Global Protests After Execution of Shiite Cleric in Saudi Arabia (VIDEO)

Shiite? Sunni?

Maybe they'll all just murder each other and the world will be better off?

At the Hill, via Memeorandum, "Global outcry after Saudi Arabia executes Shi'ite cleric, 46 others."

And the New York Times, "Iranian Protesters Ransack Saudi Embassy After Execution of Shiite Cleric."

'People were shoving each other down the stairs and climbing over each other...'

Update on the Dubai high-rise fire, at London's Daily Mail, "Panic in Dubai as inferno rips though 63-storey hotel... but fails to halt New Year firework celebrations just 500 yards away."

Video at CNN, "People evacuate hotel fire."

PREVIOUSLY: "Massive Fire Engulfs Luxury Hotel in Downtown Dubai (VIDEO)."

Massive Fire Engulfs Luxury Hotel in Downtown Dubai (VIDEO)

Lots of news about the fire on Twitter.

And watch, via AP:

Delta Force Secretly Killed Iranian Agents in Iraq — with IEDs

From Sean Naylor, at the New York Post:

The Iraq war was, in part, a proxy battle between the US and Iran. But fighting it had “political restrictions,” author Sean Naylor writes. In his new book, “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command,” Naylor reveals that US special operations forces came up with a solution, one that would let them conduct secret assassinations without anyone — even our own FBI — finding out.

By early 2007, some US intelligence estimates held that as many as 150 Iranian operatives were in Iraq. Many were member of the Quds Force, the covert arm of Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy. Their mission was to coordinate the violent campaign being waged against US forces by Iraq’s Shi’ite militias.

“It was 100 percent, ‘Are you willing to kill Americans and are you willing to coordinate attacks?’ ” said an officer who studied the Quds Force’s approach closely. “ ‘If the answer is “yes,” here’s arms, here’s money.’ ”
The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) set up a new task force, named Task Force 17.

Its mandate was simple: go after “anything that Iran is doing to aid in the destabilization of Iraq,” said a Task Force 17 officer...

Keep reading.

I blogged Naylor's book last night, "Sean Naylor's New Book, Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Stares Down United Nations in Rebuke to Iran Nuclear Deal (VIDEO)

At Town Hall, "Chilling: Netanyahu Glares at UN Delegates for 45 Seconds for Their 'Deafening Silence' on Iran Deal."

Chilling:

Dick Cheney Discusses Iran Nuclear Deal at American Enterprise Institute (VIDEO)

Well, Cheney slams the Iran nuclear deal at the American Enterprise Institute.

Watch the full video, at AEI, "The nuclear deal with Iran and the implications for U.S. security."



And see the New York Times, "Dick Cheney Denounces Nuclear Deal With Iran as 'Madness'," and Politico, "Cheney: Deal would allow Iran to nuke U.S."

Obama Sent Secret Letters to Foreign Governments Promising Sanctions Immunity

From Daniel Greenfield, at FrontPage Magazine:

You can see why Obama and Kerry wanted to wrap up negotiations with Iran as quickly as possible to avoid giving Congress enough time to consider all this information. Every day the Iran deal looks worse and worse.

Remember Obama talking up sanctions snapback? Remember the time he promised that you could keep your doctor? The two have a lot in common, except that, as far as we know, the administration didn't write a whole bunch of letters to foreign governments telling them they were lying about ObamaCare.

But the country's number one traitor did just that on sanctions snapback.

Sens. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) disclosed in the letter to the State Department that U.S. lawmakers have been shown copies of several letters sent by the Obama administration to the Chinese, German, French, and British governments assuring them that companies doing business with Iran will not come under penalty.

The Obama administration is purportedly promising the foreign governments that if Iran violates the parameters of a recently inked nuclear accord, European companies will not be penalized, according to the secret letters.

Congress became aware of these promises during closed-door briefings with the Obama administration and through documents filed by the administration under a law requiring full disclosure of all information pertaining to the accord.

“We therefore request the Administration to publicly release these letters, which are not classified, so that the full extent of the Administration’s non-public assurances to European and Chinese governments can be discussed openly by Congress and analyzed by impartial outside experts,” they write...

Keep reading.

How and Why to Kill the Iran Deal

From Caroline Glick, at the Jerusalem Post.

