The new government in Yemen has extracted several of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s cronies from the country’s power structure, including demotion of Saleh’s half-brother Mohammed al Ahmar and nephew Tareq Mohammed Saleh, the former heads of the Air Force and Presidential Guard, respectively.

Yemen’s unrest has not ended with the ouster of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Yemeni Revolution instead has entered a new phase, the “Parallel Revolution.”

The news that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula nearly blew up a US aircraft last week is a reminder of its continuing strength.

American assistance programs aimed at helping Yemen build and maintain counterterrorism forces will not suffice in the face of a real and growing al Qaeda-affiliated insurgency.

American policy makers have failed to implement this strategy outside of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The result has been a growing threat from the Gulf of Aden region, where two of al Qaeda’s franchises—al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen and al Shabaab in Somalia—have established safe havens. (INCLUDES VIDEO)

Al Qaeda has benefited from the collapse of the Yemeni state. Islamist militants have demonstrated the capacity to take and hold territory from state control. These territorial gains increase al Qaeda’s operating space in Yemen.

If experience is anything to go by, the Marines who misbehaved in that video will be disciplined and punished—while those who are trying to exploit those images to undermine their mission never will be.

Liberals typically erupt in outrage if you suggest they don’t respect or understand the Constitution, let alone defend it.  But then they let slip that in fact they really don’t respect or understand the Constitution.