In Mike Pompeo, Trump taps an Iran hawk whose views dovetail with his own
WASHINGTON — Mike Pompeo, US President Donald Trump’s pick to become secretary of state, is an unabashed Iran hawk who vehemently opposed the 2015 nuclear deal, and has sought a more aggressive approach toward Tehran since joining the administration as CIA Director in January 2017.
...
Tillerson will now be succeeded by a figure who has stood out as an Iran hardliner. After former president Barack Obama forged the landmark agreement with world powers and Iran in July 2015, Pompeo, then a Congressman from Kansas, immediately castigated the pact as both ineffectual and weak.
He said the accord would not “stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb” and that it “places Israel at more risk.” He scorned the notion, perpetuated by the Obama administration, that the deal would open Tehran up to the international economy and thus allow it to potentially join the community of nations. He said the “theory that post-sanctions Iran will moderate is a joke – they want to annihilate Israel.”
Furthermore, he demanded that it should have been a prerequisite for Iran to halt its routine saber rattling against the Jewish state. “Ceasing to call for the destruction of Israel should have been a condition of the Iran Deal – along with release of innocent American hostages,” he said that summer.
Since assuming his post as Trump’s CIA director he has not only made it a habit to show up in person to the daily intelligence briefing, but to give speeches calling for a more bellicose policy toward the Islamic Republic.
Shortly after he was nominated for that role, he said he looked forward to “rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
And the day before Trump decertified the Iran nuclear deal under domestic law, Pompeo gave a speech at the University of Texas in Austin labeling the country as “a thuggish police state” and a “despotic theocracy.” He further compared its ruler’s aspirations as commensurate to those of the Islamic State terror group.
“Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are the cudgels of a despotic theocracy, with the IRGC accountable only to a Supreme Leader,” he said. “They’re the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-mike-pompeo-trump-taps-an-iran-hawk-whose-views-dovetail-with-his-own/
Tillerson was an impediment to war with Iran, and he has now been removed.
= new reply since forum marked as read
