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Mike Pompeo Wastes No Time Focusing on Iran Regime

April 30, 2018 by admin

Mike Pompeo Wastes No Time Focusing on Iran Regime

Pompeo meets with Saudi officials on his first trip as the new Secretary of States, April 2018

Fresh off his Senate confirmation despite a desperate effort by the Iran lobby to torpedo it, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo kicked off a whirlwind trip overseas with stops at a NATO summit in Brussels, Saudi Arabia and Israel in which he put the Iranian regime front and center of U.S. foreign policy moving forward.

The turnaround from the Obama administration’s attitude towards the Iranian regime is startling and badly needed. Under the previous administration, the focus of making the Iran nuclear deal the centerpiece of its foreign policy achievements drove out all other considerations.

Iranian regime’s long and brutal history of human rights violations was largely ignored as an inconvenient truth. Iran’s status as a state sponsor of terrorism was overlooked and its threats to its neighbors were glossed over by measly promises of “moderation” that never came to pass.

If hindsight is 20/20, then in the three years since the deal was struck, the world has seen Iran’s true colors and it’s largely consisted of red for the blood spilled and black for the charred remains of cities and villages blasted into oblivion in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

To say the world became a much more dangerous place with the rise of Islamic extremism coupled with the outflow of Iranian money supporting terrorist groups is a gross understatement.

And yet, the Obama administration held on to the hope that things would get better, if nothing else because it couldn’t stand to admit that it made a colossal mistake in the approving of the nuclear deal without any conditions on inspection of Iranian regime military sites, its ballistic missile program or meddling in the affairs of its neighbors.

The Trump administration hasn’t been under illusions about Iran’s role in destabilizing activities and has correctly called the mullahs out for their role as the center of troubles in the Middle East. Even more fortunate, this administration frankly doesn’t care much about its perceived public image or the goodwill of academics, television analysts or armchair foreign policy wonks.

Under Pompeo and new national security advisor John Bolton, this administration has been blunt and to the point; a shock to the system of typically mild-mannered diplomacy practiced over the past decade.

Pompeo kicked off his first full day as secretary of state this past Friday at a NATO summit for foreign ministers in Brussels in which he said it was “unlikely” the president would remain in the Iran nuclear deal after the May 12th deadline unless European leaders agreed to a “substantial fix” addressing the president’s concerns.

“Absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the flaws of the deal, he [Trump] is unlikely to stay in that deal,” Pompeo said.

While President Trump has met with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in two visits in which both pressed him to remain in the deal, the president has made it clear what his conditions are to stay in the agreement. The diplomatic ball is now firmly in the hands of European and Iranian negotiators.

But beyond the nuclear agreement, Pompeo continued on to Iranian rival Saudi Arabia to make clear the U.S. position that now views Iranian regime as the greatest threat to regional stability.

Speaking to reporters in Saudi Arabia, Pompeo said the multi-party agreement reached in 2015 to curb Tehran’s nuclear program did not do enough to contain the Islamic Republic. “In fact, Iran has only behaved worse since the deal was approved,” he said.

Secretary Pompeo, cited Iranian regime’s support for the “murderous” government of Syrian President Bashar Assad and also accused the country of arming Houthi rebels in Yemen who have repeatedly targeted Saudi cities with ballistic missiles — a charge denied by Tehran.

“Iran destabilizes this entire region,” Pompeo said, standing alongside his Saudi counterpart in Riyadh. “It is indeed the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world, and we are determined to make sure it never possesses a nuclear weapon.”

That thematic was carried to Israel as Pompeo repeated his talking points while meeting with Israeli officials.

The trip highlighted the forming of a new alliance in the Middle East opposed to Iran’s expansion making strange bedfellows of traditional foes in Saudi Arabia and Israel, along with the Gulf states, many of which have been on the receiving end of Iranian machinations to stir up unrest with protestors and terrorist acts.

The bluntness of the Trump administration has turned the tables on the mullahs who now are the ones on the proverbial hot seat and have to make the decision on whether or not to stay in the deal by acquiescing to the U.S. demands.

