Iran leaders will have to fall in line if ‘they want their people to eat,’: Pompeo
Sayeed Muhammad of DOT : US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Iranian “leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat,” dropping all pretense of caring about Iranians as he touted the latest harsh sanctions.
As a BBC reporter tries asking Pompeo what will happen if the sanctions do not have their desired effect, but Pompeo repeatedly dodges the question, repeating that it is in Iran’s “best interest” to curb its “destabilizing influence” and clinging to the soundbite that the country is the primary sponsor of world terrorism. Pompeo attempts to pin all regional ills on Iran and paints the Iranian government’s aims as wholly at odds with those of the people.
But what if the sanctions end up hurting the people, Nili starts to ask. “No, they’re not,” says Pompeo, interrupting him.
And thus, Pompeo continues his predecessors’ callous legacy of starving people in unfriendly nations and bragging about it. In January, Rex Tillerson spoke about North Korea “ghost ships” washing ashore in Japan, most of their crews dead after desperately going fishing without enough fuel for the return trip. “We are getting a lot of evidence that these [sanctions] are really starting to hurt,” he told Condoleezza Rice, herself no slouch when it comes to disdaining the fate of civilians in war zones.
Because it isn’t just hunger – US diplomats have a history of contempt for human life when it gets in the way of their political goals.
Hillary Clinton, serving as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, gleefully chortled after NATO-backed rebels toppled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2012: “We came, we saw, he died.” Libya has since become a failed state where people are bought and sold in open slave markets, but this state of affairs is apparently preferable to an oil-rich nation dropping the petrodollar.