Marginalised by regional developments and intimidated by Washington's Cold War and Gulf War victories, two Yemenis - so goes the joke - wondered if their country should declare war on the US, force it to occupy Yemen and care for it.
"But what if we won?" wondered one. "We would have to care for America!"
As the US and Britain prepare for covert war on Yemen, and following on their failures in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemenis might wonder if the joke is becoming a reality.
Over the last few days, London has called for an international conference on Yemen (after it called for another on Afghanistan) under US-British auspices to see how best to support the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni president, against al-Qaeda.
From fragile to failed
One does not have to be a Yemen expert to tell you that further destabilising Yemen along the lines of Pakistan or Somalia is not sound policy, and that Yemen's proximity to the Gulf and the Horn of Africa does not bode well for regional stability.
But that is exactly what will happen if the US/UK "counterterrorism" policy focuses on providing military support to a three-decade-old government that presides over an unstable and decentralised country.
By offering more military training, arms, naval patrolling, intelligence sharing and possibly shared offensive operations, the West might help prolong and sustain an autocratic regime that faces secessionist movements in the North and South.
Mostly, though, it will aggravate a fragile state of Yemen into a failing state.
Even if estimates are exaggerated (Yemen's interior minister in 2002 put the number of guns at 60 million), Yemeni tribes are better armed than any other in the region and will not surrender their weapons quietly to the central government, especially in light of the declared foreign intrusion into their country's affairs.
Forgotten front?
But the US military presence, like that of al-Qaeda, is hardly new. In the decade since the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000, Washington has sent special forces into the country, took out suspected "terrorists" and shared in various raids against al-Qaeda targets in the country.
But that is ignored by an ever more influential class of pseudo-experts and self-declared "terrorogists" whose careers revolve around advising the US/UK government on how to advance their interests in the Middle East through force.
They reckon Yemen has been the ignored "forgotten front" of the "war on terror" and advise much more of the same security and military solutions.
They disingenuously ignore the decade of covert American military co-operation and security operations in Yemen that utterly failed, and they dangerously advocate raising the stakes in a country that suffers from any number of tribal, religious, regional, cultural and economic tensions and conflicts that only feed into instability and violence.