While the Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, has worked mightily in an effort to portrays the president’s tough talk as a pathway to war with Iran, the reality has been a clear definition of the expectations for Iranian compliance moving forward and failure of the deal rests squarely with the mullahs in Tehran and nowhere else.

There is no small irony that the discussions taking place now are not about what concessions the U.S. must give to Iran to preserve the nuclear deal, but rather what will the Iranian regime do to stay in a deal that it needs more than the U.S.

The inescapable fact right now confronting the mullahs and Hassan Rouhani is that Iran is a basket case of a nation with a free-falling currency, stagnant economy, dwindling foreign cash reserves and beset with civil unrest and protests on an almost daily basis.

The regime needs the deal badly in order to hang on to any kind of ability to convince the world that it’s indeed a reformed nation, a fiction that has served it well the past few years but has become an outright lie.

Just as North Korea has promised to decommission its nuclear test site and reactor, the president’s tough approach may soon yield the same dividends with Iran.

Laura Carnahan

Filed Under: Blog, News Tagged With: Iran deal, Iran Lobby, NIAC, Pompeo

Iran Lobby Ineffectiveness Reaches New Lows

April 27, 2018 by admin

Iran Lobby Ineffectiveness Reaches New Lows

Iran Lobby Ineffectiveness Reaches New Lows

For the past several weeks, the Iran lobby has mounted a massive effort to try and dissuade the Senate from confirming former CIA chief Mike Pompeo as the next secretary of state, as well as opposing the installation of former UN ambassador John Bolton as the new national security advisor.

This included the usual suspects such as National Iranian American Council staffers such as Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi, as well as NIAC Action head Jamal Abdi busy issuing press statements and drafting editorials and giving interviews to anyone who would bother listening to them.

Gone though are the heady days during the Obama administration when the Iran lobby was part of the vaunted “echo chamber” pushing for passage of the Iran nuclear deal and gaining appearances on mainstream programs such as CNN.

This latest effort to alter the trajectory of President Trump’s latest cabinet additions to his foreign policy team died a quiet death amidst a dearth of any appreciable news coverage of the Iran lobby’s messaging.

Long gone are the days when Parsi could command prime editorial space in major newspapers. Instead, the complaints and whining of the NIAC are relegated to progressive blogs and academic journals.

Their complaints were centered on the same old, refrain warning of the Trump administration’s misguided actions in getting tougher with the Iranian regime leading almost certainly to a path towards war.

It’s the same nonsense NIAC tried pedaling in warning about the president’s tough talk against North Korea and now we see the positive steps coming from that tough talk as the presidents of North and South Korea met in a historic meeting this week in South Korea; marking the first time a North Korean leader set foot across the Demilitarized Zone.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un offered to discuss denuclearization for the first time without preconditions; an admission both startling in its suddenness and shocking in its existence.

Even President Trump’s most ardent critics have reluctantly given him credit for the breakthrough and for setting the stage for the first-ever summit between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader.

It is ironic too considering that North Korea provided Iran with its initial designs for its ballistic missile program, as well as assistance in jump starting its nuclear weapons program.

If North Korea and the U.S. can find an accommodation to abandon nuclear weapons as well as curtail ballistic missile development, then the claims made by NIAC and the rest of the Iran lobby that the Iran nuclear deal would be the best vehicle to achieve those goals will be proven false.

Pompeo’s confirmation by the Senate by a comfortable 57-42 margin also demonstrated how feeble the Iran lobby is now and how it lacks much influence anymore on domestic American politics.

Seven Democratic senators joined with Republicans in approving Pompeo in a strong sign of bipartisan support. It is no coincidence that his approval came after his secret diplomatic mission to North Korea in meeting Kim to discuss the summit with the president in the kind of diplomatic derring-do NIAC has claimed the administration was incapable of conducting.

Far from serving the interests of Iranian-Americans anymore, NIAC has been reduced to either serving as a cheap adjunct to the extreme “progressives” wing in order to keep money flowing or parrot whatever comes out of the mouths of the foreign ministry in Tehran.

