RUTHFULLY YOURS

DUBAI—The U.S. is investigating a possible new missile attack against a navy destroyer in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, the navy’s Middle East-focused branch said Sunday.

The crew on the ship, the USS Mason, had “indications of a possible inbound missile threat and deployed appropriate defensive measures,” the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command said in a statement. All U.S. ships and sailors were safe, and the navy was assessing the situation, the statement said.

If confirmed, the attack late on Saturday would be the third such attempt on the USS Mason in recent days as it patrols international waters near Yemen, where a bloody 18-month war is raging.

U.S. officials said two missiles were fired at the ship from territory controlled by Yemen’s Houthi rebels last Sunday. On Wednesday, the ship came under attack from two more missiles apparently fired by the Houthis. None of the missiles hit its target.

In response to the repeated barrages, U.S. destroyed three radar sites along Yemen’s western coast using Tomahawk missiles fired from the destroyer Nitze, significantly deepening American involvement in the conflict. The radar sites had been used to track U.S. ship movements, a Pentagon spokesman said.

The Houthis, a Shiite rebel group that controls Yemen’s capital, San’a, denied targeting the USS Mason, and condemned the U.S. strikes on the radar sites.

Iran’s game is clear enough. It wishes to replace the US as the regional hegemon, at the US’s expense.

Since Obama entered office nearly eight years ago, Iran’s record in advancing its aims has been one of uninterrupted success.

Iran used the US withdrawal from Iraq as a means to exert its full control over the Iraqi government. It has used Obama’s strategic vertigo in Syria as a means to exert full control over the Assad regime and undertake the demographic transformation of Syria from a Sunni majority state to a Shi’ite plurality state.

In both cases, rather than oppose Iran’s power grabs, the Obama administration has welcomed them. As far as Obama is concerned, Iran is a partner, not an adversary.

Since like the US, Iran opposes al-Qaida and ISIS, Obama argues that the US has nothing to fear from the fact that Iranian-controlled Shiite militias are running the US-trained Iraqi military.

So, too, he has made clear that the US is content to stand by as the mullahs become the face of Syria.

In Yemen, the US position has been more ambivalent. In late 2014, Houthi rebel forces took over the capital city of Sanaa. In March 2015, the Saudis led a Sunni campaign to overthrow the Houthi government. In a bid to secure Saudi support for the nuclear agreement it was negotiating with the Iranians, the Obama administration agreed to support the Saudi campaign. To this end, the US military has provided intelligence, command and control guidance, and armaments to the Saudis.

Iran’s decision to openly assault US targets then amounts to a gamble on Tehran’s part that in the twilight of the Obama administration, the time is ripe to move in for the kill in Yemen. The Iranians are betting that at this point, with just three months to go in the White House, Obama will abandon the Saudis, and so transfer control over Arab oil to Iran.

For with the Strait of Hormuz on the one hand, and the Bab al-Mandab on the other, Iran will exercise effective control over all maritime oil flows from the Arab world.

It’s not a bad bet for the Iranians, given Obama’s consistent strategy in the Middle East.

Obama has never discussed that strategy.

Indeed, he has deliberately concealed it. But to understand the game he has been playing all along, the only thing you need to do listen to his foreign policy soul mate.

According to a New York Times profile published in May, Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes is the president’s alter ego. The two men’s minds have “melded.”

Rhodes’s first foreign policy position came in the course of his work for former congressman Lee Hamilton.

In 2006, then-president George W. Bush appointed former secretary of state James Baker and Hamilton to lead the Iraq Study Group. Bush tasked the group with offering a new strategy for winning the war in Iraq. The group released its report in late 2006.

The White House doesn’t want Americans to notice, but the tide of war is not receding in the Middle East. The Navy this week became part of the hot war in Yemen, with a U.S. warship launching missiles against radar targets after American vessels were fired on this week. Just when President Obama promised that American retreat would bring peace to the region, the region pulls him back in.

The destroyer USS Nitze fired Tomahawk cruise missiles to take out three radar sites on the Yemen coast believed to be manned by Houthi rebels. Though the Houthis deny it, the Pentagon believes they were responsible for the multiple-missile attack on Sunday against the USS Mason, another destroyer patrolling in international waters. This was no mere warning shot. The Mason had to use active defenses, including interceptor missiles, to prevent a strike that could have killed dozens of sailors.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook called the USS Nitze’s response Thursday “limited self-defense strikes [that] were conducted to protect our personnel, our ships, and our freedom of navigation in this important maritime passageway.” That’s another way of saying this was the minimum the U.S. could do to defend our sailors and get the Houthis to stop firing, and we hope it works.

