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I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing our old friend, Mohammad Sahimi.
Now look at him writing at the Quincy Institute, responsiblestatecraft.org, and we ran this, I think, yesterday on antiwar.com.
When it comes to Iran, how many failures is enough for Pompeo?
That's my man.
Welcome back.
How you doing, Mohammad?
I'm doing fine.
Thank you for having me on your program, Scott.
I love talking with you and hate Pompeo.
And so I like the theme of this whole thing.
It's a Gareth Porter type analysis, but with just the right Hortonian sort of venom in it as well, which is good motivation for taking us through step by step how Mike Pompeo screwed all of us with his ridiculous maximum pressure policy against Iran in the first Trump administration.
I totally agree.
I mean, Pompeo has been after starting a war with Iran for many years.
I mean, we know that when he was a congressman from Kansas, he advocated bombing Iran's nuclear facilities in Iran.
And he just said that 2,000 bombings should do the job, as if if they do the 2,000 bombing, Iran will not react, as if no war will be started, as if nobody will be killed, and so on and so forth.
Then he joined the administration and became director of the CIA.
And from the first minute he joined the administration, he has been after starting a war with Iran, or if he cannot start a war with Iran, somehow get the regime in Tehran overthrown.
So in order to do that, he has pursued all sorts of ways and plans and plots.
None of them has succeeded.
The only success, if we can call it success, is that it has isolated the United States internationally to the extent that when he went to the U.N. Security Council a couple of weeks ago to claim the absurd claim that the U.S. is still a member of the nuclear agreement with Iran, in order to reimpose old U.N. sanctions against Iran, nobody bought his arguments.
But this is not just what, this is just his most recent attempt, but as I explained in the article, he started this long time ago, especially when he became director of CIA.
And we both know at that time that when Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, the U.S. special forces had obtained a lot of his documents and had brought them to the U.S.
So when Pompeo became the director of CIA, he basically wanted to use those documents to see whether he can establish any link between the Iranian government and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, his group al-Qaeda, so that he can use that as an excuse to be able to invoke the 2002 U.S. Congress resolution that gave the president the authority to go to war with terrorists globally.
But of course, that link doesn't really exist, because, you know, we have a lot of evidence and we have a lot of documents that are to the contrary, but that didn't stop him.
So what he did was he gave those documents, before he released them to the public, he gave them the documents to the so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracy, you know, a very well-funded pro-Israeli, hawkish lobby in Washington that opposed the nuclear agreement with Iran and has always advocated economic sanctions with Iran.
And even, you know, Mark David, its director, has even talked about going to war with Iran.
Pompeo was hoping that FDD would find the evidence that he liked to see.
And of course, FDD, you know, they looked at the documents, they went through it, thousands of them, thousands of pages of them, and they published an article in a journal that they published, the Long War Journal, in which they claimed that, you know, such evidence does exist and it does link Iran to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
But of course, we know that this has a rather old history, because this actually started during the George W. Bush administration, when they wanted to attack Iran, and they were looking for an excuse.
But what these guys don't say is that after U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, a lot of senior members of al-Qaeda escaped to Iran, and Iran arrested all of them and jailed them, and then proposed to the Bush administration, after Bush invaded Iraq, and the leadership of MEK, the Mujahedin Khalkh Organization, came under protection of the U.S. in Iraq, Iran suggested that they exchange the leadership, the senior leadership of al-Qaeda that they had in jail in Iran, with the senior leadership of MEK in Iraq.
We know MEK cooperated with the regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, even though he's an Iranian organization.
MEK also helped Saddam Hussein to put down the Shias' rebellion in 1991 during the first Persian Gulf War, and they had also acted as spies for Israel.
They had carried out a lot of terrorist operations within Iran.
So Iran has suggested that they would give the senior members of al-Qaeda to George W.
Bush administration, and in return they would receive the MEK leadership.
But Bush and Dick Cheney wanted to use MEK for their future adventures, and therefore they refused to do that.
So they began talking about Iran having a link with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
And this is contrary to the universally accepted fact that Osama bin Laden and his documents obtained from Pakistan showed it clearly that he hated Shias, and in particular he hated Iran.
But that didn't, of course, stop Bush and Cheney, and then it didn't stop Pompeo.
But whatever flimsy evidence that FTD found in the documents was so bad and so inconsequential and so meaningless that nobody took it seriously.
