Cutting Through: January 20, 2021
Mike Pompeo Can't Leave Fast Enough
Ever since Election Day, the United States has been grappling with the fallout of Donald Trump’s damaged ego. His petulance and extended tantrums have had profound effects on the country, and have drawn our attention, even while the daily death toll from COVID-19 in this country has topped 4000.
But that’s not all that we’ve been distracted from.
While Trump has been fomenting insurrection and marshalling his white supremacist troops, his equally contemptible Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has been setting fires and traps for the incoming administration of Joe Biden all over the world.
In recent days, with Trump banned from Twitter, Pompeo has been tweeting out his own absurd version of reality, sending tweets about Israel that could have been written by the most radical settler in a hilltop outpost or Kfar Tapuach, while paying respects at the grave of Baruch Goldstein.
He’s also said that he and Trump made America safer with respect to Iran, an absurd notion as they have escalated tensions in the Gulf to unprecedented heights, and spurred Iran to resuming stockpiling fissile material. Pompeo himself affirmed this reality, stating the Iran was now a greater threat than ever. Internal consistency has never been an interest of this administration, and certainly not of Pompeo’s.
But his tweets are meaningless compared to his actions, which are geared toward impeding Joe Biden’s foreign policy agenda as much as possible.
A quick list of those moves includes scheming with the head of the Mossad to coordinate a massive series of attacks against Iranian-supported forces in Syria; designating the Houthis in Yemen a “terrorist organization;” restoring Cuba to the state sponsors of terrorism list; falsely claiming, without evidence, that Iran was collaborating with al-Qaeda; and announced that restrictions on dealing directly with Taiwan as a separate entity form China were null and void.
Those are all significant moves which will have significant repercussions for diplomacy, potential conflicts, and, most importantly, innocent lives all over the world. They were made by a Secretary of State who is such a pariah that even the foreign minister of Luxembourg, a microscopic country whose whole security strategy is based on getting along with stronger and larger neighbors and world powers, refused to meet with him. That refusal, along with the refusal of European Union leaders to meet with him in protest of his willful undermining of the American election was an unprecedented slap in the face to a senior U.S. official. It is a mark of the depths of Pompeo’s mendacity and the scorn and contempt with which he, like his boss, are viewed by most of the world outside of their authoritarian cohorts.
Pompeo’s Scorched Earth Departure
Israel has been striking numerous sites in Syria in recent days, trying to do as much damage as it can before what they expect to be a more restrained approach that will be advocated by the Biden administration. The latest attack on Wednesday, where some 57 people were killed, was carried out based on intelligence provided by the U.S., a collaboration coordinated between Pompeo and Yossi Cohen, head of the Mossad.
While Israel’s eagerness to carry out attacks on Iran-backed militias before the Trump administration, with its hands-off attitude, is out of office, is expected, these strikes are also aimed at ratcheting up regional tensions in the hopes of complicating Biden’s plans to re-enter the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. The abysmal failure of Trump’s and Pompeo’s policy of “maximum pressure” is manifest not only in the tense state of affairs in the Persian Gulf and in the gradual and measured Iranian response of moving away from their commitments under the agreement, but also in the one thing the strategy has accomplished: greatly increasing the suffering of the people of Iran.
Pompeo is just as passionate about regime change in Iran as Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammed Bin Salman, John Bolton, or any other hawk you’d care to name. But he’s not exactly a creative thinker, so he fell back on a lie that worked so well in 2002 to trick Congress and the American public into invading Iraq: the false and unsubstantiated notion that al-Qaeda is working in partnership with regimes it despises. In Iraq, the allegation was that the fanatically religious al-Qaeda was working with the secular government of Saddam Hussein. Now it’s the even more absurd notion that the passionately Sunni, Salafist al-Qaeda is working closely with the very center of Shi’ite political power in Tehran. Such accusations have surfaced before and were based on scant evidence that did not even imply any close cooperation.
Where the Bush administration needed to make the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection to justify their invasion politically, Pompeo is doing it to create a legal justification for an attack on Iran without needing to further involve Congress. The ill-advised 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Congress issued in the wake of the 9/11 attacks permits operations against al-Qaeda specifically. If an attack on Iran can be justified in those terms, it can legally be carried out because Congress has already authorized it.
Once Biden is in office, this should be used to spearhead a drive to repeal the AUMF. Whether one thinks it should have been issued in the first place or not, there is simply no excuse for its continued existence, other than support for endless war. But in the short term, it is still there, and it must not be used to start a war that cannot end well for anyone.
