Tournament: UNLV | Round: 2 | Opponent: Texas CM | Judge: Paul Leader

Counterfactual 1AC

1AC

The Problem

Fourteen of the twenty-four debate resolutions since the end of the Cold War in 1991 have focused explicitly on issues of foreign policy and international security, just as the United States has tried to maintain its status and primacy in the world.

This fixation of the debate community and the political establishment represents a fundamental problem with the functioning of our society that is retrenched every year that another foreign-policy topic is selected and used to indoctrinate the next generation of young minds to follow in the follies of their forbears.

Karoun Demirjian, award-winning foreign policy correspondent for the Las Vegas Sun, wrote in 2012 on the sort of "traditional" analysis which permeates society and produces the same policies and ideas every year:

(Karoun Demirjian ~Washington correspondent for the Las Vegas Sun~, October 22, 2012, "Foreign policy debate yields similarities amid the sparring", http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2012/oct/22/final-debate-presidential-candidates-clash-over-fo/)
President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney met Monday night for the last
AND
civil conflict over a dictator’s tenure has begun to spill across the border.

The structure of policy debate and politics today aims to keep true critical thinking on the margins, pushing away revolutionary ideas and promoting a hegemonic viewpoint of the United States. Jacob Sullum, a Senior Editor at Reason Magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist, wrote in 2012 about the tendency of both parties in the U.S. to reject new thinking in favor of their hegemonic viewpoint.

 (Jacob Sullum ~Senior Editor at Reason Magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist~, ~October 17, 2012~, "What Foreign Policy Debate?" http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/17/what-foreign-policy-debate)
Next week, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are scheduled to meet for their third
AND
think later’ foreign policy." Unfortunately, neither major party is offering one.

Even in years when a non-foreign policy topic is chosen, debaters make impacts of war, terrorism, and extinction the end point of debates, leading us down the same dead-end rabbit hole every year no matter where we begin the journey.

Last year, though the topic was supposedly U.S. domestic energy policy, we spent the whole year predicting how wars, terrorism, proliferation, hegemony, and economic collapse all lead to extinction.

Topic choice is paramount: debaters put in tons of research every year, but we are always forced into the context of foreign policy. Sarah Topp and Brett Bricker, two members of our community, made the case for a rotation of topics in 2010.

(Sarah Topp ~Director of Debate and Assistant Professor at Trinity University~ and Brett Bricker ~Debate coach and professor at the University of Kansas~, "SUPPLYING A WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION: A CASE FOR MANDATORY TOPIC ROTATION", Contemporary Argumentation 26 Debate, 2010, p47-55.)
The proposed topic rotation scheme would help¶ maximize the educational value of debate.
AND
legal policy. Failure to guarantee topic rotation can result in stale education.

This year, the same story is already playing out where straight-up teams are already basing their aff research on the U.S.’s ability to use foreign policy decisions to influence international norms and mitigate instability and conflict abroad, right now someone is reading cases about the need of the U.S. judiciary to assert itself to promote stability abroad, and the need of the U.S. to curtail its cyber operations in order to strengthen our alliances and geopolitical hegemony.

Always debating foreign issues hurts debaters who are indoctrinated into the system of destruction, and unprepared to confront the vast variety of topics we experience every day of our lives.

We all have our own lives, experiences and interests which we will pursue whether it’s writing, art, sports, music, politics, or science. We all have friends, families and acquaintances; we all will interact with people, eat, drink, travel, and make important decisions in our lives. The analytical and critical thinking skills we learn in debate are all we take out of this round.

As Sarah and Brett continued in their 2010 article,

(Sarah Topp ~Director of Debate and Assistant Professor at Trinity University~ and Brett Bricker ~Debate coach and professor at the University of Kansas~, "SUPPLYING A WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION: A CASE FOR MANDATORY TOPIC ROTATION", Contemporary Argumentation 26 Debate, 2010, p47-55.)
First, legal topics teach strong research skills. Kade¶ Olsen (personal communication
AND
itself a disservice by avoiding topics that¶ are explicitly legal in nature.

