this stuff just leaves me spluttering

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Hillary Mann-Leverett, a former US diplomat who worked at the national security council, told Al Jazeera that Yemen had long been a troubled state plagued by poverty and violence.

"The most important thing here for geopolitics globally and within the region, is that Yemen has been a fractured, desperately poor and deeply fractitious country that all the countries in the region and the superpowers have used as a battleground," she said.

But Mann-Leverett also said that the Obama administration's policies towards the region were partially to blame for threats against Washington and its allies.

"We have given the Saudis a green light to militarily intervene in Yemen and to characterise what is happening in Yemen as a Sunni-Shia war [with] the Saudis there to defend the Sunnis against craven Shia," she said.

"We're paying the price today of outsourcing our policy to the Saudis."

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