Even Pompeo didn't take it seriously after realizing that that's not the path to go.
So basically that was the start of his effort to try to spark a war with Iran, or do something that Iranians would react strongly, and that would provide an excuse to the United States to attack Iran.
Well, or at least to make sure at that time, was that, well I should make sure, was that before Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, that was in what, March of 2018?
Exactly, yes.
So this was before that, right?
This was to help pressure him to get out of the deal at that point.
Yes, exactly, yes.
And so at that time Tillerson, who was the CEO of Exxon, he was the Secretary of State and Pompeo was still at CIA, but Pompeo worked with Bolton, the National Security Advisor, to help encourage Trump to go ahead and break the deal then, right?
Exactly.
I think Tillerson had tried to talk him out of it, but maybe that encouraged him to do it more.
More, and then they forced Tillerson out, and then Mike Pompeo was appointed Secretary of State, and then he announced his maximum pressure policy against Iran.
He set 12 conditions for Iran that if Iran acted upon them and did what Pompeo was telling them, then the Trump administration would start negotiating a new nuclear deal with Iran.
But of course, those 12 conditions, everyone knows, and at that time a lot of experts and analysts commented that those 12 conditions were basically tantamount to Iran capitulating, surrendering completely.
And of course, Iranians, regardless of what we think of the regime in Tehran, and I don't like them at all, but they were not going to surrender, you know, especially when it comes to a country like Iran, because Iran is not a new country, it's an old country that has existed there for thousands of years.
So they are not going just to, you know, throw their hands up and surrender, and that basically, that has continued.
So yeah, he has ratcheted up the pressure every few months.
He has tried all sorts of ways to, in order to either create a condition.
I think his main hope at the beginning, and this was probably, this was something that he probably learned from the exiled opposition, Iranian opposition in Washington, the part of opposition that I call the fake opposition, because we have true opposition to the Iranian regime in Tehran, and we have the true, the fake opposition.
And this division is actually used in Iran also.
The fake oppositions are that part of the opposition that advocates economic sanctions against Iran, advocates, supports military intervention in the name of humanitarian intervention.
And even some of the groups in this fake opposition are secessionist groups, the groups that supposedly represent ethnic groups, and they, one way or another, they want to separate from Iran.
So they have basically deceived Pompeo that, you know, by imposing economic sanctions on Iran, Iranians will revolt and go out on the street, millions of them, and demonstrate and then topple the regime the way it happened in 1979.
But of course, in 1979, when people revolted, we didn't have the experience of Middle East over the past 20 years.
The middle class in Iran, which has always been the engine of any meaningful political movement and reform and everything, completely stayed out of the couple of sets of demonstrations that took place in 1997 and, sorry, in 2017, 2018, and 2019, because they realized that if they go out and demonstrate on a larger scale in many, many cities, because of the bad economic conditions, then that could quickly lead to, you know, armed confrontation with the security forces, and that would quickly convert Iran to another Syria or Libya.
And they didn't want that.
As much as they don't like the regime in Tehran, they don't want Iran to become another Syria or even Iraq or Libya.
So they stayed out of the demonstrations.
And although the demonstrations did take place, and they did take place in many, many cities throughout Iran, but they were basically by the poor, you know, working class people.
And the extent of it was also greatly exaggerated in the West.
You're saying that the Iranian government made the decision not to make it worse by crushing the demonstrations, but just let them play out and they'll go home?
To some extent, the Iranian government recognized that, and they didn't want to, you know, go out and basically kill everybody.
For example, the way it happened after the coup in Egypt in 2013, when the security forces in a couple of days killed 5,000 people.
I mean, this is according to Amnesty International.
So they didn't want to do that.
And at the same time, we have to remember that a lot of crashes that took place between Iranian security forces and those demonstrators, a lot of them were provoked by outsiders, you know, social media, social networks, and so on, but by the so-called, or what I call a fake opposition in Western Europe and in the United States.
So although people did get killed, but it wasn't on a scale that we could compare it to, for example, Egypt in 2013.
Right.
Well, and you know, I mean, the thing is, you got these people are such dummies.
If you would have, can you imagine John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and their people sitting there saying, yeah, what we want to do is see something like 1979.
What happened in 79 was a mass popular uprising that overthrew the American backed sock puppet dictator.
What they really mean is, wouldn't it be nice if we could get a 1953 where we overthrew the semi-independent government in order to install a dictator?
