RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Sometimes calling the five-sided Pentagon the “puzzle palace” makes perfect sense. Though the name purports to describe the maze of hallways that traverses the Department of Defense, on occasion the tag explains the state of military decision-making.

The Defense Department has its own year in review, which is all happy-face.

Here is mine–six examples from the last twelve months that make one wonder if those providing for the common defense are using common sense.

#6. Arming the “moderate” Syrian opposition. This has looked like a Keystone Kops short from day one. The Defense Department estimated training about 60 fighters at a cost of about $10 million per fighter. In October, the Pentagon announced it was suspending the program. “I was not satisfied with the early efforts,” declared Defense Secretary Ash Carter in what might rank as the understatement of the year. Since everything was going so well, Obama signed a bill in November authorizing $800 million for training rebels next year.

#5. Crash diet in Afghanistan. Remember all those ads on how to lose weight without diet or exercise? That’s what US defense policy sounds like some times, particularly in Afghanistan where the administration has shorted the size of the force again and again and promised everything would be cool. In October, the president reversed his decision to the troop levels to zero by the end of the year. But while something is better than nothing, the brutal facts are that the future of the country is now in jeopardy. There are even new al Qaeda training camps popping-up in the country.

#4. Death on the Homefront. In July, five US service members were killed in a terrorist attack on recruiting station in Tennessee. While the deaths themselves were tragic enough, the incident raised legitimate questions over whether the US military was taking appropriate measures to protect the force at home, including permitting service members to bring personal firearms to work and be armed on duty.

Berlin’s vast correspondence is a true monument to European, Jewish and liberal civilisation

With the publication of Affirming: Letters, 1975-1997 (Chatto & Windus, £40), Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle bring to a triumphant conclusion one of the most remarkable literary projects of our time. Isaiah Berlin’s selected correspondence runs to four volumes, covers nearly 3,000 pages and amounts to more than one million words. Even its recipients number well into the hundreds. These include men and women of all ages, many nationalities and a surprising range of occupations. There may be no dustmen amongst them, but nor are they confined to the conventionally respectable. Perhaps as a result, Berlin’s Letters also constitute an epistolary oeuvre alternatively deadly serious and playfully frivolous, often nobly inspired, occasionally just a little bit disreputable.

The cumulative effect is amusing, compelling and illuminating. By his own evaluation, Berlin’s natural medium was “chatting — plauderei”. Writing letters was a simple extension of that pleasure. Yet he eventually found both the time and energy to express profoundly significant observations about the Russian Revolution and its undoing, the Nazi nightmare and the Holocaust, the foundation of Israel and the creation of the modern Middle East, even the Cold War and the dynamics of decolonisation through this otherwise informal medium. Students of 20th-century politics, scarcely less than scholars in intellectual history and of political philosophy, will find much of lasting value to ponder in these pages for years to come.

The Obama administration is happily barreling toward the Iran nuclear deal’s Implementation Day, with Secretary of State John Kerry today hailing Tehran for fulfilling terms of “what was truly one of our most important accomplishments of 2015.”

Implementation Day will come when the International Atomic Energy Agency “verifies that Iran has completed all of these nuclear commitments, which increase Iran’s breakout time to obtain enough nuclear material for a weapon to one year, up from less than 90 days before the JCPOA.”

Before Christmas, parties to the agreement including Iran were predicting that Implementation Day could come in January.

Kerry said “one of the most significant steps Iran has taken toward fulfilling its commitments occurred today, when a ship departed Iran for Russia carrying over 25,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium materials.”

“The shipment today more than triples our previous 2-3 month breakout timeline for Iran to acquire enough weapons grade uranium for one weapon, and is an important piece of the technical equation that ensures an eventual breakout time of at least one year by Implementation Day,” he said.