Mort Rosenblum: Another, older pueblo lost in a distressing geopolitical era

SANA’A, Yemen (A bit delayed) — Okay, a lot delayed. My notes from 1990 describe the most wondrous city I’ve seen before or since, a mountaintop Arabian Nights fantasia high above Middle East madness: Ornate mud mansions, blue-tiled mosques, teeming medieval souks, exotic gardens.

It was redolent of the Tucson I once knew, built of adobe with a leafy central plaza where multi-cultured families gathered in the evening air. Its staple of spicy beans, foul, was close kin to frijoles. Life was in the streets. People cared for one other.

In Sana’a back then, arms ranged mostly to British bolt-action Lee Enfields from Lawrence of Arabia days and, as in Tucson, gun deaths were largely accidental.

From a hilltop balcony, I saw a gingerbread skyline of towering minarets and six-story palaces sparkling in the sun. Donkey-cart traffic jams clogged massive wooden gates in the ancient walls. It was, before overuse devalued the word, the epitome of awesome.

I walked downhill for 1,000 years into a warren of twisting lanes. At dusk, lounging on cushions, I drank that green Yemeni coffee unmatched anywhere, nibbled honeyed pastries from a brass platter, puffed on a water pipe and chewed qat to a happy buzz.

Then I talked late in the night with new friends, happy to welcome a rare American, a fellow Semite. Back then, Muslims, Christians and Jews were still people of same book.

Today, that magical capital would be on my bucket list only if I wanted to risk coming home in one.

The ruins of a fabled city with roots 2,500 years deep are now ruled by Houthis, a nasty Shiite sect supported by Iran, who bedevil U.S. warships and commercial vessels. Israel is within range of their sophisticated missiles. They are fighters in flipflops with an air force.

No place illustrates more starkly than Yemen how much of the world is being destroyed by futile war caused by botched diplomacy and fundamentalist zealots — in robes or bespoke suits — who distort the teachings of Allah, Jesus and Moses.

I went to Yemen from Saudi Arabia in 1990 while waiting for Desert Storm clouds in Iraq to burst over Kuwait. Saddam Hussein had tapped into Kuwaiti oilfields. U.S. diplomats failed to prevent his invasion of the small neighboring emirate on the Gulf.

George Bush the elder rallied a coalition to take back Kuwait and chase after fleeing Iraqis. He was wise enough to stop short of Baghdad, not ready to knock Humpty Dumpty off the wall without a mop. Still, the Middle East smoldered.

As Osama bin Laden prepared his revenge against America for defiling the kingdom that guarded Islam’s holiest sites, Saudi Arabia began expelling Yemenis by the hundreds of thousands and sending troops to skirmish over a disputed border.

Bush junior invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 but then diverted his forces into Iraq although Saddam was a secular Sunni, a bitter foe of Bin Laden. Whether that was for oil, W.’s personal reasons or neo-con lunacy, it blew Pandora’s Box all to hell.

Torture at U.S. prisons in Iraq spawned ISIS and swelled other terrorist ranks. Yemen’s president merged what was North Yemen with Aden, Britain’s old gateway to its East-of-Suez empire. He was deposed in the 2011 Arab Spring, and the country fell apart.

The Obama administration backed a brutal Saudi air war that starved Yemenis under Houthi rule. But it also united China, Russia and Europe behind accords to curb Iran’s nuclear advances and bring a more moderate Iran back into the global mainstream.

Then Donald Trump reneged on the Iran deal. Hostile hardliners armed the Houthis. His Abraham Accords fortified Benjamin Netanyahu and excluded Palestinian self-rule. The West Bank exploded. Hamas caught Israel off guard with its monstrous assault.

And now, despite tireless diplomacy by Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Israeli extremists push America toward an unwinnable war against Iran along with its proxies, Hezbollah and Houthis. The Israel-right-or-wrong lobby is strong in America.

Against these complex geopolitics, parallels to Tucson seem tenuous. The Old Pueblo lost its heritage to bulldozers, not bombs. There is a lot left to love. But misbegotten “development” squandered so much of its irreplaceable past.

I left the Star for the Associated Press and went abroad in 1967. Two years later, I came back to find Tucson’s old Mexican heart cut out for “urban renewal.” No more families and friends gathering in that old plaza, as Yemenis did on their rooftops.

Arizona’s borders are no more “open” now than they were then. Internal migrants, Americans from elsewhere, had not yet moved in en masse to regard darker-hued families with local roots that run centuries deep to be “aliens.”

People back then read newspapers and learned “civics” in schools. Churches and temples taught the Ten Commandments. Most knew that all cultures, however distant, are inextricably linked to a wider world and that fresh ingredients enrich a melting pot.

Today, not so much. An alarming number believe high walls can keep out the world. Chanting, “USA,” under a banner of “America First,” they see distant despots like Vladimir Putin as irrelevant to their insulated lives.

Yet if some nuclear-armed madman decides to strike a major of America’s killer drones and missiles, that is not in faraway Yemen. It is just down the road at Raytheon.