Pompeo: Peace and Stability ‘Impossible’ Without Confronting Iran

Decades of US interventions and outright wars across the Middle East haven’t proved nearly the cure-all that a lot of hawks had promised they would be. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sees the continued existence of Iran as the key to all of this.

During the Warsaw anti-Iran conference, Pompeo declared both peace and stability to be “just not possible” without confronting Iran. And to be clear, administration officials maintain they’re confronting Iran at an unprecedentedly high rate.

This suggests that when Pompeo says confronting Iran is vital to peace, and the key to solving effectively every problem in the Middle East, he’s using the term “confront” the same way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s transcript was changed from “war” to “confrontation.”

A lot of top EU officials, correctly predicting the tone of the conference, did not bother to attend, with lower-ranking diplomats representing a lot of countries, as Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence berate them for not being more anti-Iran.