The “rotten to the core” Khamenei regime is a “paper tiger” whose time is up, Mike Pompeo has told Iranians campaigning for democracy.
Mr Pompeo, a former secretary of state under president-elect Donald Trump, made the comments while addressing a conference held by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Paris just ahead of his former boss being inaugurated as US president on 20 January.
It comes as Trump has already outlined a belicose new foreign policy with a warning to Tehran’s Hamas allies that the US will take severe action against Gaza if hostages are not released bythe time he reenters the White House.
In his speech, he claimed that President Trump will be “bringing back the maximum pressure campaign” and it will be “the beginning of the end” for the despotic and evil regime.
He promised that “the regime’s end is in reach” as it continues to suffer from “dysfunction of the highest order”. He condemned the nature of the regime, explaining how “the ayatollah’s cronies care more about fomenting war against their enemies and their radical theology than they do about basic sustenance for their own people.”
Pointing to the utter failure Iran’s proxy forces during 2024, he claimed that “all the regime's bluster about the extent of its power and influence has been revealed for what you all knew it was, a grand lie… The Ayatollah, the Wizard in Iran, has now been revealed for what he truly is, a corrupt character who only rules by fear and terror.”
Pompeo said that he believes that “human decency will triumph” over the Iranian regime who have “committed such atrocities and such horrors” against the Iranian people and the wider world.
He said that US support for efforts to topple the “fragile” regime was just around the corner and told the NCRI to keep fighting, praising their efforts as the actions of “freedom fighters of the highest order”.
Trump’s former secretary of state called on the incoming administration to adopt a new policy that includes “recognition of the National Council of Resistance of Iran as the single best alternative to the clerics that are ruling Iran”.
He went on to commend the NCRI’s 10-point plan for a post-mullah Iran, claiming that it "deserves every nation’s support”.
Pompeo continued by saying that Mrs Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the NCRI, “heads a democratic alternative that has demonstrated its capability over now four decades against the Mullah's dictatorship”.
That alternative is the “one path to the regime's end, and that is being achieved by the Iranian people and the organized resistance inside of Iran.”
