By Patrick Cockburn
"The US embassy in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, which has just closed its doors because of the al-Qa'ida threat, is a spectacularly ugly building that has been designed as a fortress to withstand a military assault.....
The architecture is the fruit of security reviews that see embassies as concrete bunkers built to withstand attack in a hostile land and not as a centre for spreading goodwill towards America. This is hardly surprising considering the fate of US embassies from Tehran to Beirut. The closure of the embassy may also reflect realism among US diplomats in Sanaa over the ability of the central government to defend them despite proffered aid from the US and an American-British Yemeni counter-terrorism force.....
The US and Britain may come to regret intervening in Yemen, which is very much an Arab Afghanistan....
The closure of the US embassy also underlines how vulnerable these facilities are in the age of the suicide bomber. To defend them at all means, as in Baghdad, turns them into a heavily defended foreign enclave which is resented locally and becomes a physical symbol of imperialist designs."
"The US embassy in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, which has just closed its doors because of the al-Qa'ida threat, is a spectacularly ugly building that has been designed as a fortress to withstand a military assault.....
The architecture is the fruit of security reviews that see embassies as concrete bunkers built to withstand attack in a hostile land and not as a centre for spreading goodwill towards America. This is hardly surprising considering the fate of US embassies from Tehran to Beirut. The closure of the embassy may also reflect realism among US diplomats in Sanaa over the ability of the central government to defend them despite proffered aid from the US and an American-British Yemeni counter-terrorism force.....
The US and Britain may come to regret intervening in Yemen, which is very much an Arab Afghanistan....
The closure of the US embassy also underlines how vulnerable these facilities are in the age of the suicide bomber. To defend them at all means, as in Baghdad, turns them into a heavily defended foreign enclave which is resented locally and becomes a physical symbol of imperialist designs."
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