Yemeni warlords are 4-dimensional!

“AK-47 is the real weapon of mass destruction” is one of the best lines uttered by Nicolas Cage in his famous 2005 Hollywood movie Lord of War. Since World War II, it is believed that the AK-47 has killed more human beings than any other kind of weapon. It is certainly, by far, the leading killer in Yemen. An estimate of how many pieces of such weaponry in the country ranges between several to twenty million pieces, thanks to the Yemeni warlords both allegedly inside and admittedly outside of the Government.

I remembered this movie line as I was reading the recent news of bloodshed in Harf Sufyan, north of Sana’a, between Huthis and members of tribes loyal to the State. This is taking place even after the successful State Visit by the Amir of Qatar reviving the Doha agreement between the Huthis and the State, one that came earlier this year following the ceasefire agreement between the two sides ending the so-called “sixth war”.

Observers are asking: will a seventh war take place? To answer this question we need first to answer another underlying question: who benefited most from the previous six wars? Clearly, the parties that benefited most have been the merchant of death parties. Those are the Yemeni warlords: arm trading, military, tribal and political warlords.  They are of four types, or in other words 4-dimensional as advertised in the above title. Tribal warlords are well known to make a living out of conflicts. Military warlords make fortunes off illegal arms sales or by consuming war budgets. Political warlords advance their agendas through conflicts and bloodshed. This is in addition to your average day-to-day merchants of death such as the one well portrayed by Nicolas Cage in his 2005 movie.

In physics, 4-dimensionality is quite dangerous because it describes the mechanics of fast bodies in space-time. Slow moving bodies are described by 3-dimensional physics. Therefore, the answer to the first question depends on the speed of Government actions blocking a new and seventh war from happening relative to how fast the 4-dimensional actions by Yemeni warlords are. Einstein’s theory of special relativity is 4-dimensional as it postulates the speed of light as the maximum possible speed in the universe and measures any other speed relevant to it. One wonders how fast our government can act and how many dimensions will its space-time contain. It is all relative including the possibility of a seventh war.

* Professor of Physics (qmbahran@yahoo.com)
Ex-Minister of Electricity and Energy

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