The Solution

To break free of indoctrinating education in debate, we advocate the following counterfactual affirmative: The 2013-2014 NDT/CEDA debate resolution is "Resolved: The United States Federal Government should change its definition of one or more of the following: Marriage, Person, Retirement age, Family, Poverty."

The Advantage

The Federal Definitions topic provides the best access to issues that are immediately applicable to people today – the definitions of a person, marriage, family, poverty, and the retirement age. Finding answers to these questions is of vital importance to all people, but whenever these concerns are raised they are swept under the rug with the justification that foreign policy issues are more important and pressing, endlessly pushing back the timeline on resolving real everyday struggles.

Justin Green, the Director of Debate at Kansas State University, explained some of the reasons to prefer the Federal Definitions topic based on its relevance to critical thinking in all aspects of our lives.

(Justin Green ~Director of Debate at Kansas State University~, April 25, 2013, CEDA forums topic discussion, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?topic=4803.0)
Why did we write this paper? We want to move debate forward in a
AND
neg in this topic. We all learn about something that helps everyone.

Using our counterfactual plan text enables us to reset the clock and evaluate a world in which events had turned out differently while best developing the critical thinking skills that are necessary to create change in our own lives and in the greater micro- and macro-political spheres. As Barbara Spellman and Alexandra Kincannon write in a legal journal, counterfactuals are the basis of all logical reasoning. In fact, they are the most accessible part of debate logic to laypersons and are the skills most easily transferred to other aspects of our lives.

(Barbara Spellman ~Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia~ and Alexandra Kincannon ~Ph.D. Candidate, University of Virginia~, "THE RELATION BETWEEN COUNTERFACTUAL ("BUT FOR") AND CAUSAL REASONING: EXPERIMENTAL FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR JURORS’ DECISIONS", Law and Contemporary Problems, Lexis.)
Counterfactual reasoning is essential for causal reasoning in the law. The psychological literature in
AND
opinion is quite as competent as that of the most experienced court." n90

What’s in it for debaters? You only need to look at the community to see where this would change things. Here in round 2 of UNLV, there are teams debating about Presidential war powers and the impact they have on U.S. influence and hegemony until they turn blue.

In another room there’s a match-up right now between one team who are saying we should assign District Court Judges to approve or deny drone strikes proposed by the President, against another who might say that any attempt to limit U.S. drone policy will be politically contentious, causing gridlock in Congress that will force the U.S. to default. Both sides are basing their arguments off of the best interests of the U.S. and neither side is really taking into consideration the meaning of their "impacts."

At the end of the round, both sides will claim they "solve" for "nuclear wars" which will "kill everyone on earth" without ever taking into account who those people are and what their real wants and needs are. In almost every room, some variant of that EXACT same debate is happening, except for the same teams who every year refuse to be bound by the limits of the resolution and choose to step outside the box of traditional debate to share their own stories and experiences of debate, and to examine what kind of world we created for ourselves.

What would the community look like if all of the teams who think outside of the box of policy debate actually got to develop their arguments and engage other teams on the merits of the ideas they bring about questions essential to our own existence? Vijayendra Rao and Paromita Sanyal shed some light on that in 2010 when they looked at the way debating governmental definitions of personhood, poverty, marriage, family, and the age of retirement serves as a training ground for advocates of excluded and disadvantaged populations, as well as a means of developing critical thinking skills through argumentation. The Federal Definitions topic fits within the diverse pedagogical interests of the debate community.

(VIJAYENDRA RAO ~lead economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank~ and PAROMITA SANYAL ~assistant professor of sociology at Wesleyan University~, Dignity through Discourse: Poverty and the Culture of Deliberation in Indian Village, May, 2010, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 629 Annals 146, Lexis)
Such disagreements over who is included in the BPL are generally successful in rectifying errors
AND
skills of rational and critical argumentation in the manner imagined by proponents of deliberation

For once, every debate wouldn’t have to devolve into framework and topicality where none of the real issues are tackled and we just spend an hour and a half arguing about the rules.

