Yemen is a country that most of us thought very little of, if at all, and could hardly identify as being a sandy coastal nation at the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula on the Red Sea, until terrorists bombed our Navy's USS Cole there in 2000. But the little nation of 23 million people has become another base of international terrorists.
Yemen's government and the United States are cooperating because there are al-Qaida terrorist elements in Yemen making threats serious enough to have required a two-day closing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital of San'a last weekend.
Even in our troubled world, who would have imagined a need for any kind of U.S.-Yemen aid and alliance effort being forced upon us by threats to vital American interests emanating from Yemen?