al-Qaida in a way that does not build an even larger force of terrorists who hate us.