RUTHFULLY YOURS

The sudden upheaval that shattered ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia over the weekend also saddled the Obama administration with unexpected complications in what already was a long-shot bid to ease the crises of the Middle East.

Administration officials voiced rising concern that the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia could undermine their broader regional efforts—in particular ending the Syrian civil war.

Secretary of State John Kerry had been pressing Tehran and Riyadh for months to establish a direct diplomatic channel to address the Syria conflict.

The two countries reluctantly agreed late in 2015 to join a multinational peace process. That led to a United Nations plan for a cease-fire and peace talks, but the latest developments raise questions about its viability.

The conflict is also exposing deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia under President Barack Obama. Saudi officials have repeatedly pressed the White House to take more-aggressive steps to check what they say is Iran’s regionwide efforts to destabilize Arab countries.

Saudi officials have warned that the nuclear agreement reached in July between world powers and Iran would significantly strengthen Iran’s finances while only scaling back its nuclear capabilities for a few years.

That headline question may seem premature, but it’s worth asking if only to reduce the odds that the Saudis are lost as we enter the last perilous year of the Obama Presidency. Iran and Russia have an interest in toppling the House of Saud, and they may be calculating whether President Obama would do anything to stop them.

This comes to mind watching the furious reaction by Iran and its allies to Saudi Arabia’s New Year execution of 47 men for terrorism. Most of the condemned were Sunnis, including members of al Qaeda, but the Saudis also executed prominent Shiite cleric Nemer al-Nemer, who had led a Shiite uprising in 2011.

“The divine hand of revenge will come back on the tyrants who took his life,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday, among many other denunciations across the Shiite Middle East. Protesters ransacked and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran before police belatedly stopped them. The Saudis responded by cutting off diplomatic relations with Iran.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Iranian ally and former Prime Minister of Iraq, put regime change on the table by saying the execution “will topple the Saudi regime as the crime of executing the martyr al-Sadr did to Saddam” Hussein. He was referring to the death of another prominent Shiite cleric in Iraq in 1980.

The White House expects Iran to finish work needed to trigger implementation of an international nuclear deal in the coming weeks, but Washington needs more time to prepare sanctions over its ballistic missile program, a U.S. official said on Saturday.
The administration had additional diplomatic and technical work to complete before announcing any new sanctions related to the missile program, but the delay was not a result of pressure from Tehran, said deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

“We have additional work that needs to be done before we would announce additional designations, but this is not something that we would negotiate with the Iranian government,” Rhodes told reporters in Hawaii, where President Barack Obama is on vacation.

WASHINGTON—Leading lawmakers, including supporters of President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, rapped the White House for delaying fresh sanctions on Tehran over its missile program, warning that the move would embolden it to further destabilize the Middle East.

The abrupt reversal by the administration came as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani publicly ordered his military to dramatically scale up the country’s missile program if the sanctions went ahead.

Senior U.S. officials have told lawmakers the sanctions were delayed because of “evolving diplomatic work” between the White House and the Iranian government.
The administration had notified Congress on Wednesday that it would impose new financial penalties on nearly a dozen companies and individuals for their alleged role in developing Iran’s ballistic missile program, but pulled back later that day.

Top U.S. lawmakers, including White House allies, said they believed failing to respond to Tehran’s two recent ballistic missile tests would diminish the West’s ability to enforce the nuclear agreement reached between global powers and Tehran in July.

As August ends, from time immemorial, Jews begin to discuss the advent of the Jewish high holidays, which vary because they are always observed on the Jewish calendar. They are either early in September or they go into October.

On the Gregorian calendar holidays are on fixed dates every year, but somehow it increasingly feels as if December 31 comes earlier with every passing year. I wish you all a happy, healthy, successful and safe new year. rsk

It sounds like a simple assignment: list 10 U.S. foreign policy triumphs of 2015. OK, make that five. Can we maybe find three? Two? After all, President Obama has pivoted to foreign policy as the centerpiece of his second term, and Secretary of State John Kerry has logged a gazillion miles of diplomatic travel, punctuated by marathon talks, capped by “historic” deals. So, how’s that working out?

As it turns out, there’s no need to make your own list. The State Department has assembled one for us, posted on State’s blog by spokesman John Kirby. Actually, State posted it and first sent it out by email on Dec. 24. Apparently someone thought it needed more attention; State re-sent it yesterday.

As Kirby explains it, the list was inspired by a note-to-staff from Kerry, “summing up a busy year and charting the course ahead.” That led Kirby to draw up his list, to which he added the gimmick of “a great hashtag — which was recently trending on Twitter” — #2015in5words (as it happens, this hashtag has chiefly become a magnet for five-word comic variations on 2015 being the year in which “everyone was offended by everything” — but never mind).