When, of course, if you frame it that way, the answer is, don't be stupid, John, that'll never work.
This is nothing like 53 and the current regime there's hold on power is whatever percent off the chart compared to the control that the parliament had in, you know, the immediate aftermath of World War II in Iran there with that fledgling democratic government where the CIA and the British had had run, you know, before us had had the run of the place for decades and this kind of thing.
It's just absolutely ridiculous.
And so they couch it like 79.
But then that's just as ridiculous because that's the entire other side of the ledger.
That's the reaction from being oppressed by us for 26 years.
Exactly.
And not only that.
These guys, they really are that dumb that they can frame all these things in ways that just make absolutely no sense and then build their policy based on their total misunderstanding or their refusal to really grapple with the history of who's who here.
Exactly.
And the other the other factor that we have to add is that the present Iran and even the 1979 Iran is vastly different from Iran of 1953.
Now we have all sorts of, you know, social media, you know, everything.
People become aware of everything.
And Iranians have also had this experience of the coup in 1953 and then the revolution in 1979 and so on.
So that they are not going to be fooled by what, you know, Pompeo and Bolton and people like them claim.
Now, let me just emphasize, I'm not saying that the population in Iran is a pro regime.
I'm not saying that the regime does have its supporters.
It's probably about 20 percent of the population.
But they do.
But they have power.
That's the point.
They've got the place locked down well.
Exactly.
And not only that, the Iranian middle class, it's very well connected with the outside world.
And therefore, they are extremely aware of what's going on in the outside world, particularly in the Middle East.
They have seen what has happened to Syria.
They have seen what has happened to Libya.
They have seen what happened in Egypt and countries like that.
And regardless of how they feel about the regime and its power and so on, they don't want Iran to become another Syria.
They don't want Iran to become another Libya.
They don't want, you know, a civil war in Iran, which would give excuse to, you know, the United States.
And at the same time, you have to remember that Iran is a multi-ethnicity nation.
There are many ethnic groups living in Iran.
And some of these ethnic groups have, you know, small political groups or even terrorist groups that have been working with outside power in order to create problems internally.
And Iranian people recognize that if a civil war or something like that happens, then Iran may disintegrate.
And they don't want that.
They want Iran to remain unified.
They want Iran's national security to be preserved.
And when the middle class is free of some of this huge economic pressure that is being exerted on them by the U.S. sanctions, as well as the internal corruptions and mismanagement and so on, then, as usual, just as we saw in 2009, for example, or in 1979 or 1997, they become the engine of reform, and they push for reform, and things will move in the right direction according to the speed that they want to push it forward.
So these people, Bolton and Pompeo, they just live in their own separate universe.
They have, you know, they have illusions about what they can do.
And unfortunately, they listen to this part of the opposition that I named, the fake opposition.
And they really think that they can use these tactics in order to get the result that they want, and they have failed.
You know what?
I mean, that really is, it's always been part of this story, but it's one of the hardest parts to understand, I guess, Mohammed, is you have on one hand, what a joke, this completely ridiculous Mujahideen-e-Khalq cult of this freak lady, Myram Rajavi, and her dead husband that she refuses to admit has been dead for 25 years or whatever it is, these lunatics.
And then on the other hand, you have the degree to which, at least at times, policy seems to take into account the idea that, you know, we do have a ready-made opposition in case of a real revolutionary regime change there that we can parachute in and install in power.
And it's this ridiculous cult.
And that somehow the Iranians will accept this, that this could work, and it's the most ridiculous sort of comic book version of a 53 coup with the absolutely most unlikely inheritors of the power.
You might as well parachute me in there and say, look, you're going to accept Horton as your new Ayatollah now, people.
There's just no reason in the world to think that these people could do it.
And yet, like, this is part of Pompeo's calculations about how this is supposed to work.
It's like, well, we have the MEK, at least, and we'll be able to use them maybe to help do these things.
And they're basing these policies on these kind of inanities.
Am I overstating that?
I mean, is Pompeo really taking these people seriously and planning around them?
You're not overstating.
You're not exaggerating.
This is what they think.
And remember, when the 1953 coup in Iran happened, they did have internal collaborators.
But those collaborators didn't have the track record that MEK has.
MEK has a terrible 40-year history of working against Iranian people.
