Yemen Portrait: The Protests, the President, and His Supporters in Washington (Filkins)

The veteran journalist Dexter Filkins has written a rambling but vivid portrayal of the political situation in Yemen for The New Yorker. The headline is very misleading: "After the Protests: Can Protesters Find a Path Between Dictatorship and Anarchy?" There is no such "After" here --- instead, Filkins offers a series of portraits: 1) of the background of President Ali Abdullah Saleh; 2) of protesters and prominent activists, including Tawakkol Karman; 3) of the President's current determination to stay in power; and 4) of those in the US Government who back Saleh in that quest.

This extract is part of that last portrait:

....In early March, as tens of thousands of people were calling for revolution, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been the President of Yemen for the past thirty-three years, staged an enormous celebration of himself. Uprisings across the Middle East had already swept away two of Saleh’s peers and were threatening to bring down his own regime. In the capital, Sanaa, thousands of Yemenis filed into the Stadium of the Revolution, their loyalty insured by the promise of payments after the rally. Some climbed into the bleachers; others gathered on the field, where an array of blue and white plastic lawn chairs faced an elevated stand reserved for the President and his men. Outside the stadium, about a mile away, protesters, who had been gathering for weeks, condemned Saleh, chanting “Leave!” For an hour, Yemenis in the stadium held newspapers over their heads to protect themselves from the sweltering heat. Then the loudspeakers blared, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of all the Yemeni people, the Preserver of Unity, Savior of the Nation, peace be upon him, His Excellency Ali Abdullah Saleh!”

See also Yemen: The Dangerous US Game (Scahill)

The crowd cheered, and thousands of people raised their arms, some holding up posters. Men blew kisses; women, wearing jet-black chadors, clapped their gloved hands. Saleh, dressed in a dark business suit and Ray-Bans, lowered himself onto a hand-carved chair inlaid with ivory. Applause rolled for several minutes; every moment or two, Saleh lifted his right hand. Then the crowd, led by a man on the viewing stand, began to repeat, “Our blood, our souls, we’ll sacrifice for you!”

Before the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Iraqis chanted an identical paean to Saddam Hussein, who was Saleh’s mentor and friend. Yemenis used to call Saleh “Little Saddam.” In 1990, when the United Nations Security Council voted to expel Saddam’s forces from Kuwait, Yemen was the only Arab state to vote no. In retaliation, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states kicked out a million Yemenis, depriving the country of remittances—one of its primary sources of money. Yemen’s economy collapsed, and it never fully recovered. Nearly every aspect of Saleh’s rally echoed the parades once staged for Saddam—even the posters, which depicted a leader far more youthful and virile than he actually is.

While Yemenis offered adoring testimonials, Saleh fidgeted in his chair, repeatedly turning to chat, first with his Prime Minister and his Vice-President, then with a group of aides behind him. Saleh is said to possess a savvy intelligence and the attention span of a teen-age boy. Finally, after glancing at his watch, a bejewelled square of violet glass, he rose to speak.

Saleh is a short, stout man, with a thick-necked demeanor and a sandpapery voice. In a speech weeks earlier, he had practically spat at the people assembled before him, vowing to fight the protesters “with every last drop of blood.” During a subsequent speech, he laid blame for the protests on the United States and Israel. “There is a control room in Tel Aviv for destabilizing the Arab world,” Saleh said. “It is managed by the White House.” It was the sort of remark that used to serve him well.

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The White House says that Brennan’s statement was not intended to grant Saleh permission to attack the protesters. But, since the unrest began, the Saleh regime has received unusually strong support from the Obama Administration. The White House has made clear it believes that in Yemen abrupt change must be avoided, even at the cost of Yemeni lives. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in the Middle East, maintains a close relationship with Saleh, and has visited Sanaa four times since taking the counterterrorism post, in 2009. After the lurid speech blaming Israel and the United States for the protests, Saleh called Brennan to apologize. The Obama Administration scolded Saleh after the attack on the Sanaa University protesters, but it didn’t urge him to step down. A senior American military officer explained why: “If Saleh goes, the two likeliest outcomes are anarchy or a government that is not as friendly.”

Either result, U.S. officials believe, could embolden Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has established a foothold in Yemen. A senior Administration official said that between a hundred and two hundred hard-core Al Qaeda fighters are in Yemen, and that hundreds of Yemenis provide them with support. Along with Pakistan’s tribal areas and Somalia, Yemen is now considered one of the most likely places from which Al Qaeda could mount an attack on America. Two recent failed plots appear to have originated with Al Qaeda members in Yemen: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to set off an in-flight bomb, on Christmas Day, 2009, and the loading of explosive printer cartridges onto America-bound cargo planes, in October, 2010. U.S. officials say that they have linked Abdulmutallab to Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who is now the most prominent spokesperson for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Last spring, President Obama authorized the killing of Awlaki, who is believed to be hiding in Yemen.

America’s relationship with Saleh was once tense. In 2000, after Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in the port city of Aden, American officials complained that Saleh’s government had all but stymied their investigation, and that senior members of his government seemed to be aligned with the terrorist group. Saleh himself, however, is not considered to be an Islamist, or even particularly religious; like Saddam before him, he is most interested in maintaining power. Indeed, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Saleh, dependent on Saudi and Western aid, promised to coöperate with the war on terror.

Since then, he has allowed the U.S. to fire missiles at suspected militants, ordered his forces to detain terrorist suspects at the behest of the U.S., and facilitated intelligence-gathering operations, including surveillance by Predator drones. The U.S. jointly mans a military-command center in Yemen.

In recent years, the U.S. has dramatically increased its aid to Saleh’s regime. The focus has been on training and equipping Yemeni counterterrorism troops with modern weapons, night-vision cameras, and helicopters. This program, which was negligible as recently as 2008, had a budget last year of a hundred and fifty million dollars. The U.S. has also substantially increased its economic and development assistance to Yemen, most of it intended for areas populated by extremists.

As officials in both Washington and Sanaa repeatedly reminded me, Yemen is not Egypt: it has virtually no middle class, a weak civil society, a marginal intelligentsia, and no public institutions that operate independently of Saleh. The Yemeni opposition includes notable Islamists, among them Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, a cleric whom the U.S. has designated a terrorist.

A Western diplomat in Yemen said, “O.K., fine, Saleh goes. Then what do you do? There is no institutional capacity—in the bureaucracy, in the military, or in any other institutions in this society—to really step in and pick up the pieces and manage a transition.” A failed state in Yemen, coupled with an already anarchic situation in Somalia, could provide Islamist militants with hundreds of miles of unguarded coastline, disrupting the shipping lanes that run from the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean.

The senior Administration official put it bluntly: “Our goal is to help prevent a coup or a usurpation of power by Muslim Brotherhood types or by Al Qaeda.”

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