This is the garbage I can't handle. And its much more typical of Rep. administration. They seeminglyh are willing to sell their soul and make deals with the devil to get what they want...........these kind of deals have a way of coming back to haunt you.
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The New York Times
Yemen, an Uneasy Ally, Proves Adept at Playing Off Old Rivals
By PATRICK E. TYLER
ASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — When Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, met with President Bush a year ago, the Yemeni offered to help reconcile America's grievances with Saddam Hussein of Iraq, a longtime ally of Mr. Saleh's.
There is an Arab proverb, the Yemeni president said. If you put a cat into a cage, it can turn into a lion. Mr. Bush responded that he had no intention of reconciling, a senior administration official said.
"This cat has rabies," Mr. Bush said, referring to Mr. Hussein, and then added with a bluntness that was said by officials in the room to have shocked Mr. Saleh, "The only way to cure the cat is to cut off its head."
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the global campaign against terrorism forced the United States into an important but uneasy alliance with Yemen and its president, Mr. Saleh, a volatile army commander who seized power in Yemen in 1978 and who sided with Iraq during the Persian Gulf war of 1990-91.
But even as he positions himself now in the American camp, Mr. Saleh, ideologically, remains closer to Iraq, and some American and Saudi officials say the Yemeni leader is straddling the diplomatic fence, accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency while taking delivery, as he did this month, of North Korean Scud missiles.
The missiles ostensibly were purchased for Yemen's Army. But experts point out that Scuds are weapons of marginal military utility against any potential foe and could easily be resold. There is also no discernible enemy target they could reach from Yemen.
In any event, Mr. Saleh might not have been able to afford them, administration officials acknowledge, without some covert American assistance.
There is growing concern that Mr. Saleh's government — or tribal leaders allied with him — have continued to provide sanctuary to Qaeda cells, including the one that carried out the October 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole at Aden, killing 17 Americans.
At the time, Mr. Saleh declared Yemen's network of militant Islamic groups off-limits to United States investigators.
One regional expert in the administration said it was Yemen's history to play off rivals. During the cold war, Mr. Saleh ordered Soviet weapons while he tilted politically toward Washington and courted Western oil companies. At various times he used close relations with Iraq to fortify himself against Saudi Arabia, his largest historic rival.
"Anybody saying that Yemen is playing both sides in the war on terror doesn't know Yemen, and Yemen's need for stability and security," said Yemen's ambassador to Washington, Abdulwahab A. al-Hajjri. Noting the attack on the Cole, the ambassador called Yemen a "victim of terrorism."
One of the poorest nations in the Middle East, Yemen and its 19 million people are spread across an arid landscape where intertribal rivalry and conflict abound. Yemen is also the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, whose father was born in the mountainous Hadhramaut region, which straddles the caravan route that connected the Queen of Sheba's realm to King Solomon's court.
To its neighbors, today's Yemen has been strikingly friendly territory for Qaeda operatives. On Nov. 3, a Hellfire missile fired from an unmanned Predator drone killed two Qaeda men and four other passengers in a sport utility vehicle.
Until his arrest in the United Arab Emirates in early November, Al Qaeda's chief of operations for the Persian Gulf, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, moved in and out of Yemen with impunity even as Saudi Arabia's intelligence service was demanding his arrest for plotting in 1998 to attack the armored limousines of Saudi leaders with antitank missiles.
"The kingdom tried to get al- Nashiri from the Yemenis," said Prince Turki al-Faisal, former chief of Saudi intelligence and now Saudi ambassador to Britain. "The kingdom enlisted the support of the U.S. in convincing Yemen to cooperate, but to no avail."
As recently as February of this year, Mr. Nashiri was spotted by Saudi officials walking down a street in the Yemeni capital, Sana, in the company of the deputy director of Yemen's intelligence service, Col. Abdulaziz al-Safani.
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