Worse yet, NIAC seems to get more press from regime-controlled publications than any in the U.S. Even Parsi’s tweets have taken on an edge of near-panic.

“WAKE UP AMERICA! Trump’s about to start a war with #Iran and he’s openly telegraphing it. He’ll kill the #IranDeal (the deal that restricted Iran’s program) and then threatens war if Iran restarts the program – which it’ll only do if Trump kills the deal.” — Trita Parsi (@tparsi) April 24, 2018

One has to wonder why Parsi and the rest of NIAC are fixated on fighting battles to oppose the president at every turn, they remain strangely silent on more recent moves by the mullahs in Tehran to oppress its people and further try to destabilize the region.

The regime for example took the first steps to the popular Telegram instant messaging app used by over half of the Iranian population by banning the ability of Iranians to swap videos and pictures on it.

The act was taken by the regime to try and halt the near constant flow of videos and pictures being sent around and outside of Iran of protests and acts of oppression by the regime including arrests and beatings by regime police.

Also, the U.S. has stepped up surveillance to monitor the movement of suspected Iranian anti-air and ballistic missiles inside Syria as concern mounted the Iranian regime was moving its military forces into position for possible strikes against U.S.-backed coalition forces or even Israel.

Amidst these new actions, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif arrived in New York for a weeklong visit and was met by large protests from Iranian dissident and human rights groups.

Several dozen supporters of the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC) joined a demonstration Monday across the street from New York’s Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as it hosted a discussion with Zarif on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and U.S.-Iran relations.

Shirin Nariman, the organizer of Monday’s protest, told VOA Persian that her group objected to Zarif’s invitation to speak at CFR. “The people of Iran have spoken [through anti-government street protests] in the last few months and showed that they don’t want this regime at all — not even a part of it,” Nariman said.

We can only hope that the ever-shrinking influence of the Iran lobby and NIAC continues to eventually disappear.

 

Filed Under: Blog, News Tagged With: Featured, Iran deal, Iran Lobby, Jamal Abdi, National Iranian American Council, NIAC, NIAC Action, North Korea, Pompeo, Reza Marashi, Trita Parsi

Iran Lobby Shows its Hypocrisy in Latest Attacks on US

December 4, 2017 by admin

Iran Lobby Shows its Hypocrisy in Latest Attacks on US

Iran Lobby Shows its Hypocrisy in Latest Attacks on US

The recent media speculation over U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s alleged precarious employment status has given rise to a cottage industry overnight of second-guessing by various talking heads and analysts over what a potential change at Foggy Bottom might look like in terms of future US policy.

The Iran lobby, specifically the National Iranian American Council, was swift to jump on the bandwagon and raise the specter of a push by “neocons” to put one of their own into the seat and go to war against the Iranian regime.

The focus of that smear attack was Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) who has been a vocal critic of the Iranian regime, especially the nuclear agreement.

It serves the Iran lobby’s purposes to push the narrative that Trump administration’s primary focus is to somehow foment a war with Iran; even though no administration official—from the president on down—has never even hinted at such an outcome, let alone advocated it.

The narrative though helps the Iran lobby by feeding into the fear factor it has long used in warning against taking any aggressive actions to restrain the mullahs in Tehran. Remember how during the run up in negotiations over the nuclear agreement how the NIAC and its allies pushed the image of a war between Iran and the US as the reason for completing the deal?

The Iran lobby has always used fear mongering as a PR tactic and in the case of Secretary Tillerson, it is going all out to push it again.

The best example was an editorial authored by Trita Parsi and Ryan Costello of the NIAC on its website with the provocative headline of: “Cotton, Pompeo and Trump are a Recipe for War with Iran.”

Hyperbole aside, Parsi and Costello argue a scenario where Tillerson is replaced by current CIA director Mike Pompeo and he is replaced at the intelligence agency by Cotton. Of course Parsi and Costello offer no proof for such a scenario other than a vague “reported plan.”

There is no better example of trolling fake news than what Parsi and Costello are doing.

