Pompeo visits CENTCOM to coordinate diplomacy, military options
WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) - US Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo travelled to Tampa, Florida for meetings on Monday and Tuesday with senior officers at US Central Command (CENTCOM.)
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday afternoon after his meetings, Pompeo explained that he had come to Tampa to “make sure that the State Department and the Department of Defense were deeply coordinated across a whole range of issues.”
CENTCOM’s area of responsibility runs from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the east. Although Pompeo insisted that his talks involved more than just Iran, his remarks to the press dealt almost entirely with that country.
Pompeo noted that since the beginning of May, when the US announced the first of three deployments of military forces to the Middle East, there had been “over a half dozen different instances of Iranian attacks in the region.”
Some were thwarted. “Some not successfully thwarted,” and “they had an impact,” he said, without further elaboration.
Pompeo reiterated the Trump administration’s position that it is not seeking conflict with Iran. Rather it aims to apply maximal economic and diplomatic pressure on Tehran, so it will agree to renegotiate an expanded version of the 2015 nuclear deal to include its missile program, as well as its support for proxies throughout the region.
“It’s been our mission since the beginning,” he said, “to convince the Iranian regime not to move forward with their nuclear program;” not to develop their missiles; and refrain from “all the other activities, the malign activities that they’ve been involved in.”
Pompeo confirmed that last week’s unsuccessful visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Iran had been coordinated with the US.
Read More: Japan’s Prime Minister to visit Tehran, as US, French leaders deny split on Iran
Asked if Washington was trying to communicate with Tehran to defuse tensions, Pompeo explained that President Donald Trump had asked Abe “to take a message” to the Iranian leadership. “We have been engaged in many messages,” he added, “communicating to Iran that we are there to deter aggression” and not to start a war.
A month ago, Pompeo visited Baghdad, just days after the White House announced that it was sending an aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers to the Middle East.
Read More: Pompeo makes surprise, unannounced visit to Baghdad
The US had “detected a spike in intelligence that Iran’s militia proxies” might attack US forces in Iraq, The Washington Post explained on Tuesday. During his visit to Baghdad, Pompeo told Iraqi leaders that any attack that caused the death of even one US soldier would prompt a US counterattack, the Post reported.
Pompeo expected that the Iraqis would convey that message to Iran. Nonetheless, in the past few days, there have been three attacks on Iraqi military bases, where US forces are stationed.
On Friday night, Balad Air Base, some 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of Baghdad was hit by mortar shells.
On Monday night, there was a Katyusha rocket attack on Taji, a military base 30 kilometers (18 miles) north of Baghdad.
Read More: Rockets land in Iraqi military base, home to US-led coalition troops
And on Tuesday night, several Katyusha rockets were fired at the Presidential Complex in Mosul, originally constructed as a site for one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, but which now serves as an Iraqi military base.
Iraqi forces found the rocket launcher soon after the Mosul attack. Its relatively small size suggests the difficulty of preventing such assaults.