Naftali Bennett: Obama's Nuclear Deal with Iran is a 'Farce'

Via the BBC:

#StopIranRally

I couldn't make it up to L.A. yesterday, which is a bummer. Looks like it was a big event.

At ABC 7 News Los Angeles, "Hundreds protest Iran nuclear deal in Westwood."

BONUS: At ABC 10 News San Diego, "San Diegans protest Iran Nuclear Deal."

Iran's Defense Minister Forbids International Military Site Inspections

Well, this is a big surprise.

At the Times of Israel, "Iran defense chief forbids international inspections of military sites":

Iran’s defense minister on Monday said Tehran would not allow international inspectors to enter the Islamic Republic’s military sites, in comments that appear at odds with the terms of a landmark nuclear deal struck with world powers last week.

Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan also said the nuclear deal does not limit its missile development, which he maintained Tehran would “resolutely” pursue.

The comments came on the heels of Iran’s Foreign Ministry saying the UN could not ban Iranian ballistic missile development under the deal and a top military commander rejecting the UN’s adoption of the groundbreaking accord earlier in the day.

Taken together, the comments shed doubt on Tehran’s willingness to keep to some of the concessions agreed to in the pact, which has been touted in the West as the best way to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and was endorsed unanimously in the United Nations Security Council Monday...

There are no verification guarantees in the Obama Iran pact. Indeed, the agreement isn't even about reigning in Iran's nukes. It's about establishing an Obama "peace" legacy and cementing Iranian hegemony in the Mideast to counterbalance Israeli power.

Obama's Unsettling #Iran Press Conference

From James Taranto, at WSJ, "‘That’s What Politicians Do’."

Obama's Iran Deal Wasn't About Thwarting Iranian Nuclear Capabilities

Well, cementing some kind of legacy as a "peacemaker" has long been central to the administration's Iran diplomacy. Hostility to Israel has also been a key driver. I mean, the criticism of the Iran deal has been long in coming. Everyone knows that there's going to be no way to verify Iranian compliance, since access to Iran's nuclear sites isn't guaranteed. Charles Krauthammer, for one, has pointed this out for awhile.

In any case, check out Abe Greenwald, at Commentary, "The Deal Wasn’t About Iran’s Nukes":

If you think the United States just struck a poor nuclear deal with Iran, you’re right; but if that’s your key takeaway, you’re missing the point. Iran’s nuclear program was last on the list of the Obama administration’s priorities in talking to Tehran. The administration readily caved on Iran’s nukes because it viewed the matter only as a timely pretense for achieving other cherished aims. These were: (1) preventing an Israeli attack on Iran; (2) transforming the United States into a more forgiving, less imposing power; (3) establishing diplomacy as a great American good in itself; (4) making Iran into a great regional power; and (5), ensuring the legacies of the president and secretary of state as men of vision and peace.

The administration has always viewed Israel as an intractable troublemaker and the main catalyst for the region’s woes. An Israeli strike on Iran, especially if supported by the United States, would have been yet another display of destabilizing Israeli aggression that put Middle East peace further out of reach. Barack Obama, therefore, repeatedly warned Israel against attacking Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu complied, and for his compliance White House officials taunted him in 2014 as a “chickenshit” whose window of opportunity had closed. That window is now barred. The Iran deal states that the U.S. will train Iranians to counter any sabotage attempts on its nuclear facilities and systems. This is aimed at frustrating Israeli action...

Continue reading.

Obama Loses It as Major Garrett Asks Pointed Question on Four Americans Left Behind in Iran (VIDEO)

At NewsBusters, "Major Garrett Confronts Obama, Demands Answers on U.S. Prisoners."

And at Hot Air, "Major Garrett angers Obama: Why are you content with Iran holding U.S. prisoners while you celebrate this nuclear deal? UPDATE: “Disrespectful,” says Dana Bash."

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable question to me. And Dana Bash slams Garrett as "disrespectful"? That's really something else.

The story even makes Politico, "Barack Obama shuts down reporter: 'You should know better'":

President Barack Obama’s patience grew short during his news conference on Wednesday, telling CBS News correspondent Major Garrett “you should know better” after he asked a question relating to the four Americans being held in Iran.

Obama bristled when Garrett said the president should have to answer for the celebration around the deal, when the detained Americans remain in Iran.

“As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran, three held on trumped-up charges ,according to your administration, one whereabouts unknown,” Garrett said. “Can you tell the country, Sir, why you are content with all the fanfare around this deal to leave the conscience of this nation and the strength of this nation unaccounted for in relation to these four Americans?”