The best chance to provide a world where those arguments could take place was the Federal Definitions topic, which is why it is so important that our counterfactual worldview is evaluated first to determine the impacts of this round. Amy Burns, a Law Clerk at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2013 that the only way to understand and correct harms is to use counterfactual reasoning to trace the causal route.

(Amy Knight Burns, Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ~January, 2013~ Stanford Law Review, Counterfactual Contradictions: Interpretive Error in the Analysis of AEDPA, Lexis.)
Imagine you are buying a home. The seller provides you with a certificate stating
AND
will have to assess what would have been, absent the defendant’s wrongdoing.

Further, Amy writes about how counterfactuals are key to the way our legal system operates. Any attempt to correct harms in the status quo needs a counterfactual, enabling us to un-do the harms created by the selection process and move forward to more productive debates.

(Amy Knight Burns, Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ~January, 2013~ Stanford Law Review, Counterfactual Contradictions: Interpretive Error in the Analysis of AEDPA, Lexis.)
Though different courts have different attitudes toward counterfactuals, ranging from the cavalier n24 to
AND
, and would almost surely be inadequate in its ability to rectify wrongdoing.

L Paul Strait and Brett Wallace apply the value of critical thinking to debate. Without using counterfactuals to inform our understanding of the world, it is impossible for us to access any other impacts.

(L. Paul Strait, USC and Brett Wallace, George Mason U., The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making, Policy Cures? Health Assistance to Africa, Debaters Research Guide, p. A2)
More to the point, debate certainly helps teach a lot of skills, yet
AND
of people’s lives, both individually and collectively" (p. 156).

Tournament: Calchico | Round: 1 | Opponent: Central Oklahoma Botkin-Hamm | Judge: Dunn

Counterfactual 1AC

1AC

The Problem

Fourteen of the twenty-four debate resolutions since the end of the Cold War in 1991 have focused explicitly on issues of foreign policy and international security, just as the United States has tried to maintain its status and primacy in the world.

This fixation of the debate community and the political establishment represents a fundamental problem with the functioning of our society that is retrenched every year that another foreign-policy topic is selected and used to indoctrinate the next generation of young minds to follow in the follies of their forbears.

The way we talk about things in policy debate creates a politics of securitization that is used to prop up a hegemonic viewpoint of the United States. Niclas Ivarsson from Lund University wrote on how securitization is a speech act, and how that speech shapes the reality we live in.
~Niclas, Head of Department of Political Science: Peace and Conflict Studies at Lund Univerity. Health and Security: HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa, p.6-7, http://theses.lub.lu.se/archive/2007/05/30/1180512652-29760-128/Uppsatsen.PDF~~
The process of securitization is often compared by Buzan et al. (1998)
AND
threat in the same way (Buzan et al. 1998 p 23) 

Professor Mark Neocleous wrote in 2006 about how securitizing our lives creates a constant state of emergency that never goes away, producing totalitarianism and violence in society.
(Mark Neocleous is a Professor of the Critique of Political Economy Politics and History. Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance: Towards a Critique of Security Politics Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 131–149. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300301)
The examples here are too numerous to mention, but the British Prevention of Terrorism
AND
possibility, but actually had a major role in its creation and continuation.

Even in years when a non-foreign policy topic is chosen, debaters make impacts of war, terrorism, and extinction the end point of debates, leading us down the same dead-end rabbit hole every year no matter where we begin the journey.

Last year, though the topic was supposedly U.S. domestic energy policy, we spent the whole year predicting how wars, terrorism, proliferation, hegemony, and economic collapse all lead to extinction.

Topic choice is paramount: debaters put in tons of research every year, but we are always forced into the context of foreign policy. Sarah Topp and Brett Bricker, two members of our community, made the case for a rotation of topics in 2010.

(Sarah Topp ~Director of Debate and Assistant Professor at Trinity University~ and Brett Bricker ~Debate coach and professor at the University of Kansas~, "SUPPLYING A WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION: A CASE FOR MANDATORY TOPIC ROTATION", Contemporary Argumentation 26 Debate, 2010, p47-55.)
The proposed topic rotation scheme would help¶ maximize the educational value of debate.
AND
legal policy. Failure to guarantee topic rotation can result in stale education.

