‘We’re at a Very Dangerous Crossroads’: NBC’s Richard Engel Offers Grim Rebuttal to Pompeo Dismissing Iran Blowback as ‘Noise’
As the Trump administration defended the strike on Qasem Soleimani as necessary to avert an imminent attack, NBC News’ Richard Engel said a comment made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the possibility of “a little noise” in the interim sounded similar to a quote from Donald Rumsfeld when he was Secretary of Defense in 2003.
On @MeetThePress Secretary @SecPompeo said killing Soleimani 100% makes America safer, “even if there’s a little noise here in the interim.” I remember, as Baghdad was being looted after Saddam’s overthrow, Rumsfeld said: “Freedom’s untidy.”
— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) January 5, 2020
Engel, reporting from Iraq today, told Katy Tur, “There have not been large protests in the streets of people demanding the Americans stay. There have been calls for the Americans to leave, but we have not been hearing many counter-voices arguing the opposite. Even though this resolution and now this request by the prime minister may not be binding, it does seem to be that pressure is mounting on the U.S. to at the very least limit its presence if not start taking steps to end it.”
Regarding the above tweet, Engel said Pompeo’s comments feel very premature right now:
“To hear at the time, it was Defense Secretary Rumsfeld saying, well, ‘Democracy is messy. Things just happen.’ And I had this distinct feeling that, well, this is not just messy. We are off on a — down on a very messy path or down uncharted waters. And I had a similar feeling when I heard the current Secretary of State say something kind of similar, that this is just a passing phase. This is — we are at a very dangerous crossroads right now. Iran is united and is mobilized in a way that I haven’t seen before. It is telling its proxies that they should be prepared for a long battle. You hear groups like Hezbollah saying that it is time to push the United States out of the region. So I am not sure or as convinced as Secretary Pompeo is that this is just a passing bit of noise, just as I was not convinced that what we saw so many years ago was just a bit of a messy phase in the early birth of a newly democratic state.”
On Meet the Press yesterday, Chuck Todd questioned Pompeo on whether America is safer today after the strike on Soleimani. Pompeo said America is absolutely safer today.
Todd said at one point, “We do expect retaliations against American citizens now, correct?”
“Preserving, protecting, and defending America is the mission that we have,” Pompeo said. “It may be that there’s a little noise here in the interim and that the Iranians make the choice to respond. I hope that they don’t. President Trump has made clear what we will do in response if they do, that our response will be decisive and vigorous.”
You can watch Engel’s comments above, via MSNBC.
