Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo urges Israel to ‘finish the job’ and ‘crush’ Iran

Peace-loving nations should be helping Israel to “finish the job” with Iran instead of demanding a ceasefire, Donald Trump’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo has urged.

He said Lebanon and the Gulf Arab states would be thanking Israel for taking out the region’s greatest threat, and that the only nations unhappy with degrading Tehran would be China, Russia and North Korea.

He said that instead of saying “don’t”, the White House should be helping Israel to “finish the job.”

“It means you take it down lock, stock and barrel,” he told an audience at Policy Exchange.

The Biden Administration, Australia, the UK, the EU and other nations have repeatedly called on Israel to put down its arms against Gaza and in Lebanon, where Israel opened a new front in the past weeks targeting Hezbollah.

World leaders have repeatedly expressed concern that the conflicts could lead to a full-scale war.

Mr Pompeo said it was right for the western world to be worried about getting dragged into another conflict in the Middle East.

“It’s why you have to win, it’s why Iran has to be crushed,” he said.

“This is how you avoid a war in the Middle East.”

He said supporting Israel and the Gulf states against their common threat — Iran — was how the Trump Administration had dealt with the region and deterred conflict.

“This is all about trust and confidence, do your friends believe you’ll be with you and do you demonstrate that in the moment,” he said.

“And I hope that not only will the Brits get that right, but that we will in the United States, that the European nations will and every peace-loving nation will say, nope the problem child sits in Tehran and we’re going to push back against them every way and always and if you do that, you can avoid it.”

We are in a world now where the Israelis are firmly on the front foot.

Mr Pompeo, also a former CIA Director, said taking out Iran’s proxy forces in Yemen, Syria and Iraq was achievable.

“What they’ve done to Hezbollah, it would be like taking out the entire C-suite at Microsoft down to every product line development rep,” he said.

Mr Pompeo, who is widely regarded as a frontrunner to be Donald Trump’s Defence Secretary if the former President wins next month’s election, made the comments ahead of the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks in which Hamas terrorists killed 1200 Israelis and took 250 hostages.

Israel responded to the attacks by bombarding Gaza for the past year aimed at eliminating Hamas and its infrastructure.

But the civilian toll and humanitarian crisis has worsened over the past year, with estimates that up to 41,000 Palestinians have been killed and sparked a fierce backlash, particularly amongst pro-Palestinian and Muslim voters.

And Israel’s attacks in Lebanon — where it successfully targeted hundreds of Hezbollah fighters in a sensational exploding pager attack and killed the terrorist organisation’s leader Hassan Nasrallah — has lead to a new wave of protests in western capitals. Protesters are angry at what they say is Israel’s disproportionate use of force and civilian casualties

Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed proxy which Tehran uses as a buffer or deterrent. Last week, Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel in retaliation for the attacks in Lebanon and the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.

Michael Stephens an associate fellow on Middle East Security Studies with the Whitehall think tank RUSI, said people around Mr Trump were intent on helping Israel reorder the region.

“They’re very keen to do it on the back of increased US power in the region and deployments,” he said.

“And they’re very keen to do it on the back of giving Israel more free reign than existed before.”

He said it was for this reason that Democrat supporters considering boycotting voting for Vice-President Kamala Harris because they believed the Biden Administration was complicit in genocide should be careful what they wished for.

And he added that the demonstrations around the world aimed at forcing western governments to break solidarity with Israel were missing the point.

“If you are someone who is marching in London, in Paris, in New York and you want to end hostilities as a result of what happened on October 7, you’re going to be disappointed,” he said.

“Events on the ground are driving how the region is moving at the moment.

“That dynamic needs to be understood — the region has its own balance of power.

“That balance of power is being rewritten day-by-day, as Hezbollah is being pushed back, as Iran thinks about what its next move is.

“Israel has more or less outthought, out-fought Hezbollah, it has Hamas on the back foot.

“We are in a world now where the Israelis are firmly on the front foot.

“So we have two separate conversations going on here — there’s a conversation going on in the region, and then there’s a conversation going on in Trafalgar Square or there’s a conversation in Times Square.”

But he said the almost-weekly protests had exposed the level of polarisation over the war in Australia, the UK, United States, France and Germany.

News of a 56-year-old man in Sydney being arrested and charged for holding up an Israeli flag with a swastika covering the Star of David made international news overnight.

The swastika was the symbol used by the Nazis who killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust in the Second World War.

“Some people don’t seem to be getting the memo that holding up placards in support of terrorist organisations — despite a lot of police advice to the contrary — is a bad idea,” said Mr Stephens.

“It’s desperately sad, really, genuinely desperately sad to see this because it shows the depth of polarisation that this conflict has caused, particularly amongst certain minorities.”

On the weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron became the first European leader to say that arms should stop being delivered to Israel for use in Gaza.

This was swiftly rejected by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who likened it to the demands for a ceasefire.