This year, the same story is already playing out where straight-up teams are already basing their aff research on the U.S.’s ability to use foreign policy decisions to influence international norms and mitigate instability and conflict abroad, right now someone is reading cases about the need of the U.S. judiciary to assert itself to promote stability abroad, and the need of the U.S. to curtail its cyber operations in order to strengthen our alliances and geopolitical hegemony.

Always debating foreign issues hurts debaters who are indoctrinated into the system of destruction, and unprepared to confront the vast variety of topics we experience every day of our lives.

We all have our own lives, experiences and interests which we will pursue whether it’s writing, art, sports, music, politics, or science. We all have friends, families and acquaintances; we all will interact with people, eat, drink, travel, and make important decisions in our lives. The analytical and critical thinking skills we learn in debate are all we take out of this round.

As Sarah and Brett continued in their 2010 article,

(Sarah Topp ~Director of Debate and Assistant Professor at Trinity University~ and Brett Bricker ~Debate coach and professor at the University of Kansas~, "SUPPLYING A WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION: A CASE FOR MANDATORY TOPIC ROTATION", Contemporary Argumentation 26 Debate, 2010, p47-55.)
First, legal topics teach strong research skills. Kade¶ Olsen (personal communication
AND
itself a disservice by avoiding topics that¶ are explicitly legal in nature.

The Solution

To break free of indoctrinating education in debate, we advocate the following counterfactual affirmative: The 2013-2014 NDT/CEDA debate resolution is "Resolved: The United States Federal Government should change its definition of one or more of the following: Marriage, Person, Retirement age, Family, Poverty."

The Advantage

The Federal Definitions topic provides the best access to issues that are immediately applicable to people today – the definitions of a person, marriage, family, poverty, and the retirement age. Finding answers to these questions is of vital importance to all people, but whenever these concerns are raised they are swept under the rug with the justification that foreign policy issues are more important and pressing, endlessly pushing back the timeline on resolving real everyday struggles.

Justin Green, the Director of Debate at Kansas State University, explained some of the reasons to prefer the Federal Definitions topic based on its relevance to critical thinking in all aspects of our lives.

(Justin Green ~Director of Debate at Kansas State University~, April 25, 2013, CEDA forums topic discussion, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?topic=4803.0)
Why did we write this paper? We want to move debate forward in a
AND
neg in this topic. We all learn about something that helps everyone.

Using our counterfactual plan text enables us to reset the clock and evaluate a world in which events had turned out differently while best developing the critical thinking skills that are necessary to create change in our own lives and in the greater micro- and macro-political spheres. As Barbara Spellman and Alexandra Kincannon write in a legal journal, counterfactuals are the basis of all logical reasoning. In fact, they are the most accessible part of debate logic to laypersons and are the skills most easily transferred to other aspects of our lives.

(Barbara Spellman ~Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia~ and Alexandra Kincannon ~Ph.D. Candidate, University of Virginia~, "THE RELATION BETWEEN COUNTERFACTUAL ("BUT FOR") AND CAUSAL REASONING: EXPERIMENTAL FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR JURORS’ DECISIONS", Law and Contemporary Problems, Lexis.)
Counterfactual reasoning is essential for causal reasoning in the law. The psychological literature in
AND
opinion is quite as competent as that of the most experienced court." n90

What’s in it for debaters? You only need to look at the community to see where this would change things. Here in round 1 of Berkeley, there are teams debating about Presidential war powers and the impact they have on U.S. influence and hegemony until they turn blue.

In another room there’s a match-up right now between one team who are saying we should assign District Court Judges to approve or deny drone strikes proposed by the President, against another who might say that any attempt to limit U.S. drone policy will be politically contentious, causing gridlock in Congress that will force the U.S. to default. Both sides are basing their arguments off of the best interests of the U.S. and neither side is really taking into consideration the meaning of their "impacts."

