This evening's music features jazz and blues trumpeter Hot Lips Page.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

Iran-Saudi proxy war in Yemen explodes into region-wide crisis

Like a ticking timebomb left unattended for too long, Yemen’s undeclared civil war has suddenly exploded into a region-wide crisis that will have far-reaching, unpredictable international consequences, not least for Britain and the US.

The conflict, spreading outwards like a poison cloud from the key southern battleground around Aden, pits Saudi Arabia, the leading Sunni Muslim power, plus what remains of Yemen’s government against northern-based Houthi rebels, who are covertly backed by Shia Muslim Iran. ...

The so-called Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah (the Supporters of God), belong to the Zaidi sect, a relatively obscure branch of Shia Islam. Formed by members of the northern al-Houthi clan, the group was originally known as Believing Youth and began life in the early 1990s as a revivalist theological movement reportedly teaching peaceful co-existence.

The group was radicalised by the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Anti-American demonstrations brought the group into conflict with the government of the then president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. In 2004, it launched a fully-fledged insurgency. ...

The fact that the Saudis have given the name “Storm of Resolve” to their air operation in Yemen recalls another big joint operation involving US and Saudi ground forces, Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 war to drive Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

The Saudi decision to unveil the international coalition in Washington suggests that the Obama administration, rather than the normally risk-averse regime in Riyadh, may be the driving force behind the intervention. ...

In another regional theatre of war, the Americans find themselves fighting on the same side as the Iranians, using their air power to support Iranian-backed Shia militia attacking Islamic State forces in the Iraqi city of Tikrit. ... Incongruous, too, is the prospect of John Kerry, the US secretary of state, meeting his Iranian counterpart this week in Lausanne to try to seal a nuclear deal with Tehran at the same time as the two countries take drastically opposite sides over Yemen. By dramatising the confrontation with Iran, the Saudis may be sending a not so oblique message to Washington that the nuclear deal, which they oppose, is dangerous and that Tehran is not to be trusted.

Congress Totally Cool With Israel Spying on U.S. Officials Negotiating With Iran

Mossad reportedly listened in to nuclear talks and used the information to lobby Capitol Hill. Democrats and Republican greeted the news with a big shrug.

Israel is spying on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear talks? No problem, key Democrats and Republicans in Congress say. It’s just part of the game.

“I don’t look at Israel or any nation directly affected by the Iranian program wanting deeply to know what’s going on in the negotiations—I just don’t look at that as spying,” Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said. “Their deep existential interest in such a deal, that they would try to figure out anything that they could, that they would have an opinion on it… I don’t find any of that that controversial.” ...

Of course, the White House only found out about this because it too was spying—on Israel.

But if lawmakers were upset by this turn of events, they weren’t showing it Tuesday. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, for one, joked that he was more concerned that Israeli intelligence hadn’t shared what they learned with him.

“One of my reactions was, why haven’t they been coming up here sharing information with me? I mean Israel. I haven’t had any of them coming up and talking with me about where the deal is, so I was kind of wondering who it was they were meeting with. I kind of feel left out, if you know what I’m saying,” Corker said.

If anything, lawmakers said they were perturbed that the Israelis were being accused of spying—not that they did any actual surveillance. Learning the details of the nuclear talk, lawmakers argued, was less like “spying” and more like information gathering.

It's OK to leak government secrets - as long as it benefits politicians

When it comes to classified information, some leaks are more equal than others. If you are a whistleblower like Edward Snowden, who tells the press about illegal, immoral or embarrassing government actions, you will face jail time. But it’s often another story for US government officials leaking information for their own political benefit. ...

Consider a government leak that ran in the New York Times on Monday. The article was about 300 of Hillary Clinton’s now notorious State Department emails, which had been hidden away on her private server for years and were turned over to Congress as part of the never-ending Benghazi investigation. “Four senior government officials” described the content of her emails to New York Times journalists in minute detail “on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to secret information”.

Surely the Obama administration will promptly root out and prosecute those leakers, right? ... But those emails supposedly clear Clinton of any wrongdoing in the Benghazi affair, which likely makes the leak in the administration’s interest.

But that disclosure was nothing compared to what appeared in the Wall Street Journal a day later, in the wake of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s underhanded attempts to derail a nuclear deal with Iran. The Journal reported on Tuesday that not only did Israel spy on Americans negotiating with Iran, but they gave that information to Republicans in Congress, in an attempt to scuttle the deal.

How does the US know this? Well, according to the Journal and its government sources, the US itself intercepted communications between Israeli officials that discussed information that could have only come from the US-Iran talks. The disclosure of this fact sounds exactly like the vaunted “sources and methods” - i.e. how the US conducts surveillance and gets intelligence - that the government continually claims is the most sensitive information they have. It’s why they claim Edward Snowden belongs in jail for decades. So while it’s apparently unacceptable to leak details about surveillance that affects ordinary citizens’ privacy, its OK for officials to do so for their own political benefit - and no one raises an eyebrow.

This really should be read in full. It is totally excellent:

What Rahm Emanuel can learn from crazy lefties

In an interview with The New York Times, an Emanuel adviser sneered at left-wing critics and their political aspirations in classic "Rahmbo" fashion:

"Unless they get the crazy lefty money machine going nationally, it’s not going to matter that there’s a resurgent left," said an adviser to Mr. Emanuel who did not want to speak publicly about strategy. "The liberals at Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park can think great thoughts and read poetry for Chuy, but nothing else will happen." The New York Times

The adviser is probably right about the money. Politics is an expensive business, and fundraising is an inescapable part of the job. There isn't a lot of money flowing to the crazy left wing, which is why Garcia is being so colossally outspent.

However, there is another side to this story. Emanuel's deep strategic weaknesses on policy and politics are a direct result of his predilection for bashing the left. And his predicament is indicative of a major problem with American liberalism. By foreclosing the kind of egalitarian policy that is necessary to improve the fortunes of most people in an age of stark inequality, and by repeatedly denying itself an anchor in the left, the Democratic Party has sowed the seeds of its current political difficulties. ...

Rahm Emanuel is a cynical, mean-spirited politician who unquestionably would have fit right in with the liberal red-baiters of the '50s. As such, he has found himself in trouble. Just like Andrew Cuomo, he expected to sail to re-election on a massive tide of political fundraising, but faced a strong challenger who came seemingly out of nowhere.

And like Cuomo, Emanuel may well win. But his national aspirations are fading fast. It turns out money can only do so much to obscure a politician's failure to materially improve the lives of his constituents.