It's been a while since WikiLeaked checked in on Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's newly embattled president and a reliably interesting character in the WikiLeaks oeuvre. Most of what we've seen from Saleh in the leaked U.S. State Department cables has followed a pattern in which U.S. diplomats try to coax more counterterrorism cooperation out of the veteran strongman, while Saleh -- whose government received $155 million in military aid from the United States in 2010, twice the previous year's amount -- tries to finagle more cash and materiel out of the Americans. A newly released December 2004 State Department cable recounting a meeting between Saleh and U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Krajeski (pictured above with Saleh in a 2007 photo) is no exception.

The meeting takes place a little more than a month after U.S. President George W. Bush's reelection; Saleh badly wants to meet with Bush in Washington to congratulate him personally, he tells Krajeski, and also talk about "important new developments in the region 'that can only be discussed face to face,'" according to the cable. Krajeski hems and haws a bit about this, at which point, the cable notes, "True to form, Saleh launched into a list of what he believes the U.S. owes him. 'Where is the money for the Army, and what about my spare (F-5) parts?' Saleh demanded." (The cable notes, a little acidly, that there have been reported problems with getting the Yemeni Ministry of Defense "to follow through with the necessary paperwork on parts and equipment in order to spend the 17 million USD in Yemen's [foreign military financing] account.")

There's also the matter of smaller weapons, specifically the massive number of small arms being bought and sold in Yemen:

Pointing out that any meetings with senior U.S. officials would quickly turn to the subject of Yemen's huge grey market in SA/LW [small arms/light weapons], Ambassador told Saleh that Yemen needs to gain control over the huge flow of these weapons in and through the country. Washington is very concerned about this issue and ready to help the ROYG tackle it, added Ambassador. "I will do it!" Saleh exclaimed, insisting that he was insisting that he was already "cracking down" on the SA/LWs market.

The conversation soon turns, inevitably, to counterterrorism, in which Saleh has been a longstanding if not unproblematic partner to the United States. Pressed on the subject of Hadi Dulqum, an arms dealer with alleged links to Al Qaeda, the cable reports that "Saleh stuck to his line that Hadi Dulqum is just a 'simple arms dealer:'"

The Saudis want Dulqum, said the President, "they are crazy for him. What do you expect?" he asked, "if we arrest every arms dealer in the country, we will have hundreds of them in prison." The USG [U.S. government] agrees with the Saudis, said Ambassador, adding that Dulqum's connections with AQ are too extensive for him to be simply another Yemeni arms dealer.

Months later, Saleh does manage to swing a White House invite, prompting a June 2005 cable from the Sanaa embassy titled PRIORITIES FOR WASHINGTON VISIT: SALEH NEEDS TO BE PART OF THE SOLUTION. The cable characterizes relations with Saleh's government as "frustrating and difficult," noting that "Saleh has indicated to top advisors in the past that he believes he can pull the wool over the eyes of the [U.S. government.]" On the political front, "Saleh touts Yemen as a leader in regional reform and has committed to democratization," the cable says. "Domestically, however, he has run-out of reforms he can implement at no political cost to himself."

The cable proposes "a public show of support via a greater role in public fora such as the G-8" as a possible inducement to greater democratization, but it seems that half a decade later, the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt may have done the job more effectively.

Via Arabist.net, here's an interesting cable, dated January 2008, from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Titled "BLUEBLOOD SHIA CLERIC COMMENTS ON "BACKWARD" SADRISTS AND SISTANI'S FEARS AND FRUSTRATIONS," the cable describes a meeting with Emad Klanter, a member of a prominent clerical family in Najaf (my emphasis):

Son of a respected Najafi Ayatollah, nephew to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, related by marriage to Muqtada al-Sadr, and bearing a faint resemblance to the actor Robert De Niro, Klanter is a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad but was not wearing the traditional Shia Sayyid's garb of black turban and cloak during our meeting at the IZ villa of Saad Jabr, a Saddam-era exile opposition financier and son of Iraq's first Shia Prime Minister.

It goes on to find Klanter, who calls the Sadrists "backward, almost like they are from a cave," fretting about will happen when U.S. troops leave. " Swinging his arms into an abbreviated 'Gator Chomp' type of gesture," the cable's author relays, "he said that if the U.S, leaves 'Iran will swallow us whole.'"

Or maybe Saudi Arabi will. Another interesting cable dated September 2009 and signed by former U.S. ambassador Christopher Hill paraphrases one interlocutor saying that "Saudi influence in Iraq was significant, perhaps more significant than Iran’s at the moment, given the financial and media assets at its disposal, and given Iran’s recent internal distractions."

WikiLeaks hasn't posted the cables yet, but the New York Times's Scott Shane has a piece out drawing from a forthcoming batch of Yemen dispatches, focusing on the United States' relationship with the wily Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's president of three decades.

Nothing in it is terribly surprising if you've read much about Saleh, whose attempts to capitalize on the American government's sudden interest in his country following last year's foiled Christmas Day bomb plot, which was hatched in Yemen, are notorious enough to have inspired a Saturday Night Live skit. Still, some of the best character studies in the cables thus far have been of the United States' inconvenient allies in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union -- rulers like Saleh, Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev, and Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev -- so the piece is definitely worth a read.

The WikiLeaks cables do add some interesting details to the story of Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, who has emerged since last year as an important player in counterterrorism efforts in Yemen. After al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula botched an assassination attempt on Nayef in August 2009, the Saudis, who share a sprawling border with Yemen, stepped up their cooperation with American intelligence agencies, and were instrumental in foiling AQAP's attempt to blow up two cargo planes over the United States last month. A May 2009 cable released earlier this week captures Nayef's growing sense of alarm even before the assassination attempt, in an account of a meeting between the prince and U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.

Nayef tells Holbrooke, "We have a problem called Yemen." He says that Saleh's "vision of Yemen has shrunk to Sana'a," the capital city in the north, and the Yemeni president has lost what connections he had once had with the tribes that form the de facto government of Yemen's once independent and now tenuously controlled south. The Saudis, Nayef claims, have better relations with the southern tribes, and have taken matters into their own hands, financing development projects in the tribal regions that host AQAP in an effort to win Yemeni hearts and minds. I wonder how that's working out...