At the end of the round, both sides will claim they "solve" for "nuclear wars" which will "kill everyone on earth" without ever taking into account who those people are and what their real wants and needs are. In almost every room, some variant of that EXACT same debate is happening, except for the same teams who every year refuse to be bound by the limits of the resolution and choose to step outside the box of traditional debate to share their own stories and experiences of debate, and to examine what kind of world we created for ourselves.

What would the community look like if all of the teams who think outside of the box of policy debate actually got to develop their arguments and engage other teams on the merits of the ideas they bring about questions essential to our own existence? Vijayendra Rao and Paromita Sanyal shed some light on that in 2010 when they looked at the way debating governmental definitions of personhood, poverty, marriage, family, and the age of retirement serves as a training ground for advocates of excluded and disadvantaged populations, as well as a means of developing critical thinking skills through argumentation. The Federal Definitions topic fits within the diverse pedagogical interests of the debate community.

(VIJAYENDRA RAO ~lead economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank~ and PAROMITA SANYAL ~assistant professor of sociology at Wesleyan University~, Dignity through Discourse: Poverty and the Culture of Deliberation in Indian Village, May, 2010, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 629 Annals 146, Lexis)
Such disagreements over who is included in the BPL are generally successful in rectifying errors
AND
skills of rational and critical argumentation in the manner imagined by proponents of deliberation

For once, every debate wouldn’t have to devolve into framework and topicality where none of the real issues are tackled and we just spend an hour and a half arguing about the rules.

The best chance to provide a world where those arguments could take place was the Federal Definitions topic, which is why it is so important that our counterfactual worldview is evaluated first to determine the impacts of this round. Amy Burns, a Law Clerk at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2013 that the only way to understand and correct harms is to use counterfactual reasoning to trace the causal route.

(Amy Knight Burns, Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ~January, 2013~ Stanford Law Review, Counterfactual Contradictions: Interpretive Error in the Analysis of AEDPA, Lexis.)
Imagine you are buying a home. The seller provides you with a certificate stating
AND
will have to assess what would have been, absent the defendant’s wrongdoing.

Further, Amy writes about how counterfactuals are key to the way our legal system operates. Any attempt to correct harms in the status quo needs a counterfactual, enabling us to un-do the harms created by the selection process and move forward to more productive debates.

(Amy Knight Burns, Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ~January, 2013~ Stanford Law Review, Counterfactual Contradictions: Interpretive Error in the Analysis of AEDPA, Lexis.)
Though different courts have different attitudes toward counterfactuals, ranging from the cavalier n24 to
AND
, and would almost surely be inadequate in its ability to rectify wrongdoing.

L Paul Strait and Brett Wallace apply the value of critical thinking to debate. Without using counterfactuals to inform our understanding of the world, it is impossible for us to access any other impacts.

(L. Paul Strait, USC and Brett Wallace, George Mason U., The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making, Policy Cures? Health Assistance to Africa, Debaters Research Guide, p. A2)
More to the point, debate certainly helps teach a lot of skills, yet
AND
of people’s lives, both individually and collectively" (p. 156).

Tournament: UNLV | Round: 3 | Opponent: Weber CS | Judge: Christian Bato

Drones 1ac

Despite recent rhetoric, Obama is increasing drone strikes in Yemen. The drone campaign in Yemen is the fulcrum of widening presidential war powers authority.

Jilani 8/20/13 ~~~Zaid,former Communications and Outreach Coordinator for United Republic and the former Senior Reporter-Blogger for ThinkProgress, The Atlantic,http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/the-real-reason-the-limits-of-drone-use-are-murky-we-cant-decide-what-terrorists-or-conflict-mean/278739/~~~~~~====**

"The use of drones is heavily constrained," ~~said President Obama-http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/us/politics/transcript-of-obamas-speech-on-drone-policy.html?pagewanted=all26_r=0~~~~ during his May
AND
the killed over the past two weeks are believed to have been innocent."¶ 

The United States Federal Government should prohibit the President of the United States from using appropriated funds, not withstanding any other provision of law, for targeted killing in Yemen.