Obama responded: “I gotta give you credit, Major, for how you craft those questions. The notion that I’m content as I celebrate with American citizens languishing in Iranian jails. Major, that’s nonsense and you should know better.”

Why They're Cheering in Tehran

From Frederick Kagan, at the Wall Street Journal, "The nuclear deal is an opaque 159 pages, offering sanctions relief and vague promises of inspections":

The nuclear agreement with Iran announced Tuesday is an astoundingly good deal, far surpassing the hopes of anyone . . . in Tehran. It requires Iran to reduce the number of centrifuges enriching uranium by about half, to sell most of its current uranium stockpile or “downblend” it to lower levels of enrichment, and to accept inspections (whose precise nature is yet to be specified) by the International Atomic Energy Agency, something that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had wanted to avoid.

But the agreement also permits Iran to phase out the first-generation centrifuges on which it now relies and focus its research and development by exclusively using a number of advanced centrifuge models many times more efficient, which has been Tehran’s plan all along. The deal will also entirely end the United Nations’ involvement in Iran’s nuclear program in 10 years, and in 15 years will lift most restrictions on the program.

Even that, though, is not Tehran’s biggest win. The main achievement of the regime’s negotiators is striking a deal that commits the West to removing almost all sanctions on Iran, including most of those imposed to reduce terrorism or to prevent weapons proliferation. Most of the sanctions are likely to end in a few months. Thus the agreement ensures that after a short delay Iran will be able to lay the groundwork for a large nuclear arsenal and, in the interim, expand its conventional military capabilities as much as the regime pleases. The supreme leader should be very proud of his team.

The agreement consists of 159 pages of opaque prose, and key sections are referred to but are not clearly marked. Even figuring out the timeline embodied in the deal is hard, but it appears to run about as follows...

Keep reading.

The Obama administration gave the mullahs a get-out-of-jail-free card, kind of like the clemency program now being launched by the White House.

And see, "Obama’s False Iran Choice."

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Condemns Iran Nuclear Deal: 'One of the Darkest Days in World History' (VIDEO)

At Newsmax, "Netanyahu Denounces 'Historic Mistake' in English, Farsi":

The ink may still be wet on a nuclear accord reached between Iran and Western powers but critics — including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — have already taken to social media to decry it.

And at the New York Times, "Iran Deal Denounced by Netanyahu as 'Historic Mistake'":

JERUSALEM — Furiously denouncing the accord to limit Iran’s nuclear program on Tuesday as a “historic mistake,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel would not be bound by the agreement and warned of negative repercussions in a region already riven with rivalries and armed conflict.

Contrary to President Obama’s assertion that the agreement will cut off every pathway for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, Israel’s leaders rejected the deal as a dangerous compromise that will exacerbate regional tensions and pave the way over time for Iran to produce multiple bombs — “an entire arsenal with the means to deliver it,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Israel views a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to its survival. For Mr. Netanyahu, the accord is the bitter culmination of a long struggle that has severely strained Israel’s relations with the United States, its crucial ally...

More at Israel Matzav, "One of the darkest days in history."

Clarissa Ward Reports: An Inside Look from Yemen -- A Country in the Midst of Civil War

This is excellent reporting, from last night's CBS Evening News:

Iran Seizes Marshall Islands-Flagged Cargo Ship

At the New York Times, "U.S. Sends Destroyer After Iran Detains Ship":

WASHINGTON — The United States Navy sent a destroyer toward the Persian Gulf on Tuesday after Iran took control of a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship it accused of trespassing in territorial waters, American military officials said.

The ship, the Maersk Tigris, with 24 crew members, was intercepted by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps patrol boats on Tuesday morning while traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, a Pentagon official said. The Iranian forces fired shots across the ship’s bow, the official said, after its captain declined an order by the forces to divert farther into Iranian waters.

The official said the ship was traveling through “an internationally recognized maritime route.” After being fired on, it issued a distress call, prompting the United States Navy to direct a destroyer, the Farragut, to the area and to put aircraft on standby to monitor the situation.

The episode threatened fragile negotiations over reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but American officials were quick to play down its significance, correcting initial reports out of Iran that it had seized a United States ship. The Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, have been independent of the United States since 1986 but have a “free association” relationship with the country.

Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said the ship was traveling through Iranian territorial waters that are, by international agreement, open to foreign ships making an innocent passage. He said it was “inappropriate” for Iran to have fired warning shots, but he added that it was too early to know whether Iran’s intervention was a violation of international navigation freedom. Iran has in the past threatened to block the strait, a route for much of the world’s oil.

An American military official said Tuesday that the Farragut was about 60 miles away from the site of the episode, and that as of the afternoon there had been no communication between the United States Navy and Iran.

A Maersk spokesman said that the ship was a charter vessel, not a Maersk-crewed ship. A spokesman for the charter company, Rickmers Shipmanagement, said that the crew members were all Eastern European or Asian, and that the ship had been headed to a port near Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, from Jidda, Saudi Arabia. It was carrying general cargo, “anything from food to machinery to electronics,” he said.

The Rickmers spokesman, Cor Radings, said the captain had said that the ship did not stray into Iranian waters outside the international maritime route. “She was stopped by the Iranians and instructed to go to a rendezvous point in Iranian waters,” he said. “Since then we’ve lost contact with the ship.”

More.

Katherine Zimmerman on CNN's 'The Situation Room'

At AEI, "ISIS is now active inside Yemen (VIDEO)."

Yemen: The New Afghanistan

From Robin Wright, at WSJ:

When I first went to Yemen, two decades ago, it struck me as the one place on earth closest to understanding life on another planet. Everything seemed so different, from the architecture to the rough unsettled terrain. It was as culturally beguiling as it was politically troubled.

The outside world often views Yemen from the vantage of terrorism. It has been the unwilling base for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula since Saudi Arabia’s crackdown forced it out of the kingdom a decade ago. AQAP has become the biggest and boldest al Qaeda franchise since Osama bin Laden’s death. It was invoked by the Kouachi brothers during the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris two weeks ago.

A lot of bad boys have ties to Yemen. The bin Laden family was of Yemeni descent. Among those who still live there is Saudi-born Ibrahim al Asiri, a master bomb-maker linked to the plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Yemen was the home of American-born Anwar al Awlaki, the AQAP ideologue, until a U.S. drone strike killed him in 2011.

The U.S. has launched more than 115 drone strikes against extremists in Yemen since 2002. Many have been killed. Many more still exploit Yemen’s chaos.

But Yemen, which is four times the size of Alabama, is important for other reasons that should be just as important to the outside world. It shouldn’t be written off or seen through a single prism.

Yemen was one of four countries where peaceful demonstrations ousted autocratic leaders in 2011 and 2012. Although the media focuses on the infamous in Yemen, its uprising also produced Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakol Karman, a young dissident, blogger and mother of three, and hundreds of thousands of others who braved danger and death in their strike at the University Square protest camp.

They had plenty of political grievances. Surrounded by oil-rich sheikhdoms, Yemenis have always also had the hardest economic slog. They live in the poorest of the 22 Arab countries–and don’t have massive oil exports to exploit. Per capita income is less than $200 a month. At least 45% of the 26 million people live below the poverty line.

Life is particularly tough for the young generation that led the uprising. The median age is 18–and unemployment among youth is as high at 40%. Yemenis also have the lowest literacy rate.

Like Libya, Yemen has imploded politically since the uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the strongman who ruled for 23 years. (He also led North Yemen for another dozen years before the two halves of the country united in 1990).

His successor, President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, has been unable to enforce the consensus on a new power-sharing formula that emerged from the U.N.-backed National Dialogue in 2013-14. It calls for Yemen to create a federal system with six regions. But Mr. Hadi’s power has eroded since Houthi rebels of Asarallah, or “Partisans of God,” seized part of the capital, San’a, last September.

Yemen is now riven by many fissures: The old north-south divide still defines politics, with a secessionist movement growing ever louder. Strife among diverse tribes, clans and sects have destabilized large chunks of the country. Mr. Saleh’s loyalists and allies in the Republican Guards have maneuvered on behalf of the former president, perhaps hoping for a comeback of sorts.

On Tuesday, less than a day after negotiations between the government and Houthis over a ceasefire and power-sharing deal broke down, Houthi rebels took over the presidential palace and the headquarters of the country’s presidential guard.

Yemen remains in peril. The government is too fragile to be viable, despite support from the U.S. and Gulf monarchies. Key countries began evaluating Monday whether to withdraw diplomats and their nationals in Yemen...