Senate Must Not Confirm Anti-Iran-Deal Pompeo

Daniel Larison writes in The American Conservative that the confirmation of Mike Pompeo as the next Secretary of State should be rejected by the Senate. There are many reasons Pompeo should be disqualified from the post of America’s chief diplomat, but most critical is his desire to annul the nuclear deal hammered out with Iran. The Obama administration was a disaster, but the deal agreed upon with the Iranians is still better than no deal at all. The unappealing option to use military force will always be on the table, but cancelling the deal makes it almost an inevitability.

A better understanding of why pulling out of the Iran deal is a bad idea is captured in my recent post quoting Cato Institute scholars Chris Preble and John Glaser. Read more from Preble on that subject here. Other valuable intelligence on subject is provided by Tom Friedman here, and Brent Scowcroft here. These men occupy a broad swath of the political spectrum, and all have convincing reasons for why abandoning the Iran deal would be a bad idea.

With Pompeo poised to lose a vote in the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker is going to push his nomination through to the full Senate anyway. It’s a mistake to ignore the committee and Corker should reconsider.

Larison writes (abridged):

It’s not true that senators “haven’t put forward any real reasons” to reject Pompeo. They have objected to his preference for resorting to force, his disdain for diplomacy, his hostility to the nuclear deal, his bias against Muslims, and his past record of supporting disastrous wars and torture. Those are just some of the reasons so many senators are opposed to Pompeo. Those sound like real reasons to me.

The debate over Pompeo isn’t over, but I have to acknowledge that he just secured one Democratic vote this week. North Dakota Sen. Heitkamp announced that she will vote to confirm him. She was probably the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent up for re-election this year, so if anyone was going to support Trump’s nominee it was probably going to be Heitkamp. Arizona Republican Jeff Flake has not yet announced his position, so it possible that he could still end up voting against the nomination. If Flake needs a reason to vote against Pompeo, he should remember that Pompeo was a vocal critic of normalization with Cuba that Flake strongly supported.

Read more here.

Rand Paul Questions Mike Pompeo At Confirmtaion Hearing 4/12/18