Thus do we have State’s self-laudatory list of “The Year-in-Review: Pivotal Foreign Policy Moments of 2015.” Each moment is summed up in five words with an accompanying paragraph and video clip, meant to show “significant success across a range of issues.”

Actually, what most of this list suggests, to interpret it kindly, is that the State Department has decamped from Planet Earth and is by now operating in an alternate universe. This is alarming because the rest of us are pretty much stuck with the real-world fallout.

Iranian naval vessels approached to within 1,500 yards of the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Truman and fired several unguided rockets, according to sources at the Pentagon.

The official characterized the incident as “certainly unnecessarily provocative.” We could add “deliberately so.”

The Hill:

At around 10:36 a.m., several Iranian navy vessels approached the Truman, as well as other coalition and merchant vessels, the official said.

“They were observed quickly approaching their location as they transited the Strait of Hormuz into the Arabian Gulf,” said the official.

At 10:45 a.m., Iran warned of a “previously unannounced live-fire exercise over maritime radio and requested for nearby vessels to remain clear,” the official added.

Approximately 40 minutes later, the exercise warnings were repeated, and the ships started to launch the rockets, the official said.

It is unclear how many rockets were fired, the official said; however, they were fired in a direction away from the passing commercial and coalition ships. The ships departed after firing the rockets.

The Truman is the first U.S. aircraft carrier to enter the Gulf, after the USS Theodore Roosevelt left in October, leaving a U.S. carrier gap of several months. The U.S. has maintained a carrier presence in the Gulf for decades, even keeping two carriers there at the same time to support the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

When the Roosevelt left the Gulf in early October, Iran conducted a ballistic missile test.

America was born a land of speculators and opportunists. People have constantly moved across its great land mass in pursuit of the better life. But there’s a catch. A country of drifters and dreamers has provided rich pickings for grifters and con men. Not surprisingly, they crop up in countless American novels, plays and films, from Melville’s 1857 “The Confidence-Man” to “The Sting” (1973), a movie that was set in the 1930s, toward the end of what T.D. Thornton calls the “golden age of the con artist.” With “My Adventures With Your Money,” Mr. Thornton offers up a hugely entertaining biography of one such “artist.”

In an essay called “Diddling,” Edgar Allan Poe described confidence man as a “compound of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.” George Graham Rice, the anti-hero of Mr. Thornton’s book, had an abundance of “grin,” or what a later age would call chutzpah. A 1934 profile of him by the journalist A.J. Liebling described him as “contagiously optimistic,” with a “phosphorescent smile.” The title of Mr. Thorton’s book-length profile is taken from Rice’s own 1913 memoir, originally dedicated in a memorable way: “To the American Damphool Speculator, surnamed the American Sucker, otherwise described herein as The Thinker Who Thinks He Knows But Doesn’t—greetings! This book is for you! Read as you run, and may you run as you read.”
My Adventures With Your Money

By T.D. Thornton
St. Martin’s, 320 pages, $27.99

Jacob Herzig was born in 1870, the son of well-to-do Jewish immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side. As a young man, he stole money from the family’s furrier business. Sent to a reformatory, he befriended an elderly con, Willie Graham Rice, whose name he appropriated. For the next 40 years, his life was a whir of scams, fortunes quickly made and lost, and run-ins with the authorities.

Mr. Lehman was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission.

The U.S. Navy, with 280 ships, is now far too small to effectively protect this country’s vital interests in the Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Yet on Dec. 14 Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered the Navy to cut additional ships it was planning to build and instead to buy more missiles and airplanes.

The shortage of missiles, torpedoes and spare parts that concerns Mr. Carter is real. But by not rebuilding the fleet, the Obama administration is repeating the blunders of the 1970s—sending sailors and their too few ships on much longer deployments, now trending toward eight and 10 months instead of six. In response, the most experienced sailors and their families, as in the ’70s, are starting to leave the Navy, worsening the other corrosive result of longer deployments: ships and airplanes that break down from a lack of skilled maintenance. The Persian Gulf was recently left without a carrier for two months.

Is the solution to the problem simply a significant increase in the defense budget? No. The source of the problem is not primarily the amount of money, but how that money is spent, or misspent, by the military bureaucracy.

The Obama administration is preparing to impose its first financial sanctions on Iran since it forged a landmark nuclear agreement in July, presenting a major test for whether Tehran will stay committed to the deal.

The planned action by the Treasury Department, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal, is directed at nearly a dozen companies and individuals in Iran, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates for their alleged role in developing Iran’s ballistic-missile program.

Iranian officials have warned the White House in recent months that any such financial penalties would be viewed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a violation of the nuclear accord.

Senior U.S. officials have said the Treasury retained a right under the agreement to blacklist Iranian entities allegedly involved in missile development, as well as those that support international terrorism and human-rights abuses. Officials view those activities as separate from the nuclear deal.