During a bipartisan summit convened in Washington, DC, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vehemently condemned the Iranian regime’s domestic repression and international terror campaigns. Speaking to an audience deeply concerned about the future of Iran and the Middle East, Pompeo was unequivocal in outlining the serious threats posed by Tehran’s malign activities.
Secretary Pompeo began by shedding light on Tehran’s duplicitous facade of stability, stating, “Tehran continues to portray an image of stability beside nationwide protests from 2017. The regime’s goal is pretty simple. It is to project power throughout the region. It is to frighten the Gulf Arab states, the Israelis, everyone in the region. We all want just the opposite, and we’re going to get it.”
Moreover, Mr. Pompeo exposed Tehran’s orchestration of conflicts in the Middle East, adding, “Tehran is orchestrating the conflicts we see in Israel today, in the Red Sea where Americans were killed, and all across the region. Because it wants the global situation, the global attention to be on its proxies. It wants to distract us from its own internal weakness. This is something we all know. We must not let them do this. Tehran wants to use its terror and mayhem, spread by its proxies, to get concessions from us, to put fear here in the United States and in its leadership. We should never give in to its demands or reward its brutality and its destruction. We cannot let that happen.”
Pompeo further exposed Tehran’s propagandistic portrayal of regional conflicts as a struggle between Israel and the Palestinian people, labeling it as a blatant falsehood: “Tehran’s great hope, indeed its prayer, is to portray what is happening in the region as a fight between Israel and the Palestinian people. This is a lie. We must meet it with the truth that the head of the snake of global terror lies in Tehran.”
The former US Secretary of State then shifted focus to the solution, praising the courage and resilience of the Iranian Resistance. He remarked, “We must watch a determination and a potent organized Resistance continue to grow. It is now seasoned with decades of fighting against this malign dictatorship and the theocracy. I am confident that this resistance will only increase.”
Mr. Pompeo continued by cautioning against the regime’s efforts to undermine what it perceives as a significant threat to its own existence. He stated, “Since this past December, the regime has begun holding sham trials… We’ve seen them conduct trials in absentia that target members of the MEK, the main opposition movement. These men and women who live all across Europe, including in France and in Albania. The regime wishes to create a phony legal precedent against them and have them extradited to Iran or uses false claims to justify terror against them. I hope and I pray that countries like the United States and across Europe will reject this for the sham that it is.”
Turning his attention to the dire human rights situation within Iran, Pompeo deplored the regime’s escalating repression and record-high executions, saying, “”The recorded number of executions in 2023 alone reached no less than 860, marking the highest figure in the past eight years. These executions have also been on the rise in 2024. The pattern continues. This is a clear indication that the Iranian regime knows that it is weak, that it fears the very people that they are executing.”
Discussing the recent sham elections held by the regime as a demonstration of its weakness, the former US Secretary of State said, “On March 1st, Iran had held yet another sham election. This election for the Assembly of Experts once again denied the people of Iran the capacity to cast real votes in a meaningful way for the candidates that they preferred. So many decided not to participate in the election as a result of that. The good news is what we saw that day was an echo of what we saw in 2022, an uprising where protesters all across Iran chanted down with the oppressor, be it the Shah or the supreme leader.”
He added, “I didn’t get a – I didn’t get an opportunity at the beginning to congratulate Mrs. Maryam Rajavi and her movement for leading the boycotts of these elections. And having done so now for decades – yes, you – she should be deeply thanked for that. You and I, every American, should know the history. We know the history that it was the MEK that boycotted December 1979 referendum and did not endorse that flawed constitution. And it did so despite becoming the main target of the ruling clergy’s wrath, as a result of which it suffers to this day.”
Dismissing the regime’s propaganda against the Iranian Resistance, Secretary Mike Pompeo said, “I remember when I became Secretary of State, I found it interesting that the mullahs constantly say there is no alternative to their regime, and yet spend billion dollars to defend against that very alternative. They spend all of their political capital, they spend all their time, all their resources denying the alternative possibilities. They waged several rounds of major cyber-attacks against Albania, asking that government to silence the main opposition. What is it they are afraid of if there’s no alternative? Every single week, inside every single city in Iran, the regime directs its Friday prayers to its leaders to chant against a non-existent alternative. All this energy should encourage us. It should remind us that the only alternative is the Resistance and the efforts to upend this evil regime.”
Pompeo concluded with a rallying cry for global solidarity in support of the Iranian people’s quest for freedom: “Those of us with the capacity to impact the world and how it responds to the amazing work of these resistance fighters can’t let them down. The Iranian regime wants to be rewarded for its terrorism. We can never do that. Hostage-taking, proxy wars, these are the tools of weak men. The strength lies with the Iranian people. Reward them, not the terrorists. These freedom fighters on the ground inside Iran will ultimately deliver an outcome, much like the freedom fighters did for the people of the United States of America now 250 years ago.”
