Mike Pompeo: Appeasement of Iran ‘Will Cause More Death’

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that appeasing Iran, which reportedly helped coordinate Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel on Saturday, “will cause more death.” 

Pompeo, who served as former President Donald Trump’s secretary of state when the administration moved to kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, shared the Wall Street Journal’s report Monday morning that Iran assisted in coordinating Hamas’s attack on Israel.

The Journal, citing a “senior member of Hamas and Hezbollah,” reported Sunday night that “Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday.” 

“We told the Ayatollah and Soleimani: If you plot against or kill an American, we won’t stop by fighting the knucklehead proxies you fund and hide behind. We will hold the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leadership accountable. They did and so we did,” Pompeo wrote in his tweet sharing the article:

We told the Ayatollah and Soleimani: If you plot against or kill an American, we won’t stop by fighting the knucklehead proxies you fund and hide behind. We will hold the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leadership accountable. They did and so we did. If this article has it right -…

— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) October 9, 2023

“If this article has it right – Iran has now killed Americans. Appeasement will cause more death,” he added. 

At least nine Americans were killed in the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas, according to the State Department, and the death toll in Israel has surpassed 700 people. 

“We have reports that several Americans were killed. We’re working overtime to verify that. At the same time, there are reports of missing Americans and there again, we’re working to verify those reports,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union Sunday morning:

Per the Journal, the plan was devised over multiple meetings in Lebanon between officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard and Hamas in the past couple of months, although a “spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations said the Islamic Republic stood in support of Gaza’s actions but didn’t direct them.” 

Blinken told Bash that the Biden administration had “not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there’s certainly a long relationship” between Iran and Hamas.

Hamas’s attacks came just less than a month after the U.S. released $6 billion of frozen Iranian money for humanitarian aid in exchange for American hostages. 

Blinken said Sunday that “not a single dollar has been spent from the account” and that “it could only be used for things like food, medicine, medical equipment.”

Blinken added the deal did not involve any U.S. tax dollars.

Robert C. O’Brien, a former national security adviser during the Trump administration, contended Sunday that the deal incentivized additional U.S. hostage-taking. 

“While welcoming our Iran hostages home, I said at the time — paying ransom (eg unfreezing $6 billion) is problematic because it incentivizes new hostage taking & gives terrorists money for new operations. I didn’t think we would see these points illustrated so vividly, so quickly,” O’Brien posted on X.