Yemen President Goes to the Airport and (gasp) Gets on a Plane

Who Could Have Seen That Coming?

Yemen is a small country in the middle east who political turmoil is such that it could threaten the stability of the region.  The President of the country Abdullah Saleh has or had been in Saudi Arabia, in sort of a house arrest as part of the strategy to provide a greater degree of stability to Yemen to facilitate a settlement of the political issues.



President Saleh



The President of Yemen is now back in Yemen.  How did he get there?  Well here’s the story in the Financial Times.

Yemen’s president appears to have tricked his Saudi hosts when he unexpectedly returned home last week, exacerbating the stand-off between his regime and the country’s pro-democracy protest movement.

And how did he trick his hosts?

According to a senior US official, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been undergoing medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, “bolted the kingdom under the pretence of going to the airport for something else”.

Now The Dismal Political Economist would think that when a person like the President of Yemen goes to the airport, it is probably to get on a plane, and not for “something else”.  So he wonders what the “something else” could have been that was credible enough to fool the officials.  Maybe the "something else" was something like this.

1. The Burger King in the airport food court is much better than the one out by the interstate, and he just wanted a better Whopper.

2. The President of Yemen had never seen planes take off and wanted to watch from the observation deck.

3. The peanuts in the U. S. Air Club at the Saudi airport are world renown, and he wanted to see for himself is the praise was merited.

4. He thought prices were lower in the clothing shops inside the airport as opposed to the outlet mall.

5. Justin Bieber was arriving to give a show, and he wanted an autograph.

6. Mr. Saleh had unused mileage in his frequent flyer account and wanted to see if he could exchange them for a year’s subscription to the Tel Aviv Times.

Yep, it was probably one of those.