RealLifeLore has been doing a decent job covering it [1].
The broad summary is you have the Saudi-backed unity government, the Iranian-backed Houthis, who claim all of Yemen but practically want North Yemen, and the UAE-backed STC, who also claim all of Yemen but practically want South Yemen. Emiratis bring the Israelis to the party. The Iranians bring the Russians. The Saudis bring various international elements (I know less about them than the Houthis and STC).
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgD7zmJN3_A&pp=0gcJCVACo7VqN5t...
Stopped caring about anything he had to say after that, and I also then realized that there was a an entire genre of “person with no actual expertise reads Wikipedia articles and explains them with good lighting and high production quality.”
Comments here should be read as opinions, not as facts. I see it every time there is a subject I know deeply about, 90%+ of the comments are either factually incorrect or just bad opinions.
For what it's worth I watch his videos and he seems to touch on incredibly valuable topics I would never hear about otherwise, like [1].
> The quick cuts and dazzling montages, as well as the dramatic shots of Harris absorbed by a document he’s unearthed, highlighting it suspensefully in tight close-ups, all lend credence to the often-excellent work he does. But it also makes it easy to mask his mistakes. And for someone who takes journalism to heart, his mistakes are big, leading to oversimplification and an occasional lapse in skepticism.
[...]
> In a video that garnered 8.5 million views and which Harris thumbnailed with the words “WE HAVE PROOF,” Harris explores the recent craze over UFO sightings—sorry, UAP sightings, meaning unexplained anomalous phenomena. In passing, he mentions Mick West, who has done excellent work debunking a lot of blurry footage of what is alleged to be high-tech spy drones or aliens.
> But the bulk of the video is spent leering at report after report—a total of 144 are being investigated by the U.S. government right now!—while original music amps up the mystery. The emphasis on evidence over context is key to Harris’ style: flood the space with visuals that keep your attention and elicit questions and only occasionally pull back to explain.
i hope so, they have been one of the biggest sources of discord in the Middle East, funding civil wars in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, funding a coup in Egypt.
I wouldn't be surprised if the UAE starts scheming to foment within Saudi Arabia next. And unfortunately, the only counter to that would be for Saudi Arabia to become further entrenched in its Salafi culture.
i think next moves of us-israeli-uae axis will be against Turkey and Qatar. we are already seeing this rhetoric in democratic party and in israel.
Kind of depressing thought actually.
I gotchu: https://youtu.be/-evIyrrjTTY ("This Land is Mine", 3 min)
Thank goodness our predecessors didn't think this way. They thought that through reason, hard word, and humanism they could overcome these things, and they did. No doubt there were plenty of naysayers.
What will we do with our turn?
I think your assessment of whatever the "specific condition" is, is wrong.
1) source, 1950: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
This part of the planet has been almost intractable since the age of Hammurabi - it is quite fractured without any current overarching unity or framework. There isn't a dominant religion (similar to Europe) or shared values. I could say almost meaningless things like "thought that through reason, hard word, and humanism they could overcome these things" which would make little of the hard truths of the long histories of the varied peoples and fractions of the area.
It would almost seem naive to say things like because we've solved some tough problems in the last century we can solve all problems.
I think you gloss over much and certainly give yourself a mightier than thou feeling with your "Thank goodness our predecessors didn't think this way".
I too hope for peaceful resolution and stability but fall back to the historic record of success especially in a place that is constantly, recently and historically decimated by war among fiefdoms.
The reason is fractured is because of the inherent tribalism within the cultures of the region. Strip away the tribalism (Oman, Qatar, UAE to an extent), concentrate the people near a few cities (Egypt), or provide them a unifying overarching culture (Iran, Turkey), and you get some success. In fact, the early Islamic empires were heavily mired in infighting even though they were "unified" under the Caliphate, in spite of the Prophet's calls for the "Ummah" (One Islamic Nation). I would even argue that Islam's biggest contribution to the region was in providing a specific administrative framework with which to shed the tribal infighting and unite culturally similar but disparate peoples together. It's also why Israel succeeded as a nation with its European flavor of nation-state identity.
An Israeli intelligence officer perhaps correctly attributed it to the past culture of water scarcity and needing to protect your water sources. That is, in the desert, there are only so many sources of water, and if someone steals it away from you, you simply die. So that created a culture of inherent suspicion of outsiders and people outside the clan, even though they all share the same customs and culture.
This lines with my core opinion that it is rarely at peace except when under dominance of one flag (e.g. Achaemenid and Cyrus the Great) before Alexander the great defeated Darius III.
Yes, many different sects of Islam are in the region.
In fact it was wars with a strong religious element between Protestant and catholic factions that tore Europe apart for centuries afterwards
[0]: https://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/07/17/the_middle...
The Gulf countries now are in a far better condition than they were under the Ottomans (and than modern Turkey). "Stability" is what led the Ottoman Empire to devolve into a backwards, economically undeveloped society that was incapable of competing with the west.
"I and my brother against my cousin, and I and my cousin against the stranger."
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-legal-adviser/2...
It's funnier than that. The justification is "self-defense of its [the USA's] Israeli ally".
I guess Al-Qaeda and Isis are also there.