They go on to recite a history of Pompeo and Cotton’s record—which is already well known—of their doubts about the Iran nuclear deal and of the ability to rein in Iranian extremism, but couch it in a way to convey the idea that both are some crazed blood thirsty war mongers.

“What of the man that Pompeo would replace, Rex Tillerson? It is indisputable that Tillerson has been a disaster on many fronts, in particular, his campaign to gut the State Department which will do untold damage to American diplomacy for years to come. Yet, on the Iran nuclear deal, Tillerson has actually allied with Secretary of Defense James Mattis to urge Trump against ripping up the deal. The loss of Tillerson, combined with Cotton’s elevation, would mean that Pompeo and Cotton could face little resistance in their campaign to unravel a nuclear accord that is working and downplay the likely alternative ― war,” Parsi and Costello write.

In the twisted little world that Parsi and Costello are trying to fabricate, they stick to the logic that unraveling the nuclear accord can only lead to war; a preposterous idea when considered alongside the reality of since the deal was passed.

In the wake of the Iran nuclear deal, the Middle East has devolved into a region-wide war zone due largely to actions by Tehran, including the bloody civil war in Syria that sent four million refugees flooding across Europe and another sectarian uprising in Yemen that now threatens to bring Saudi Arabia into direct conflict with Iran.

Far from producing a peaceful world, Iranian regime has been at the epicenter of some of the worst conflicts taking place now; a far cry from the absurdist claims made by Parsi and Costello.

Of course, neither ever takes Tehran to task for supporting those wars, nor for its North Korean-like fanatical support for developing ballistic missiles; a point reinforced by a regime spokesman in denouncing comments made by French president Emmanuel Macron criticizing the missile expansion program.

“French official, other officials, who want to speak about Iran’s affairs need to pay attention to the deep developments that have come to pass in the region in past decades and the big changes between the current situation and the past,” said Bahram Qassemi, regime foreign ministry spokesman, according to state media.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will definitely not negotiate on defense and missile issues,” he added.

Tension between Iran and France increased last month when Macron said that Iran should be less aggressive in the region and should clarify its ballistic missile program. His foreign minister also denounced, during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Iran’s “hegemonic temptations.”

France’s criticisms only echo those made by then-candidate Donald Trump and his current administration’s positions, and yet Parsi and Costello avoid criticizing the French on the same issue.

The hypocrisy of their positions is readily apparent as they fabricate Tillerson’s potential demise in order to create a false narrative, but not apply the same standard in criticizing the much-more revealing truth behind Iranian actions over the past four years.

Pompeo and national security adviser HR McMaster spoke at length about Iranian expansion in “weak states” in the Middle East at the 2017 Reagan National Defense Forum in California this weekend.

Pompeo confirmed he sent a letter recently to Maj. Gen Qassem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s foreign operations arm or Quds Force.

“I sent a note. I sent it because he had indicated that forces under his control might in fact threaten US interests in Iraq,” Pompeo said.

“He refused to open the letter. It didn’t break my heart to be honest with you. What we were communicating to him in that letter was that we will hold he and Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests in Iraq by forces that are under their control. We wanted to make sure he and the leadership in Iran understood that in a way that was crystal clear.”

Far from being a call to war, Pompeo’s effort to reach out to Soleimani only illustrated the focus of the Trump administration to rein in Iranian expansionism, not start a shooting war.

If there are any real war mongers here, they live in Tehran, not Washington.

Michael Tomlinson

Filed Under: Blog, News Tagged With: Featured, Iran deal, Iran Lobby, Iran Talks, IRGC, Khamenei, National Iranian American Council, NIAC, NIAC Action, Pompeo, Ryan Costello, Tom Cotton, Trita Parsi

National Iranian-American Council (NIAC)

  • Bogus Memberships
  • Survey
  • Lobbying
  • Iranians for International Cooperation
  • Defamation Lawsuit
  • People’s Mojahedin
  • Trita Parsi Biography
  • Parsi/Namazi Lobbying Plan
  • Parsi Links to Namazi & Iranian Regime
  • Namazi, NIAC Ringleader
  • Collaborating with Iran’s Ambassador

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