But there’s more to this story because the Houthis are one of Iran’s regional proxy armies. They are fighting to control Yemen against a Saudi-led coalition that is trying to restore the former Sunni Arab government in Sana’a. The U.S. has been quietly backing the Saudis with intelligence and arms, though the Saudi coalition has been fighting to a draw with the Houthis, who are supplied by Iran. The cruise missiles used against the USS Mason are also used by Hezbollah, another Iran proxy army.

Don’t expect the White House to acknowledge this because the ironies here are something to behold. Mr. Obama is backing the Saudis in Yemen in part to reassure them of U.S. support after the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal that the Saudis opposed. Mr. Obama’s Iran deal was supposed to moderate Iran’s regional ambitions, so Mr. Obama could play a mediating role between Tehran and Riyadh. But the nuclear deal has emboldened Iran, and fortified it with more money, so now the U.S. is being drawn into what amounts to a proxy war against Iran. Genius. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—The U.S. struck and destroyed three coastal radar sites in Yemen early Thursday in a significant military response to a series of attempted attacks against American warships in recent days, deepening America’s role in the country’s protracted civil war.

U.S. personnel aboard the destroyer Nitze launched a series of Tomahawk cruise missiles against the three separate radar sites along the Red Sea Coast, north of what is known as the Basb-el-Mandeb strait, Pentagon officials said in a statement late Wednesday. Initial assessments by the military indicate all three sites were destroyed, officials said.

The radar sites, all within Houthi-controlled territory in southern Yemen, were used during two separate attempted attacks against U.S. Navy ships, as well as in a third against a UAE-flagged swiftboat, over the last few days, according to Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook. The sites were ground radar installations that U.S. officials believe were used by rebels to track American ship movements.
“These limited self-defense strikes were conducted to protect our personnel, our ships and our freedom of navigation in this important maritime passageway,” Mr. Cook said in a statement issued late Wednesday evening. He added that the U.S. would respond to “any further threat” to American ships and commercial traffic in the area.

The strikes represent a potentially significant step for the U.S. in Yemen, where a bloody civil war has pitted Iranian-backed Houthi rebels against a Saudi-led coalition supported by the U.S. Before now, American strikes in Yemen only have targeted al Qaeda leaders. The U.S. is supporting Saudi Arabia in air operations against Houthi rebels, but hasn’t taken an active military role.

Washington has tried to strike an uncomfortable balance in the war, backing the Saudi-led air campaign but criticizing Saudi officials for excessive violence against civilians, especially after dozens were killed when strikes hit a funeral recently. In the aftermath of that strike, the U.S. said it would reconsider the scope of its support for Saudi’s campaign, which includes aerial refueling and some intelligence-sharing and training, and urged a negotiated settlement. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Obama Administration keeps stretching the limits of the nuclear deal with Iran to provide the type of sanctions relief the mullahs believe they are owed, no matter what the deal says. So what better way to repay White House’s generosity than by firing on U.S. ships?

That’s one way to understand Sunday’s incident off the coast of Yemen, when the USS Mason, a guided-missile destroyer, and the USS Ponce, an amphibious ship, were attacked by two Chinese-built C-802 cruise missiles fired from territory controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi militia. Iran is a major operator of the C-802; its proxy Hezbollah used it in 2006 to punch a hole in an Israeli corvette off the coast of Lebanon.

On Sunday neither missile hit its target, though the USS Mason launched SM-2 air-defense missiles to defend against the threat. The episode could have ended differently: Last week the Houthis scored a direct hit on the HSV Swift, an unarmed transport shift used by the United Arab Emirates to resupply the Saudi-led military coalition that has been fighting the Houthis for 18 months.

The U.S. contributes limited intelligence support to that coalition, part of a grudging effort by the Administration to reassure Riyadh that the U.S.-Saudi alliance could survive the nuclear deal. Tehran would dearly like to dissolve that 71-year alliance, which also has been frayed by Saudi targeting mistakes that have resulted in major civilian casualties. It’s probably no coincidence that Sunday’s attacks on the U.S. ships came a day after a Saudi air strike mistakenly killed more than 140 mourners at a funeral in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

That attack is a tragedy, but the Administration should remember that the U.S. military has committed similar errors before it cuts Riyadh loose. If the U.S. is uncomfortable with Saudi Arabia as a friend, it will find even less to like should the kingdom ever become an enemy.

More significantly, the attack on the Navy ships—with hundreds of American sailors aboard—is another reminder that the nuclear deal has done more to embolden than moderate Tehran’s ambitions, despite a cascade of U.S. concessions.