Senate appropriations restrictions solve best

Raven-Hansen, UVA Law Professor ~’94
(Peter and William Banks, "PULLING THE PURSE STRINGS OF THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF," 80 Va. L. Rev. 833, Lexis)

The foregoing rules of narrow construction are general rules that do not apply with equal
AND
were originally conceived as the ultimate check on executive national security practices. n119

Yemen Democracy Adv

Yemen is in the midst of a fragile, but stable, democratic transition.

Worth 2/18/13 ~~~Robert F., Yemen, Hailed as Model, Struggles for Stability, ~~http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/world/middleeast/yemen-hailed-as-a-model-struggles-for-stability.html?pagewanted=all-http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/world/middleeast/yemen-hailed-as-a-model-struggles-for-stability.html?pagewanted=all~~~~~~~~~~====**

The tents at the heart of this city~’s Change Square are now almost empty of
AND
rancorous political factions, under the watchful eyes of Arab and Western monitors.

Obama~’s drone policy is a direct rebuff to Yemen~’s most democratic institution, the NDC, and undermines the transition to democratic elections – risks total breakdown of Yemeni rule of law.

Bailey 26 Benjamin 8/27/13 ~~~freelance journalist and activist/cofounder of Global Exchange and CodePink: Women for Peace, Pam 26 Madea, How America~’s killer Drone strikes undermine Yemeni democracy, ~~http://muslimvillage.com/2013/08/27/43053/americas-killer-drone-strikes-undermine-yemeni-democracy/-http://muslimvillage.com/2013/08/27/43053/americas-killer-drone-strikes-undermine-yemeni-democracy/~~~~~~~~~~====**

Should the United States be free to intervene in Yemen, a country with which
AND
our orbit. Let~’s give them a chance to run their own country.

Scenario 1 – War

Collapse of Yemen~’s political system will destabilize the entire region.

Baron 3/1/13 ~~~Adam,Correspondent, Better than expected, but still not enough: Can Hadi hold Yemen together?,http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2013/0301/Better-than-expected-but-still-not-enough-Can-Hadi-hold-Yemen-together~~~~~~====**

It was far from the anniversary that Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi had hoped
AND

at the end of the day, five secessionist demonstrators were killed.

That instability causes nuclear war.

The Age ~’07 ~~~9/24, "Tempers must remain cool as the Middle East heats up", http://www.theage.com.au/news/editorial/tempers-must-remain-cool-as-the-middle-east-heats-up/2007/09/23/1190486129857.html~~~~~~====**

THE torturous road to peace in the Middle East becomes more excruciating every day and
AND
reaction, there is more mileage in diplomacy than in any military solution.

Scenario 2 – Child Soldiers

Yemen is making steps towards curbing the use of child soldiers, but increased  political instability leads to increases in recruitment.

2013 Trafficking in Persons Report ~~~http://yemen.usembassy.gov/tip2013.html~~~~~~====**

Smugglers capitalize on the instability
AND
 Yemen is not a party to the 2000 UN TIP Protocol.

Child soldiers are the most vulnerable group in the world and represent the ultimate in repressive control.

Hanson ~’04 ~~~Kirk, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, "The Plight of Children: Are We Meeting Our Responsibility to Children?" Interaction Council, Session II, 22nd Annual Meeting, July 22, 2004, ~~http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/global_ethics/iac-children.html-http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/global_ethics/iac-children.html~~~~~~~~~~

In addressing this failure, we must confront the ethical failure which is at the
AND
children — and specific actions — do we meet our responsibility to children. 

Recruitment of child soldiers creates a cycle of violence and expendability- it~’s uniquely the most exploitative form of violence.

War Child UK ~’11 ~~~"CHILD SOLDIERS," http://www.warchild.org.uk/issues/child-soldiers?_kk=child20soldiers26_kt=34d0a30a-ab2f-4c8a-9b0b-6e877056c4e326gclid=COLG3O_TmKsCFYt25QodLXoJzg~~~~~~

Children are used as soldiers because they are easier to condition and brainwash. They
AND
the rebel groups as they have simply no other way of feeding themselves. 

AQAP Adv

AQAP is poised to launch its next round of terror attacks. Internal dissention about the ~’right time~’ is the only thing stopping an attack now. Every new recruit pushes them closer to the brink of attack.