Another attempt to raise tensions with Iran is Pompeo’s baseless decision to designate the Houthis in Yemen a “terrorist group.” He’s doing this because Iran supports the Houthis, and it’s a way to try to slow Biden’s intention to end American support for the brutal Saudi war on Yemen which has created a monumental humanitarian catastrophe in a country that was already war-torn and one of the most desperately poor places in the world. It will do nothing to hinder either Iran’s regional influence or the Houthi’s fight with the Saudis. But it will make it a great deal more difficult for relief agencies to get supplies and aid in to Houthi-controlled areas. It’s an act of barbaric sadism in pursuit of a policy goal directed by the worst kind of blinkered ideology.
And that’s not the only such spiteful decision. After years of false rhetoric that somehow posits Cuba—a tiny country that is still suffering from the sanctions the United States put on it for having the audacity to remove a brutal, U.S.-backed dictator from his throne in 1959—as the root of all evil in the Western Hemisphere, Pompeo restored Cuba to the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, which will greatly complicate efforts Biden has been expected to make to restore the ties Barack Obama re-established with the island country just 90 miles from Florida. The losers in that decision are the same ones who have lost since 1959—the people of Cuba. The winners are those conservative communities, largely in Florida, who have lobbied endlessly to restore the one-dominant ruling structure not only in Cuba but throughout Latin America, with some success.
Pompeo, of course, could not leave China out. Xi Jinping became much bolder once Trump and his cronies made it clear that diplomacy was going to ineffective, and that Trump had cost the United States what credibility it had left on human rights matters like the crackdown on Hong Kong and the enslavement of Uighurs. I should note here that just a day before his term would end, Pompeo did declare that China had committed genocide and crimes against humanity in their treatment of Uighurs. While he certainly did this at this late date just to further complicate Biden’s work with China, it was something that really should have been done a long time ago. This was the right thing done for very much the wrong reason.
But China was already going to be an even more complicated, tangled mess by the time Biden came in than it had been when Biden left Washington in 2017. But that wasn’t enough for Pompeo. He decided to lift the State Department’s self-imposed restrictions on dealing directly with Taiwan, which is possibly the single touchiest point of contention for China.
China wants to do away with Taiwan’s de facto independence and fully integrate the wealthy island under Chinese rule. There are, obviously, good, moral reasons for the United States to oppose that (as all administrations have, albeit mildly and while trying not to provoke China over the issue) and there are strategic paths where this move could make sense. But Pompeo didn’t make this decision (which he could have made any time during his tenure if he wanted to) out of strategic, much less human rights, concerns. Rather, he did it to further enflame tensions with China before he leaves office. There’s no strategy here, just pettiness and the willful undermining of U.S. diplomacy with its most powerful rival. Doing it this way, unlike the declaration about the Uighurs, serves no purpose. Both really needed to be part of a comprehensive strategy to serve either the Uighurs or the people of Taiwan well, or to serve U.S. policy goals. The Uighurs designation is something Biden may well be able to work with, as it’s an issue that needs greater prominence and more direct action. Taiwan is more delicate.
This was all done in a week, and it was nothing more than a scorched earth strategy. It was Mike Pompeo saying, “if I can’t be Secretary of State, my successor will take over nothing but broken pieces.”
The man who will be a role model for decades for what a secretary of state should never do capped this week by giving an address to Voice of America where he urged them, in essence, to stop being journalists and become explicit propagandists, what he sees as the real voice of America. When a journalist dared to ask him a question, she soon found herself without a job.
Perfectly in keeping with his character.
My Recent Work
First of all, I want to remind everyone that my first book, co-authored with the brilliant Marc Lamont Hill, will be out on February 16 and is already available for pre-order. You can order it from Marc’s independent bookstore here. Early feedback has been really positive, and the backlash is only beginning, so we can really use your support!
I published a piece at Medium where I argued that impeachment is OK politically, but neither it nor the 25th Amendment were going to get Trump convicted. Rather, I suggest, the Justice Department should be preparing to prosecute him for his crimes, up to and including inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Impeachment and the 25th Amendment Won’t Work, But There Is Something That Will makes the case that if we want to establish consequences for a president stepping into authoritarianism and prevent Trump from running again, this is a better way.
Then, at ReThinking Foreign Policy, I critique a policy memo that J Street sent to the incoming Biden foreign policy team to address Israel-Palestine policy. It falls short of effective policy on the issue, but J Street having a prominent voice in the new administration is a positive, especially after where we’ve been and I express the hope that the mild memo is aimed at securing that spot, and there will be more assertive recommendations to come. Check out J Street’s Modest Recommendations for Biden on Israel-Palestine.
Finally, I have a new podcast up at Anchor. I spend a little time on the initial reaction to my upcoming book, co-authored with Marc Lamont Hill, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. Then I look at the waning days of Mike Pompeo's bumbling reign over the State Department and his scorched earth departure. Finally, I weigh in on the debate over whether Trump's support is rooted in white supremacy or economic distress. Hint: it's both and more, and the best way to deal with it is with progressive policies across the board.
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