Pompeo to deliver major speech on Iran

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan24) – US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will deliver a major speech on Iran at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Sunday.

Pompeo’s remarks are titled, “Supporting Iranian Voices,” and he will give the speech in California, where Reagan was governor for eight years, before becoming America’s 40th president. 

The state is home to America’s largest community of Iranian immigrants. Some 250,000 Iranian-Americans live there.

A senior State Department official who previewed Pompeo’s speech for journalists on Thursday explained that the Secretary of State would expose “some of the corruption” of the Iranian regime, the terrorism that it has backed around the world, and “the brutal repression at home.”

Tehran has used the relief from sanctions that it enjoyed following the Iranian nuclear deal not to advance the well-being of its own citizens, but to aggressively promote its regional influence, this official explained.

“Iran has spent over $16 billion supporting Assad and its proxies in Iraq and in Yemen,” he said.

That statement alone is significant as a reflection of US policy. Until Pompeo became Secretary of State in April, the State Department did not regularly acknowledge that Iranian influence in Iraq was a serious problem.

“Iran also gives $700 million a year to Lebanese Hezbollah,” and it has loaned the regime of Bashar al-Assad some $4 billion, the official further explained.

Thus, in his address on Sunday, Pompeo will be “supporting the legitimate demands of the Iranian people, especially their economic demands for a better life,” while he will provide an update on the US “campaign of maximum economic pressure” that aims to cut Iranian oil exports to zero as of November 4.

The State Department official, when pressed by journalists, made clear that the US is not seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime, but “a change in the regime’s behavior.”

Thus, the US seeks to impose the greatest possible pressure on Iran to force the Iranian regime to the table and negotiate a new deal over its nuclear program and other aspects of its malign behavior.

This attitude very much reflects President Donald Trump’s “transactional attitude toward international politics,” a retired Pentagon official told Kurdistan 24. “But not everything is subject to deal-making,” he said.

“People have their pride,” he cautioned, “and they can hit back at the US in asymmetrical ways.”

A representative of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (DPKI) advised, “What the Iranian people really want—and they have been repeatedly asking for in demonstrations over the past year—is a change of regime.”

“We believe that it makes a difference if the US backs the demands of the Iranian people,” he told Kurdistan 24, and “openly supports the concept of system collapse in Iran.”

That would “demoralize” the “thugs” of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who serve as the regime’s “main arm” in oppressing the Iranian people, while it would give the US an “influential role” in shaping events in Iran after “the collapse of the system.”

Editing by Nadia Riva