Lubold 8/6/13 ~~~Gordon,national security reporter for Foreign Policy. He was a senior advisor at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington,A pointed threat alert for Yemen; http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/06/a_pointed_threat_alert_for_yemen_aqaps_new_chief_is_a_patient_man_who_did_egypts~~~~~~====**

New drone strikes, fresh terror warnings; Al-Qaida is back on the
AND
"It happened with bin Laden and now it is happening with Zawahiri."

Drone strikes are undermining Yemeni faith in US aid and AQAP is picking up the pieces…and recruits.

Reuters 8/19/13 ~~~Stepped-up US drone strikes in Yemen spark massive protests, ~~http://rt.com/news/us-drone-strikes-yemen-protests-669/-http://rt.com/news/us-drone-strikes-yemen-protests-669/~~~~~~~~~~====**

At least 37 people were killed in drone strikes in Yemen during two first weeks
AND
is expected to give another 24250 million in both 2013 and 2014.

There is a multiplier effect – it~’s not just the civilian deaths that compel ordinary Yemeni~’s to join AQAP. Even ~’successful~’ drone strikes against AQAP members community members to take up arms.

Jilani 8/20/13 ~~~Zaid, Moyers 26 Co., Truthout, The Perpetual Drone War in Yemen, ~~http://truth-out.org/news/item/18294-the-perpetual-drone-war-in-yemen-http://truth-out.org/news/item/18294-the-perpetual-drone-war-in-yemen~~~~~~~~~~====**

President Obama~’s aerial attacks in Yemen, in the words of al-Muslimi,
AND
family or community members, whether or not they were affiliated with AQAP."

Scenario 1 – Imminent Attack

A series of failed attempts has AQAP itching to break their silence with an extremely violent attack.

Baron 8/8/13 ~~~Adam, With AQAP~’s strategy unclear, Yemen struggles to respond, originally printed in the Christian Science Monitor, http://www.minnpost.com/christian-science-monitor/2013/08/aqaps-strategy-unclear-yemen-struggles-respond~~~~~~====**

"After being pushed out of the territory they had in Shabwa and Abyan AQAP
AND
botched Christmas Day attack by a Nigerian AQAP-trained operative in 2010.

Causes extinction.

Alexander ~’03 ~~~Yonah, Inter-University for Terrorism Studies Director and Professor, WASHINGTON TIMES, August 28, 2003, p. A20.~~~

Last week~’s brutal suicide bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have once again illustrated dramatically that
AND
~~~ with its serious implications concerning national, regional and global security concerns.

Scenario 2 – Oil

Internal briefs show AQAP is targeting oil infrastructure.

Gulf of Aden Security Review 8/12/13 ~~~Gulf of Aden Security Review - August 12, 2013, ~~http://www.criticalthreats.org/gulf-aden-security-review/gulf-aden-security-review-august-12-2013-http://www.criticalthreats.org/gulf-aden-security-review/gulf-aden-security-review-august-12-2013~~~~~~~~~~====**

Yemen: Wahayshi promises to free AQAP prisoners; AQAP kills soldiers in Radhum near
AND
, but Radhum was not on the list of targeted facilities.~~~2~~~

Successful attack drives up global oil prices.

BBC News 9/11/12 ~~~Profile: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11483095~~~~~~====**

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula first came to prominence in Saudi Arabia in
AND
Khobar, increasing fears of political instability and pushing up global oil prices.

That collapses the economy.

Tverberg ~’13 ~~~Gail, oil industry actuary, 1/17,Ten Reasons Why High Oil Prices are a Problem,http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/01/17/ten-reasons-why-high-oil-prices-are-a-problem/~~~~~~====**

Spikes in oil prices tend to be associated with recessions. ¶ Economist James Hamilton
AND
sectors lead to more cutbacks in spending, and to more debt defaults.

And causes full scale nuclear war.

Mead ~’09 ~~~Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, 2/4/2009, The New Republic, "Only Makes You Stronger"~~~

So far, such half-hearted experiments not only have failed to work;
AND
the world economy back on track, we may still have to fight.