Tag Archives: Mike Pompeo

Will Next Steps on Iran Point towards a New ‘Big Three’ or World War III? by James George Jatras

Posted on July 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

Is the Trump administration and Iran going to be a replay of Trump and North Korea, or is it going to be a replay of Bush and Iraq in 2003? Stay tuned. From James George Jatras at strategic-culture.org:

On July 22 US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a bizarre speech on Iran. Delivered from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, and ostensibly addressed to the Iranian-American community, the speech’s staging clearly sought to evoke the fall of communism, casting the Ayatollahs in the role of Leonid Brezhnev and company.

Iranian “regime change” is not the publicly stated goal of the Trump Administration’s policy. But it is hard to see how US demands on Tehran don’t amount to exactly that, with Pompeo comparing the Iranian “regime” (a term used dozens of times to imply illegitimacy) to a “mafia.” He asserted that Iran’s behavior is “at root in the revolutionary nature of the regime itself.” What can change its “root” or “nature” without ceasing to be itself?

Pompeo demanded not just a total change in policy from Tehran but a different mode of governance amounting to Iran’s ceasing to be an independent regional power. The Reagan venue’s analogy to the collapse of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe echoed in the Secretary’s heavy emphasis on “a new 24/7 Farsi-language TV channel” spanning “not only television, but radio, digital, and social media format, so that the ordinary Iranians inside of Iran and around the globe can know that America stands with them.”

The US position on Iran is that it is solely a question of removing a layer of malign governance, after which democracy, tolerance, peace, and general niceness will spontaneously break forth, and justice will roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Just like happened in Iraq after 2003. Just like in Libya.

Never mind that Iran isn’t North America or Europe. Never mind that American and European ideas of social and personal liberty would be anathema to an unknown but significant percentage of Iran’s population. Never mind that the replacement for the Ayatollahs envisioned by many Administration big shots, the cultish People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (Mojahedin-e Khalq, MEK), may not be particularly democratic or popular with Iranians. Don’t bother us with details – the neo-Bolshevik myth of a spontaneous uprising by the oppressed masses (with a little help from outside, like the Kaiser’s generals were kind enough to provide Lenin) is alive and well in Washington.

To continue reading: Will Next Steps on Iran Point towards a New ‘Big Three’ or World War III?

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government

Tagged ,

Round the Bend, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on July 27, 2018 | Leave a comment

American politics grows increasingly daft. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

The political insanity roiling the USA only gets worse, with no end in sight. On Wednesday, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass), made the astonishing statement on CNN that “the American people wanted a confrontation, not a conversation,” between Presidents Trump and Putin in Helsinki.

Really? We wanted a mud wrestling bout and all we got was some lousy chit-chat? Next time, maybe Mr. Trump will bring a fungo bat to the room and “tune up” his counterpart — a popular negotiating technique from the rough-and-tumble New York City construction scene back in Mr. Trump’s halcyon days. Some people you just can’t reason with, especially the hell-spawned man-beast who personally directed Russian “meddling” and “interference” in our election and stole certain victory from president-designee Hillary. (I know this because The New York Times and The Washington Post said so.)

Another astonishment: in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US would not recognize Crimea as part of Russia and would demand the return of the region to Ukraine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Pompeo is pissing up a rope on that one. Russia will not give up its warm-water naval bases on the Black Sea anymore than the US will return its San Diego naval installation to Mexico, and Mr. Pompeo knows it. So do the posturing idiots on the senate committee, who apparently forgot that our own government officials fomented the 2014 Ukrainian coup that prompted Russia to annex Crimea and its military assets in the first place.

How many of you feel a gnawing disgust and contempt for both sides of the US political spectrum? The news, day and night, reveals a nation unable to think, unable to discern reality from fantasy, avid to dissemble and lie about absolutely everything, eager to support any racketeering operation designed to fleece its own citizens, and utterly ignoring the genuine problems that can drive us into a new dark age.