As I said, during the Iran-Iraq War, they collaborated with the Saddam regime, and their old leader, Massoud Rajavi, the husband of the so-called president of the resistance, Maryam Rajavi, in a speech boasted that his forces had killed 57,000 Iranian soldiers on the border with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.
I mean, this is, he was that type of, that type of guy.
And then his forces also worked with Saddam Hussein to put on the rebellion, Shiite rebellion, in 1991, after Saddam Hussein's army was defeated.
And in fact, after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney invaded Iraq, Kurdish leaders in the north also accused the MEK leadership of collaborating with Saddam Hussein against them when Saddam Hussein slaughtered a large number of Kurdish forces in the north.
And then since then, they have basically become, they are universally despised in Iran.
If there is one team in Iran on which everybody agrees, that's the hatred that they have for MEK.
Well, yeah.
No, don't leave out that George Bush and Ariel Sharon, and then, you know, later, Olmert and Netanyahu inherited these guys from Saddam Hussein when they invaded.
And immediately, you know, Cheney was using them for intelligence, and then later, in the later Bush years and into the Obama years, using them for assassinations of nuclear scientists in the country.
Yes, yes.
I mean, come on, imagine for a moment what public opinion is like about those guys right now, you know?
Yes, of course.
Yes, of course.
I mean, in the past, let's say 20, 30 years ago, if there were some demonstrations in Iran, the supporters of MEK would show up with the banner of MEK.
In other words, they would make it clear that they were MEK.
But for a long time now, after everything that was revealed about them, if there are demonstrations like what we had last year in 2019 in several cities, they don't show up, you know, as MEK supporters.
I mean, their number is small anyway.
But let's say, for example, the families of those members of MEK that were killed in Iran in 1980s still support this.
They don't dare to, you know, to say that they're MEK.
Their supporters on social networks that work from Europe, Albania, and the United States in Europe, they don't dare to introduce themselves as MEK, because they know how MEK is universally despised in Iran.
And yet, Bolton and Cheney and Pompeo and people like them act as if, you know, this is an exiled government, hugely popular in Iran.
And therefore, as soon as the regime in Tehran is overthrown, they have a, you know, ready government to take over and become totally friendly towards the United States.
But that's not going to happen, because they don't have absolutely no social base of support within Iran.
And in fact, Intercept published a lot of documents, confidential documents, from Iran's Ministry of Intelligence.
And in Iran's Ministry of Intelligence analysis, they had said that MEK is no longer a threat to the regime in Tehran, because it has transformed itself from some sort of opposition group that it was in the 1980s and perhaps 1990s to simply a propaganda machine for the United States and Israel and Saudi Arabia and so on.
And, you know, it's fine.
That's all they do.
That's funny.
That's interesting that that's what's in that leak, is the official position changing to we don't care about these idiots anymore.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Did you see the piece at the American Conservative by Arthur Bloom about how the MEK had placed these completely fake people who didn't exist in all these sources?
Yes.
And if you remember, someone in the article was quoted as saying that there's just not one or two, but there are like 19 of them.
At least they have been able to identify 19 of them.
First was this guy, Heshmat Alavi, that everybody talked about a couple years ago.
And now there is somebody else, Amir Basiri.
He also doesn't exist.
These are basically pieces that are written by propaganda, you know, part of MEK in good English, because their supporters have been living in the West, and therefore they know English quite well.
They write these propaganda pieces, and then they plant it here and there.
And it takes some time to discover that these alters don't actually exist.
These are just pieces of propaganda that they plant here and there.
So that's what, as I said, even Iran's Minister of Intelligence has said that they are no longer a threat.
They are just basically a spying organization and a propaganda organization.
They don't have any support within Iran.
You know, everything has been revealed about them.
And some of the things that have been revealed, they don't even talk about it here in the United States.
For example, many former female members of MEK talked about how they were raped by Massoud Rajavi, how they were expected to sleep with him, how they were forced to divorce their husbands and so on.
And these are real.
These are not propaganda.
They take all their children and ship them off to be educated in Paris somewhere, where essentially they're being held hostage.
Exactly.
Yes.
In Albania and the leadership in Paris.
Yes.
And the craziness, if anybody has ever dealt with these kooks on Twitter or anything, they're essentially analogous to me.
I think of not so much Jim Jones as the Heaven's Gate cult of like, what was that, 1997 or something, where they all wore Viet Cong pajamas and purple Nike shoes and they went to chase the Hale-Bopp comet off and so killed themselves with cyanide or whatever.
