For every boy who has ever watched a cowboy movie, the figure of General George Armstrong Custer cuts a dashing figure as he made a courageous last stand against the Lakota Indians at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. There, in Custer’s Last Stand, all 700 men in the famed United States 7th Cavalry were annihilated by a superior force of Native Indians.
The lesson to be taken from that one-sided encounter is that it’s not good to rush into things without first knowing most if not all the circumstances you face. In other words, look before you leap. As a former captain and a tank commander in the US 7th Cavalry Regiment, Mike Pompeo would do well to remember that hard-taught lesson. He is now President Donald Trump’s nominee as Secretary of State, to replace Rex Tillerson.
The fit between Tillerson, a former oil executive, and Trump was always a difficult one, square pegs and round holes and all of that — plus it didn’t help the former Secretary of State’s case that he never denied describing in very undiplomatic terms the Commander-in-Chief.
In choosing Pompeo, President Trump has once more opted for a straight talker, but one who will be amenable to the whims and changing values presented by Twitter diplomacy.
And in Pompeo, who previously served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the President has found a man with an ego that suits the administration’s need for a Hercules to hold up American values to the rest of the world.
In announcing Pompeo’s nomination last week, the presidential superlatives were in full flow. “He will do a fantastic job,” President Trump tweeted. And he went further — he always does, doesn’t he? — saying: “He will be a brilliant and unrelenting leader for our intelligence community to ensure the safety of Americans and our allies.” And the ‘T’ word was even trotted out a couple of times — in the same sentence — adding “I’ve worked with Mike Pompeo now for quite some time — tremendous energy, tremendous intellect, we’re always on the same wavelength.”
‘You can’t handle the truth’
The only thing President Trump didn’t do was add the hashtag “BFF” in gushing over Pompeo’s appointment.
The airport in Washington is named after a former Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and you almost get the sense that if there was an airport in need of a name, Pompeo’s would be plastered all over it now. But Pompeo is also a very smart cookie, one who finished first in his class, graduating from the US Army college at West Point.
His official biography says while serving in West Germany, he was a tank commander “patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall”. Somehow, another movie figure pops into my mind, that of the Marine commander at Guantanamo Bay played by Jack Nicholson who wants to yell “You can’t handle the truth” when it comes Communists and the threat from Cuba — except in Pompeo’s case it would be terrorists. He did, after all, serve in the first Gulf War in that 7th Cavalry.
A law degree from Harvard also followed.
The 54-year-old is also a highly successful businessman and very conservative congressman who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2010 as part of the Tea Party wave.
If confirmed by the Senate, he will become the top US diplomat in the middle of delicate negotiations with North Korea over a potential presidential meeting with dictator Kim Jong-un.
He grew up in southern California but represented Wichita in Kansas in congress, having set up a successful aerospace business there. As a member of the House select committee on intelligence, he was an aggressive critic of foreign policy under the Obama administration, particularly regarding the nuclear deal with Iran.
In 2016, a day before Trump announced that he would nominate Pompeo to lead the CIA, the congressman tweeted: “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
Pompeo is also aligned with Trump on climate change, having expressed scepticism about the extent to which humans are responsible. Pompeo has said the Paris climate accord would be a “costly burden” for the US; last year Trump announced the US would withdraw. Tillerson supported the Paris deal and pushed the president to stay.
Pompeo is also very well connected, cultivating ties to Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists who are patrons of conservative causes. They invested in Thayer Aerospace, a company Pompeo started with friends from West Point in 1998. He turned to Koch Industries, the Wichita-based conglomerate that has holdings in oil and other sectors, to help bankroll his 2010 congressional race. Pompeo was criticised by liberals for hiring a Koch Industries lawyer as his chief of staff and for introducing legislation that would benefit Koch interests.
Interrogation tactic
Pompeo has hawkish views on a range of policy issues, including torture, surveillance and the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
He has defended waterboarding as an interrogation tactic, arguing that it is not torture and is therefore legal. In a statement criticising a 2014 report released by the Senate select committee on intelligence that disclosed for the first time torture practices used by the CIA, Pompeo said: “These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots. The programmes being used were within the law, within the constitution.”
In his confirmation hearing last year, Pompeo was asked if he would restart the CIA’s use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”, if asked to do so by the president. “Absolutely not,” he replied.
And Snowden, the whistle-blower? Pompeo believes he should get the death penalty for leaking classified information to media outlets, and he belies Congress should allow domestic surveillance on a mass scale.
If there is a divergence with his Commander-in-Chief, it is on Russia. In his confirmation hearing, he appeared to share with CIA staff an adversarial view of Russia and recently re-elected President Vladimir Putin.
The Senate backed his CIA nomination by 66 to 32. Last week, the Democratic minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who voted to confirm Pompeo, said in a statement: “If he’s confirmed [as secretary of state] we hope that Mr Pompeo will turn over a new leaf and will start toughening up our policies towards Russia and Putin.”
Somehow, the chances of Pompeo turning a new leaf are about as good as a snowball’s chance in hell. It ain’t gonna happen.
— With inputs from agencies