On balance, and just for now, I’m more disturbed by the side represented by the Democratic Party, aka the “progressives” or “the Resistance,” because they are responsible for politicizing the FBI before, during, and after the 2016 election and that was a dastardly act of institutional debauchery in an agency with the power to destroy the lives and careers of American citizens. The product of that corruption is a dangerous manufactured hysteria inciting hostility and aggression against another nation that could lead to a war that humanity will not recover from.

To continue reading: Round the Bend

Leave a comment

Posted in Government, Media, Politics

Tagged ,

Pompeo’s Ridiculous Crocodile Tears for Iranian People, by Muhammad Sahimi

Posted on July 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

Nobody in Iran thinks Trump, Pompeo, Bolton and company gives two shits about the people of Iran. From Muhammad Sahimi at antiwar.com:

On Sunday 22 July 2018 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke before what the State Department claimed to be representatives of the Iranian-American community in the United States. Attendance was by invitation only, and the questions had to be submitted in advance, so that they could be vetted. Those who attended were mostly supporters of “regime change” in Iran by imperialist military intervention: old monarchists who still dream of going back to power in Iran; supporters of the MEK, the opposition organization that is universally hated by the Iranian people due to the many treasons committed by it, an organization that up until 2011 was listed by the State Department as a terrorist group, and rich Iranian Zionists who support Israel fervently. Interestingly, they mostly wanted to remain anonymous also.

Based on what the author read in social networks, a very large majority of Iranians living in the United States were opposed to even attending the speech, let alone agreeing with what Pompeo had to say. Pompeo’s speech was supposedly intended to express the Trump administration’s support for the Iranian people, and that is where the absurdity of the administration’s policy toward Iran – if one can call it as such – and the speech itself becomes evident immediately.

To see this, consider the following:

Pompeo has worked closely with some of the most virulent Islamophobes in the United States. He and national security adviser John Bolton made Islamophobia mainstream, yet Pompeo sheds crocodile tears for 83 million Iranians, 98 percent of whom are Muslim.

Pompeo and Bolton have called for bombing Iran, and yet Pompeo’s is under the illusion that the Iranian people believe that he is their friend.

Pompeo and the Trump administration claim to be friends of Iranian people, yet Iranian citizens have been banned from coming to the United States. In his speech Pompeo uttered not a single word about the ban.

Pompeo [and Bolton] were ardent foes of the nuclear agreement between Iran and P5+1 – the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany – officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The administration exited JCPOA illegally, and is trying to re-impose tough economic sanctions on Iran. Not only JCPOA benefited the Iranian people economically, it also contributed to lessening tension in the Middle East and elsewhere. It is supported almost unanimously by the Iranian people both in Iran and in the diaspora, yet Pompeo “laments” the economic plights of the Iranian people that will be even worse after the re-imposition of the sanctions.

To continue reading: Pompeo’s Ridiculous Crocodile Tears for Iranian People

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, Politics, War

Tagged , , , ,

State Dept Insider: “Eerily Familiar Drumbeat Of War Intensifying” Ahead Of Pompeo’s Iran Speech, by Reza Marashi

Posted on July 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

Many Iranians don’t like their government, but they like the idea of the US “changing” their government even less. From Razi Marashi at zerohedge.com:

Reza Marashi served in the Office of Iranian Affairs at the U.S. State Department and is currently research director at the National Iranian American Council. He is frequently consulted by Western governments on Iran-related matters. He took to Twitter on Friday to sound the alarm ahead of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s upcoming address called “Supporting Iranian Voices,” set to be held Sunday at the Reagan Library, warning as a former longtime State Department insider that this is not about “rights” or “democracy promotion” but that the wheels of the Washington regime change machine are turning.

And now I shall go on one of my famous rants. This time about Mike Pompeo’s upcoming speech on “Supporting Iranian Voices.” This is going to be long. Find your favorite comfy chair. Put on some cozy attire – sweatpants, perhaps. Pop some popcorn. Pour yourself an adult beverage.

To date, out of respect for my friends still fighting the good fight at the State Department, I have kept silent about this heavy, wet, overflowing diaper of everything that should not be. But I keep getting asked about it, so I will oblige once and then let the clown show carry on.

