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The US Department of Defence has approved the sale to Saudi Arabia of 12 AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters built by The Boeing Company, in a deal valued at up to $598m.

The jihadist threat to foreign interests may be waning with the gradual whittling down of the cadre of (known) hardened Yemeni militants. This war of attrition – analysed at length in GSN over the past year, with an update on Al-Qaeda in Yemen/Jund Al-Yemen in Defence and security, below – may not yet signal the threat’s end. But it has convinced governments and corporations that Yemen remains a place where their citizens can travel and where money can be made if care is taken.

The death of the Al-Tamimi brigade’s Hamza Al-Qayti deprived the jihadist movement of a senior leader and suggested that the security forces may have turned the tide against ‘Al-Qaeda’s’ Jund Al-Yemen arm, following confidence-sapping attacks in H2 2007 and H1 2008. But it is premature to say that the threat has gone away.

The US public  was  shown  further  grounds  to  support  an attack  on  Iraq,  when  a  leaked  intelligence  report  suggested that  a  US Navy pilot  lost  in  1991  might  still  be  alive  and  in captivity. It touched on a topic of exceptional sensitivity in the USA — where  many  people  still  believe  missing  servicemen from  the  Korean and Vietnam wars  are  either  alive  or  were held  until  their  deaths.  It  also  forced  a  reluctant  Pentagon  to publicly admit that the Iraqi Air Force (IrAF) scored a single air-to-air victory on the first night of the Gulf War.

The  New  Yorker magazine,  required  reading  for  MidEast watchers,  has  revived  suggestions  of  a  “new”  link  between Iraqi intelligence  and  Osama  Bin  Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. Its claim that the two pariahs jointly ran a terrorist organisation in Kurdish northern Iraq—if true—could provide the smoking gun  that  US hawks  have  been  seeking  to  take  the  “war against terrorism” to Iraq. Efforts to link 11 September suicide hijacker Mohammed  Atta with  Iraqi  intelligence  in  the  Czech Republic did  not  convince,  and  until  now  the  Central Intelligence  Agency — but  not  its  influential  former  directorJames  Woolsey—had  largely  discounted  reported  links between President Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.

Defence ministers of the GCC states, meeting in Kuwait, endorsed an earlier proposal by Oman that the Peninsula Shield joint defence force be increased tenfold to 100,000 men. Currently the Peninsula Shield force, based at Hafr Al-Batin in north-eastern Saudi Arabia, has a strength of about 10,000 men.

Saudi Arabia Newsletter: The present urgent political concerns of Saudi Arabian leaders may be concentrated on the latest Iranian irruption into Iraqi territory,' but not so exclusively that the breakdown of the King Hussein-Yasser Arafat joint peace process is not a matter of equal pre-occupation for the Saudi government.