President-Elect Donald Trump’s picks for key security positions are making Israel happy, indicating that the Iran deal will have little support in the White House.
Tea Party Republican Mike Pompeo, Congressman for Kansas , was picked by Trump , pending Senate approval, to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a strong supporter of Israel and was enthusiastic after meeting Israeli Prime Minister last November. Pompeo is an outspoken critic of outgoing President Barack Obama’s deal with Iran, and called for it to be repealed in a Tweet last Thursday.
I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. https://t.co/bifC97jWpY
— Mike Pompeo (@RepMikePompeo) November 17, 2016
Pompeo threatens other aspects of the outgoing administration’s legacy. Pompeo was on the House Select Benghazi Committee to investigate the 2012 attack in Libya. He told the New York Times that he felt that the State Department was “seemingly more concerned with politics and Secretary Clinton’s legacy than with protecting its people in Benghazi”.
More controversial is Trumps choice of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as his most senior national security aide. Flynn is also an opponent of the Iran deal and has called for it to be renegotiated. But in a more direct way, he signals an end to President Obama’s legacy.
Flynn was appointed By President Obama as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, but was pressured into resigning after for questioning the Obama administration’s public narrative that Al Qaeda was close to defeat.
Flynn also disagreed with the outgoing president’s positive opinion of Islam. At a Dallas event for Act for America in August, Flynn called Islam a “cancer” and a “political ideology” that “definitely hides behind being a religion”.
Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL: please forward this to others: the truth fears no questions… https://t.co/NLIfKFD9lU
— General Flynn (@GenFlynn) February 27, 2016
In his book, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies,” he wrote, “This insistence on denying the existence of jihad led President Obama to the absurd claim that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam”.
This is reassuring, considering that some believe Trump has already begun to waver on some of his campaign commitments. In a recent BBC interview Walid Phares, a senior policy aide to Trump, amended Trump’s promise to toss aside the P5+1 deal with Iran concerning their nuclear program.
“He will take the agreement, review it, send it to Congress, demand from the Iranians to restore a few issues or change a few issues, and there will be a discussion,” said Phares.