An eerily familiar drumbeat of war is intensifying across DC, as the continues its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. The ghosts of America’s neoconservative past are dusting off their Iraq playbook to make the case for war with Iran.

Their formula is simple but effective: Portray the Iranian government as an existential threat, insist that a chain of catastrophic events will result from inaction, and minimize costs and risks of the war that is necessary to facilitate their regime change efforts.

If one looks back, however, neocons weren’t alone in their push for war with Iraq. A crucial aspect of selling the war to the U.S. public was a modicum of support within the Iraqi-American community.

Iraqi exiles living abroad, such as Ahmed Chalabi and Kanan Makiya, as well as supposed whistle-blowers turned known fabricators like the infamous “Curveball,” led a contingent of vocal Iraqis who pushed for steadily more aggressive actions to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Their promise that the invasion would be a cakewalk and that U.S. soldiers would be greeted with flowers and candy didn’t quite pan out. Now, the fruits of their labor are clear for all to see — a broken country, devastated by war, with no discernible end in sight.

To continue reading: State Dept Insider: “Eerily Familiar Drumbeat Of War Intensifying” Ahead Of Pompeo’s Iran Speech

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics, War

Tagged , , ,

The Murder of Julian Assange, by Kurt Nimmo

Posted on June 23, 2018 | 2 comments

The US government wants to prosecute Julian Assange and lock him away for life. From Kurt Nimmo at kurtnimmo.blog:

It was a fool’s errand.

On the day Donald Trump was elected his supporters asked him to pardon the founder and frontman of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. They flooded social media demanding Assange be allowed to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London without arrest and extradition to the United States. 

Stone silence from Trump and his administration. 

A few months before the election, WikiLeaks released a searchable archive of over 30,000 emails and attachments taken from Hillary Clinton’s not-so private email server. 

Trump held no aversion to exploiting the emails. He called them the Crooked Hillary emails and said they endangered the national security of the United States. 

Democrats called foul, said Assange had colluded with Putin and the Russians. 

In April, they filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Russian government, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks. They argue there was a widespread conspiracy to swing the 2016 election.

They have zero evidence of this. Evidence is no longer required. Accusations alone now serve to take down leaders and destroy careers. 

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are no longer of use to Donald Trump. 

He dished out pardons to ex-Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and neocon leaker Scooter Libby. Trump mulled other pardons, including a posthumous one for Muhammad Ali to wipe out his draft dodging conviction. It was reported in June Trump insiders are pushing to pardon the junk bond king Michael Milken and reverse his conviction on securities fraud. The Milken pardon is being pushed by Goldman Sachs alumnus and current Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. 

Meanwhile, Julian Assange is left to twist in the wind. 

Both Trump’s attorney general and his former CIA director, now secretary of state Mike Pompeo want Assange extradited to the United States where he will face trial and possible execution for espionage. 

AG Jeff Sessions said the arrest and prosecution of Assange is a priority for the United States government, while Pompeo denounced him as a “hostile intelligence service,” never mind he had no problem using the Clinton emails to accuse the DNC of sabotaging the Bernie Sanders campaign. 

To continue reading: The Murder of Julian Assange

2 Comments

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Media, Surveillance

Tagged , ,

Is US Bellicosity Backfiring? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on May 25, 2018 | Leave a comment

Does Trump want US bellicosity to backfire? From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

U.S. threats to crush Iran and North Korea may yet work, but as of now neither Tehran nor Pyongyang appears to be intimidated.

Repeated references by NSC adviser John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence to the “Libya model” for denuclearization of North Korea just helped sink the Singapore summit of President Trump and Kim Jong Un. To North Korea, the Libya model means the overthrow and murder of Libya strongman Col. Gadhafi, after he surrendered his WMD.

Wednesday, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui exploded at Pence’s invocation of Libya: “Vice-President Pence has made unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya … I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks.

“Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.”

Yesterday, Trump canceled the Singapore summit.

Earlier this week at the Heritage Foundation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out our Plan B for Iran in a speech that called to mind Prussian Field Marshal Karl Von Moltke.

