President Trump plans to help set the conditions for a successful revolution by the Iranian people against the Islamic Republic, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday.
“There are times when things happen that are unexpected, unanticipated; our revolution would be one of them,” Pompeo said Sunday night at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif.,
“We don’t know the right moment, we don’t know the day,” he continued, “but we do know the things that the world is obligated to do, so that when the right time comes — when the right moment comes — the opportunity is even more likely to find it’s fulfillment.”
Trump’s team has taken care to avoid calling directly for regime change, perhaps due to the historical baggage of the CIA’s role in a 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Pompeo, addressing an audience of Iranian-Americans, all but made the case for rebellion. And he didn’t shy from repeated references to the American Revolution against the British Empire.
“Iranians want to be governed with dignity, accountability, and respect,” he said, noting the outbreak of protests in recent months. “The United States hears you. The United States supports you, the United States is with you … because we, too, took a hard first step towards becoming a free country a few years’ back.”
Pompeo sought to stoke that frustration, peppering his address with examples of corruption at the highest levels of the regime. “These hypocritical holy men have devised all kinds of crooked schemes to become some of the wealthiest men on earth, while their people suffer,” he said, referring to the clerical order running the country.
He took aim most notably at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader who controls $95 billion — “with a ‘b,’” he emphasized — as a “slush fund” for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. And that focus on financing militants comes at the expense of the Iranian people, Pompeo argued.
“Today, thanks to regime subsidies, the average Hezbollah combatant makes two to three times what an Iranian firefighter makes on the streets of Iran,” Pompeo said. “The Iranian economy is going great, but only if you’re a politically-connected member of the elite.”
That criticism also encapsulates the administration’s case for renewing economic sanctions on the regime, pursuant to Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal. “We have an obligation to out maximum pressure on the regime’s ability to generate and move money,” he said.
Pompeo’s remarks were briefly interrupted by a protester denouncing the separation of families at the southern border as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The outburst frustrated the audience, but the diplomat stayed on message.
“If there were only so much freedom of expression in Iran,” he said.
