That Was Then, This Is Now: Yemen Edition

Via Instapundit:

Six months ago, Yemen was - supposedly - a rare foreign policy success.



Today...

The last US special forces have been withdrawn from Yemen without exciting much notice from the US press.  Max Boot tweets: “All US SOF evacuating Yemen. Huge win for AQAP, huge defeat for US. How many foreign policy disasters can we handle?” Reuters reports, “the United States has evacuated its remaining personnel, including about 100 special operations forces, from Yemen because of the deteriorating security situation there, U.S. officials said on Saturday.”  This means that the last vestiges of what the Obama administration only recently touted as their model counter-insurgency operation are gone.  The collapse has flown largely under the media radar. 

Last week Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported that $500 million dollars in American supplied weapons are now in the hands of “Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda”.  The Islamist blitzkrieg is living off huge quantities of captured US materiel.

In other words, the same thing happened in Yemen that happened in Libya and Syria.  Read the rest, if you dare.  It gets worse.

Along these lines, it appears that the world is becoming more violent.

According to an analysis of data from the world’s 20 most lethal wars last year, at least 163,000 people died in conflict. That compares to just under 127,000 in the 20 worst wars the previous year, a rise of 28.7 percent. 

That’s a pretty disturbing spike by anyone’s terms. And if you look at the first few months of 2015, the violence doesn’t seem to be waning. 

What’s even more worrying is that this seems to be part of an ongoing trend that now goes back eight years. According to the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), global violence — as defined by a range of measures from conflict deaths, to displaced persons, to homicide rates — has been rising since 2007.

It's a good thing a Nobel Peace Prize recipieant has been leading the free world since 2009, otherwise, who knows what could've happened?