Among Pompeo’s demands: Iran must end all support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, withdraw all forces under Iranian command in Syria, and disarm its Shiite militia in Iraq.

Iran must confess its past lies about a nuclear weapons program, and account publicly for all such activity back into the 20th century.

Iran must halt all enrichment of uranium, swear never to produce plutonium, shut down its heavy water reactor, open up its military bases to inspection to prove it has no secret nuclear program, and stop testing ballistic missiles.

And unless Iran submits, she will be strangled economically.

What Pompeo delivered was an ultimatum: Iran is to abandon all its allies in all Mideast wars, or face ruin and possible war with the USA.

It is hard to recall a secretary of state using the language Pompeo deployed: “We will track down Iranian operatives and their Hezbollah proxies operating around the world and crush them. Iran will never again have carte blanche to dominate the Middle East.”

But how can Iran “dominate” a Mideast that is home to Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt, as well as U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and Syria?

To continue reading: Is US Bellicosity Backfiring?

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military

Tagged , , , ,

Unwarranted Hysteria: The Iranian Threat Is Inflated and Regional War Would Be a Disaster, by Danny Sjursen

Posted on May 18, 2018 | 1 comment

After Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, there are still people, some in the highest reaches of the US government, who think the US can “take out” Iran and its probable allies, Russia and China, no problem. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

“The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran. The behavior and the objectives of the [Iranian] regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself. And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!”

~ National Security Adviser John Bolton, 2017

America’s president is being advised by unhinged warmongers. Pay attention, folks – war with Iran is what men like Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu want, and, it’s war they might just get; consequences be damned! With President Trump scuttling the Iran nuclear deal and threatening to impose new sanctions – against the advice of every major European ally – war seems like a genuine, if horrifying, possibility.

Here’s a prediction: (though forecasting is always a dangerous game) President Trump will strike some sort of deal with already nuclear North Korea, vie for a Nobel Peace Prize, and then unleash the U.S. and Israeli military on non-nuclear Iran. The results will be catastrophic.

Israel, no doubt, wants war with Iran, and just this past week blasteddozens of Iranian military sites in Syria. If Netanyahu and his far-right cabal in Tel Aviv want a disastrous, destabilizing war, then let them have it. The problem is that Bibi is counting on big brother Donald Trump and the US to back his play and join the fray. But that war, an American-Iranian conflagration, is not inevitable and ill-advised. The president, a man who ran on a platform of no new “dumb wars” – like the Iraq invasion – and ought to stick to his campaign pledge.

Here’s the bottom line: 1) Iran is neither the threat nor the monster it is billed as; and 2) The actual conduct and results of a major war with the Islamic Republic would be disastrous.

Let’s start with the purported threat of Iran. We are told that Iran is a regional ogre, bent on Mideast dominance and the creation of a new Persian Empire. It is staunchly dedicated to the absolute annihilation of the state of Israel. This all makes for excellent propaganda but is just empirically false!

To continue reading: Unwarranted Hysteria: The Iranian Threat Is Inflated and Regional War Would Be a Disaster

 

1 Comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, War

Tagged , , , ,

Is Trump Assembling a War Cabinet? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on March 27, 2018 | 1 comment

If personnel is policy, then Trump is preparing for war. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general affectionately known to his Marines as “Mad Dog.”

Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with Iran is a dreadful idea.

Yet, other than Mattis, President Donald Trump seems to be creating a war cabinet.

Trump himself has pledged to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal — “the worst deal ever” — and reimpose sanctions in May.

His new national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote an op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” has called for preemptive strikes and “regime change.”

Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo calls Iran “a thuggish police state,” a “despotic theocracy,” and “the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East.”

Trump’s favorite Arab ruler, 32-year-old Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, calls Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei “the Hitler of the Middle East.”

Bibi Netanyahu is monomaniacal on Iran, calling the nuclear deal a threat to Israel’s survival and Iran “the greatest threat to our world.”

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley echoes them all.

Yet Iran appears not to want a war. U.N. inspectors routinely confirm that Iran is strictly abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal.

