Thread by @Headsnipe011

Roundtable With Traveling Press

@drawandstrike @catesduane @rising_serpent @almostjingo @tracybeanz @TheChiIIum @Quodverum_ @headsnipe01 @thomaswictor @HeshmatAlavi
@ScheyChris

justtherealnews.com/2019/01/12/288…

***Some things that stood out to me***

QUESTION: Yes. I wanted to follow up on one of the pieces of the fact sheet that went out, the goal of expelling every Iranian boot from Syria, as you all put it.

Hoping to hear about how we can do this, like, kind of what the nature is there, particularly in light of the efforts to withdraw.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah. So every Iranian boot on the ground is an ambitious objective.

QUESTION: Yes, it is.

SECRETARY POMPEO: But it’s ours. It is our mission. The tools we will use are broad. The fact that a couple thousand uniformed personnel in Syria will be withdrawing is a tactical change.

It doesn’t materially alter our capacity to continue to perform the military actions that we need to perform. But even more broadly than that, the campaign to create a better world, to allow the Iranian people to have opportunity and democracy, has lots of pieces to it –

economic, financial, diplomatic for sure. We’re going to hold an important ministerial in Warsaw on February 13 and 14 where the – there’ll be dozens of countries from –

I use “nearly every” because I don’t think there’s anybody from a couple of continents, but from nearly every continent. We’ll have countries from Asia, from Western Hemisphere, and certainly from the Middle East and from Africa and from Europe, all attending.

And we’ll talk about lots of issues, including how it is we together can get Iran to behave like a normal nation. The same set of things I laid out in May of last year.

The coalition is big and growing, and the tools that we get from having that coalition all working together on that mission give us an opportunity to create that chance for the Iranian people.

QUESTION: It’s fair to say it’s more of a holistic effort to expel – I mean, the U.S. will not necessarily take the lead. This is kind of what you spoke about in taking a greater role.

SECRETARY POMPEO: That’s right. No, we – we’re happy to be an important part of it. It’s an important part of President Trump’s agenda. The nuclear proliferation risks from Iran are incredibly real.

The previous arrangement that was struck was wholly inadequate to prevent those proliferation risks. And so our mission set is certainly to stop the terror regime, to stop the fighting of Hizballah and Shia militias and the Houthis, funding the Houthis in Yemen,

but it has a nuclear component. And you will see in a handful of days the Iranians intend to launch a space launch vehicle, to put a space launch vehicle up.

The claim is that it is to put some satellites in the air; the truth is this will be another step in their understanding of how it is you can launch an ICBM. And that’s in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, and the whole world needs to come together to oppose that.

. . .

QUESTION: During the campaign we heard President Trump say it was important to call radical Islamic terrorism by its name, something that President Obama never did.

The Vice President has used the same terms at the 9/11 Memorial this year, September 2018. In Cairo you said “radical Islamist terrorism.” Why the difference?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Radical Islamic terror – it’s a problem. We need to stop it. I’ll say it. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Was that a conscious choice, though, “Islamic” and “Islamist?”

SECRETARY POMPEO: You are suggesting I have a better control of the English language than I actually do. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: (Inaudible.)

SECRETARY POMPEO: No, there’s no difference there. Don’t – this is what – I just – I must tell you. When you try to create distinctions, when you try to call half a dozen “six” and say there are differences, that there’s variance in policy amongst senior —

. . .

SECRETARY POMPEO: This administration has been very clear we speak about radical Islamic terrorism. I’ll bet I can find a hundred times I’ve used it. If you’d like to test me on that, we can see.

QUESTION: No —

SECRETARY POMPEO: I’ll bet you can find it. We are very, very consistent about this. We have an understanding of what it is that has drived this threat to the United States and the world, and we are aiming to take it down, and we’ve made real progress.

Rather than parsing a syllable at the end of the word, you ought to acknowledge the enormous progress we have made. Ninety-nine percent of the caliphate gone, effort underway as you sit here today to take down the remaining one percent. We’re going to do it.

QUESTION: So there was no significance to the term “Islamist” in the speech?

SECRETARY POMPEO: None.

. . .

QUESTION: Can I just go back to the Cairo speech for a second?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yes.

QUESTION: Not surprisingly, the – many –numerous members of the former administration, which you took on, criticized in that speech, have been not –were not impressed with speech,

to put it mildly. Do you – what do you make of that criticism, which was that no one really wants to hear this current administration criticize the previous one, they want to know what you are doing?

Do you think that you effectively laid out the Trump administration’s strategy for the region? Do you get the sense from your interlocutors so far that they understand the coherence with which you have been saying the –

particularly with the Syria withdrawal, that staying in the fight against ISIS has – do they get that? Is it your impression that they —

SECRETARY POMPEO: Let me take the last – I think there were four questions there. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: And I didn’t ask about Saudi either. I wanted to ask about Qatar in that, and if I could, then —

QUESTION: You should’ve asked about —

QUESTION: The split with Qatar, the – really, how much of a hindrance is that to the Iran campaign? (Inaudible) left —

SECRETARY POMPEO: All right, let me take – let me take a swing. We’re going to head out of here. It is the case they get it. They understand. We make decisions about for-strength troop posture.

The nature, right – is it armored unit, is it infantry unit, are we going to have artillery, are we going to use air – we make decisions about our tactical operations all the time, all aimed at achieving the same mission, and yet you change, right,

as you’re making determination about what’s most effective, what’s delivering, what’s not. We make those kinds of decisions all the time.

This is one of those. I think they get that. I want to go back to your second question, or maybe it was your first question,

then I’ll come to your third one. Your first question was – what I tried to do in the speech, I WASN’T CRITICAL OF ANY OF THOSE INDIVIDUALS. It was the IDEAS that underlaid the previous administration’s policies.

It was their diagnosis of the problem that was all honked up. These misjudgments —

QUESTION: All what?

SECRETARY POMPEO: “Honked up.” That’s a word from Kansas. (Laughter.) It means just not quite right. I’m pretty sure it’s —

QUESTION: I’m from Buffalo, so I don’t —

SECRETARY POMPEO: I’m pretty sure it’s in the diplomatic manual somewhere way back there. (Laughter.) It’s those judgments which underlaid their policies, right.

If you diagnose the problem incorrectly, you get ISIS. If you diagnose the problem incorrectly, you get the Islamic Republic of Iran on the march in Damascus, in Baghdad, in Sana’a, in Beirut. This is what you get if you misdiagnose the problem.

So the first part of my speech was aimed at explicating those fundamental misjudgments that were made and led to the dire situation which was – which we found when President Trump came into office.

I then spent the vast majority of my set of remarks identifying how it is this administration approaches the Middle East, how important it is, how it is structurally we’re going to aim to achieve stability in the Middle East, Middle East peace –

all of those things we laid out our vision for that, and importantly laid out our judgments in a different way, that said this is what we believe will lead to those right outcomes, and here’s the policies that we put in place which we hope will deliver on them.