Like, this is just completely nutty cultism.
The most marginal kind of thing.
How could anyone ever subject themselves to this kind of stuff?
Yeah.
And yet...
Like the Moonies or something.
Yes.
The Secretary of State and our administration in this country thinks that they are viable alternatives to what we have in Tehran.
So Pompeo, as my piece in Responsible Secretary of State explains, he has gone through a whole series of these plans and plots in order to get what he wanted.
For example, when Iran shut down the U.S. drone over Persian Gulf after saying that it had violated its airspace, the New York Times reported that Pompeo was urging the president to attack Iran, but President Trump refused to do it.
Or when the Saudi Aramco oil installation in eastern Saudi Arabia were attacked by precise drones and missiles, and the Houthis in Yemen claim responsibility, and when they claim responsibility, many analysts and experts thought that the claim could be credible.
But Pompeo said this is an act of war on Iran's part.
Again, he was urging the president to take strong military action, but the president, unfortunately, was not willing to go to war with Iran because of something that had happened in Saudi Arabia, which, by the way, it didn't kill anybody, it didn't injure anybody.
It just damaged the installations, the oil facilities, just to show that what can be done.
He is also making this absurd claim that, you know, U.S. is still a member of JCPOA, you know, the nuclear agreement with Iran, and therefore it has a right to trigger the snapback sanctions because, in the opinion of Pompeo, Iran has violated its obligation under the nuclear agreement, and forgetting that the U.S. exceeded the agreement in May of 2018 and has imposed the harshest sanctions probably ever in history on Iran, and has basically closed every possible way that Iran could sell its oil and other things and import what it needs, and yet it still claims that, Pompeo still claims that U.S. is a viable member of the agreement, and therefore it has the right.
And as I said at the beginning, it's interesting that even closest allies of the United States rejected this argument, and it was soundly defeated in the United Nations Security Council.
Now, they are claiming that beginning tomorrow night at about 8 o'clock our time here in Los Angeles, they will start enforcing UN Security Council sanctions, which the UN itself doesn't accept, the Security Council itself doesn't accept, but they are going to claim that they are enforcing those sanctions just to, you know, just to advance what Pompeo wants.
And in fact, some speculate that this is his way of trying to trigger a conflict at the last moment before the presidential election of November 3rd, which is in less than seven weeks.
And we'll have to wait and see what happens.
Yeah.
Well, it's a good thing that the Ayatollah is not 100th the raving loon that they claim he is, or things could be a hell of a lot worse by now.
But he's a pretty cool customer, all things considered, you know, at least in terms of international relations.
I have always thought that Khamenei is very calculating and pragmatic when it comes to foreign policy.
Yes, he is a dictator internally.
There is no doubt about it.
But when it comes to, you know, foreign policy, he has been very pragmatic and calculating precisely because the thing that he cares about is the survival of his regime, the survival of the Islamic Republic, the way the cleric in Iran wanted, in other words, as a theocracy.
So because that's the most important thing for them, they never do anything that in the final analysis would threaten the very existence or survival of the regime.
Right.
You know, I don't know who coined the phrase, but they say that a radical becomes a conservative the moment he seizes the capital city.
Right?
Yeah, exactly.
These guys are revolutionaries.
They won and they want to keep it just like this.
Exactly.
And so that's why they have been very calculating, very pragmatic.
I mean, for example, when they killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, Pompeo was hoping that Iran would react very violently, attacking U.S. forces throughout the Middle East.
But we know that not only it did not happen, but Iran's retaliation was very measured, very limited.
And as I mentioned in the article, it was basically telegraphed.
They told the Iraqi government that's what they are going to do.
And of course, the Iraqi government passed the information to the U.S. forces in Iraq.
So there was very limited action.
And the only reason they did it is because at the beginning, Khamenei said that we will do this and we will announce that we did it.
And that's what they wanted to do.
And after that, they didn't do anything.
And Trump let them get the last word and he said, yeah, you know what?
Some guys got some headaches.
We're going to go ahead and leave it at that.
Exactly.
That could have been a hell of a lot worse, as bad as it already was.
And I'm sure Pompeo was very, very disappointed.
But every time that he has tried to provoke something, he has failed.