Have something to say about this column?
Visit Pat’s FaceBook page and post your comments….

While U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf often encountered Iranian “fast attack” boats and drones between January 2016 and August 2017, that has stopped. Vessels of both nations have operated virtually without incident.

What would be the result of Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal?

To continue reading: Is Trump Assembling a War Cabinet?

1 Comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics

Tagged , ,

Climate Exit, by John Stossel

Posted on March 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

Somebody has something nice to say about Mike Pompeo…and SLL agrees with it! From John Stossel at theburningplatform.com:

Climate Exit

President Trump’s pick to be the new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is not a fan of the Paris climate agreement, the treaty that claims it will slow global warning by reducing the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Politicians from most of the world’s nations signed the deal, and President Obama said “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”

That’s dubious.

Trump wisely said he will pull America out of the deal. He called it a “massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.”

Unfortunately, Trump often reverses himself.

The climate change lobby has been trying to change Trump’s mind. Al Gore called his stance “reckless and indefensible.” Most of the media agree. So do most of my neighbors in New York.

That’s why it’s good that Pompeo opposes the Paris deal. Such treaties are State Department responsibilities. Pompeo is more likely to hold Trump to his word than his soon-to-be predecessor Rex Tillerson, who liked the agreement.

The Paris accord is a bad deal because even if greenhouse gases really are a huge threat, this treaty wouldn’t do much about them.

I’ll bet Al Gore and most of the media don’t even know what’s in the accord. I didn’t until I researched it for this week’s YouTube video.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Oren Cass is the rare person who actually read the Paris accord.

Cass tells me it’s “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” I interviewed him for a video project I am doing with City Journal, a smart policy magazine that often makes the case for smaller government. “You don’t even have to mention greenhouse gases in your commitment if you don’t want to. You send in any piece of paper you want.”

The Paris accord was just political theater, he says. “They stapled it together and held it up and said, ‘This is amazing!’”

To continue reading: Climate Exit

Leave a comment

Posted in Economics, Environment, Governments, Science

Tagged ,

Pompeo and Haspel are Symptoms of a Deeper Problem, by Ron Paul

Posted on March 19, 2018 | 1 comment

The CIA and the State Department pay lip service only to the Constitution, and engage in all sorts of activity that is both criminal and contrary to US interests. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

President Trump’s recent cabinet shake-up looks to be a real boost to hard-line militarism and neo-conservatism. If his nominees to head the State Department and CIA are confirmed, we may well have moved closer to war.

Before being chosen by Trump to head up the CIA, Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo was one of the most pro-war Members of Congress. He has been militantly hostile toward Iran, and many times has erroneously claimed that Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror. The truth is, Iran neither attacks nor threatens the United States.

At a time when President Trump appears set to make history by meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un face-to-face, Pompeo remains dedicated to a “regime change” policy that leads to war, not diplomacy and peace. He blames Iran – rather than the 2003 US invasion – for the ongoing disaster in Iraq. He enthusiastically embraced the Bush policy of “enhanced interrogation,” which the rest of us call “torture.”

Speaking of torture, even if some of the details of Trump’s CIA nominee Gina Haspel’s involvement in the torture of Abu Zubaydah are disputed, the mere fact that she helped develop an interrogation regimen that our own government admitted was torture, that she oversaw an infamous “black site” where torture took place, and that she covered up the evidence of her crimes should automatically disqualify her for further government service.

In a society that actually valued the rule of law, Haspel may be facing time in a much different kind of federal facility than CIA headquarters.

While it may be disappointing to see people like Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and Gina Haspel as the head of the CIA, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. The few areas where President Trump’s actions are consistent with candidate Trump’s promises are ripping up the nuclear deal with Iran and embracing the torture policies of President George W. Bush. Candidate Trump in late 2015 promised to bring back waterboarding “and a whole lot worse” if he became president. It seems that is his intention with the elevation of Pompeo and Haspel to the most senior positions in his Administration.

To continue reading: Pompeo and Haspel are Symptoms of a Deeper Problem

1 Comment

Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Intelligence

Tagged ,