Education as a strategic deterrent in a backward society (Yemen as a case) (Part 1) [Archives:2006/994/Reportage]

By: Mohammed Al-Maitami
The American-British invasion of Iraq and the quick collapse of the Iraqi regime have revealed the failure of the Arab state to defend and protect its people and even defend its existence and assert its usefulness. It is clear today that there is no single country in the Arab and Muslim world whose national security is safe from international or regional powers.

These threats are a reality that could readily lead to direct colonization in the interests of superpower geopolitical goals, but at the moment the critical question is how to cope with these threats: what are the means and institutions on which Arab countries can rely to repel these threats from the external world. Currently the Arab world has no strategy to deter external aggression. This is a result of a long accumulation of undemocratic and unpatriotic political systems which have generated profound chasms in the internal structure of the state and which are not capable of reform. Poverty, hunger, unemployment, misery, desperation and other social and political sicknesses prevailing in these countries are products of these political systems. The failure of the nation-state in many MENA countries is readily apparent. Local violence and conflicts, social and political exclusion, civil wars, poverty and famines, illiteracy and unemployment, prevalence of contagious diseases, absence of real democracy and human rights, absence of equitable and independent judiciary, absence of security and equality, tyranny, despotism and covetousness and so forth are all prevalent in the MENA countries despite some variance between countries. Such circumstances and situations always provide – in any time and any place- a prime opportunity for outside intervention to exploit. As the local Yemeni saying goes, “those who make themselves into a bone