So that's why I put the title of the article, how many failures is enough for him to realize that his policy has been a total failure, is not going to work if sanctions, even the harshest sanctions, overthrew the Fidel Castro government in Cuba or overthrew the Kim dynasty regime in North Korea, or even Hugo Chavez Maduro in Venezuela, is going to overthrow the Islamic regime in Tehran also.
And by the way, Iran is far richer, far more powerful, much larger, much more populous, with a highly educated population than Cuba or Venezuela or North Korea.
And they have been living in one of the worst regions of the world and have survived there for thousands of years.
So it is obvious that it's not going to succeed.
But it does go to show the lies that Pompeo always says about Iranian people.
He always says, oh, we support Iranian people.
We stand by Iranian people.
That's just a big lie.
He doesn't support Iranian people.
Because if he did, he would recognize that what he has done has basically isolated moderate forces in Iran right now, the reformists, the moderates, the progressive, those who want negotiations with the United States, those who want good relations with the rest of the world.
He has isolated them, and instead, the radical forces, those that always object to any negotiations with the United States, those who always said, we can't trust the United States, and when U.S. exceeded from the nuclear agreement, they started saying, we told you so, we told you so.
You cannot trust it.
What he has done is, you know, isolating those forces who want a moderate Iran, who want a progressive Iran, who want an Iran that is on good terms with the rest of the world.
And at the same time, he has basically given more power to the radicals in Tehran.
So that's one thing.
Then regarding sanctions, even at the height of COVID-19 crisis in Iran, which was in like March and April, where Iran needed badly a lot of medication, a lot of medicine, Pompeo refused to relax the sanctions.
He lied by claiming that Iran can still buy humanitarian stuff that it needs, but nothing happened.
Iran could not import anything.
He and Brian Hook, who used to be a special representative for Iran, claimed that they have opened up a special channel in Switzerland to which Iran can import humanitarian needs.
But the Swiss government itself and its embassy in Tehran issued a statement saying that nothing has been done through this channel, and unfortunately this channel doesn't work.
So when he says, you know, I support Iranian people or we stand by Iranian people, it's just a lie.
He doesn't care.
He doesn't care about the plight of Iranian people.
He doesn't care about democracy.
He doesn't care about human rights.
If he did care, he would try to stop the horrendous war that Saudi Arabia has been waging, Yemen, for five years.
If he cared, he wouldn't go to Egypt and meet with Trump's favorite dictator, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the fascist dictator of Egypt that has 60,000 political prisoners, according to Amnesty International in Egypt.
If he cared, he would start from U.S. allies in that region to turn them, you know, to put them on the path to a more representative government, not a dictatorial regime like Saudi Arabia, whose ruler has people, has journalists killed and decimated.
So he doesn't care.
I mean, he's just an ideologue, as I said in my piece.
The only thing that he cares is, you know, getting to Iran, because, as I said in the piece, he's a Christian Zionist and supports Israel, and he's willing to do for Israel whatever it takes.
And he sees Iran as a threat to Israel.
So what's next for him?
Run for Senate or Secretary of Defense?
I guess he turned down the opportunity to run for Senate.
I wonder if he's going to stay, assuming Trump is re-elected, do you think he's going to stay in the government and move to defense, or he'll get a job making money somewhere?
I would say that if they're going to change the Secretary of Defense, if they are going to push out Mark Esper, maybe Tom Cotton becomes Secretary of Defense.
God help us.
Yeah, I know.
Or Lindsey Graham.
Hopefully, I don't know.
I mean, I personally want Trump to lose, so we'll see.
But if he stays, we'll see what happens.
I just hope that Pompeo will leave the scene.
I just hope that Trump realizes that Pompeo is not the Secretary of State that he should have.
If he wants to have some success in the foreign policy arena, Pompeo is not the guy.
If he had any sort of mission for Iran, the past four years, or at least since Pompeo became Secretary of State, has shown that he's not the man.
His policy towards Iran has been a total disaster.
It has not only hurt Iranian people, which of course they don't care about, but it has also isolated the Trump administration internationally.
So I don't know what's going to happen.
I just hope that Pompeo will not stay.
Yep.
Well, I'm sure with you on that.
And with that, I'll let you go.
Thanks and especially for staying overtime with us here to talk about this great piece, Mohammed.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Scott.
It's always good to be in your program.
All right, you guys.
That's Mohammed Sahimi.
He's at the Quincy Institute here, ResponsibleStateCraft.org.
The piece is called, When it comes to Iran, how many failures is enough for Pompeo?
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
