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US News

Pompeo: Real threat to Iran’s culture is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not US

By
Mark Moore
Published Jan. 7, 2020
Updated Jan. 7, 2020, 1:54 p.m. ET

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, defending President Trump’s comments about targeting Iranian cultural sites, said the real danger to Iran’s culture comes from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — not the US.

Pompeo on Tuesday said the administration would review every target if Iran retaliates against the US for killing Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani “inside the international laws of war.”

“Let me tell you who’s done damage to the Persian culture. It’s not the United States of America. It’s the ayatollah. If you want to look at who has denied religious freedom, if you want to know who denied the Persian culture’s rich and steeped history and intellect, and they denied the capacity for that to continue,” Pompeo told reporters during a news conference at the State Department.

“They’ve not allowed people that they’ve killed — that Qassem Soleimani’s killed — they’ve not allowed them to mourn their family members,” he continued.

Pompeo also reiterated that Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, was an imminent threat to American troops and interests in the Middle East and had to be taken out in the drone strike last week.

“There has been much made about this question of intelligence and imminence,” he said. “Anytime a president makes a decision of this magnitude, there are multiple pieces of information that come before us.”

Examining that information, he said, “we could see clearly” that the Iranian general’s actions included “hundreds of thousands of massacres in Syria and enormous destruction of countries like Lebanon and Iraq.”

“So if you’re looking for imminence, you need look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani,” he said.

Pompeo was referring to the death of an American contractor who was killed in a rocket barrage carried out by an Iranian-backed militia on an Iraqi base on Dec. 27.