Bruce Fein reviews the new book by the former U.S. secretary of state, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love.
Oct. 16, 2018: U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo departing Joint Base Andrews for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (State Department, Ron Przysucha, Public domain)
By Bruce Fein
Special to Consortium News
Mike Pompeo swaggers in the pantheon of the best and the brightest who engineered the Vietnam War debacle fueled by the counter-historical domino theory. He graduated first in his class at West Point, graduated from Harvard Law School and served as an editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. He is intellectually quantum levels above his former boss President Donald Trump. But as Julius Caesar said of Cassius, “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
Pompeo sallies forth like Alexander the Great on Bucephalus in his new book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for America I Love, to slay the bad guys, i.e., predominantly communist China, Iran, Venezuela and international Islamic terrorists.
Pompeo, a former secretary of state and a former director of the C.I.A. under President Donald Trump and a former member of Congress (2010-2016) during the presidency of Barak Obama, attacks his enemies, real or imagined, with all the zeal and truculence of Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada. He sees the world in prime colors without the Aristotelian balance of chiaroscuro. “You’re either with us or against us,’ in the words of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
Pompeo is a devout, evangelical Christian who professes inspiration from God and the Bible. But don’t hold your breath waiting for The Book of Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Nor expect to encounter Jesus of Nazareth’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 39): “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
The Pompeo doctrine fits Will Rogers’ definition of diplomacy like a glove: “the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.” Pompeo savages the idea of awaiting an actual or imminent attack before pulverizing nations or non-state actors “not-yet-guilty” of aggression.
He champions slaughtering the perceived enemy based on speculation of future hostilities born of bigotry reminiscent of General John DeWitt’s certitude that Japanese Americans were “not-yet-guilty” of treason in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor because they exhibited all the signs of innocence: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”
He has no patience for Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ July 4, 1821, address to Congress renouncing going abroad in search of monsters to destroy to preserve liberty and the march of the mind as the nation’s glory at home. In his Hobbesian world, the only safe course is preemptive warfare everywhere until all hypothetical enemies of the United States are vanquished.
Pompeo betrays a shocking ignorance of the Constitution he repeatedly swore to uphold and defend despite his impressive legal credentials. The Constitution endows Congress with exclusive constitutional authority to declare war, regulate foreign commerce and to sanction violations of international law in Article I. The Constitution’s makers were categorical and unanimous about the war power:
President George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention, advised:
“The Constitution vests the power of declaring War with Congress; therefore, no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”
James Madison, father of the Constitution elaborated,
“In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.”
James Wilson, delegate to the Constitutional Convention and later justice of the United States Supreme Court, added,
“This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large.”
Alexander Hamilton, Constitutional Convention delegate and vocal advocate for a muscular presidency, understood, “the Legislature can alone declare war, can alone actually transfer the nation from a state of peace to a state of hostility” and thus
“[i]t is the province and duty of the executive to preserve to the nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt them by placing the nation in a state of war.”
“Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States,” by Howard Chandler Christy, 1940. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
Yet Pompeo tacitly endorses limitless, unconstitutional presidential wars neither declared by Congress nor fought in self-defense. Neither as a member of Congress, nor as director of the C.I.A. nor as secretary of state did Pompeo ever protest unconstitutional presidential wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, and against non-state actors Al Qaeda and ISIS. He believes the president is crowned with limitless authority, among other things, to decide whether and when to attack China or Iran with nuclear or conventional weapons.
Denying the Constitution
None of this is stated explicitly. But it is implied by the book’s exclusion of the Constitution or Congress as relevant to war or foreign policy. Indeed, both are denied even cameo appearances in the making and implementation of national security policy.
Pompeo decries an alleged overreaction to the assassination of United States permanent resident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia. The C.I.A. concluded with a high degree of confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salam (MBS) ordered Khashoggi’s grisly dismembering in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Pompeo assails Khashoggi as an “activist” as if the term were a pejorative. Sam Adams was an activist, Paul Revere was an activist, the Boston Tea Party participants were activists, the signers of the Declaration of Independence who risked and gave that last full measure of devotion were activists. America would not be a nation if it were not for activists whom Pompeo scorns. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis underscored in Whitney v. California (1927), “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”
The America Pompeo is fighting for is not the America born at Lexington and Concord with a shot heard around the world. It is an America indistinguishable from monarchy in which the king can do no wrong representing a counter-revolution against July 4, 1776.
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Pompeo approves presidential power to play prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to exterminate any person on the planet (including American citizens not on a battlefield) based on a speculative hunch that the victim might become a danger to national security. His rebarbative views echo one of his predecessor’s, Henry Kissinger, who groused to President Gerald Ford in 1975, “[I]t is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.”
Pompeo heroizes C.I.A. operatives who committed torture (a universal crime under the Convention Against Torture) or destroyed incriminating evidence like Jose Rodriguez.
Pompeo tacitly supports the dragnet, warrantless spying on every American by the national security agency shredding the right to be let alone under the Fourth Amendment. He would have been appalled at William Pitt the Elder’s denunciation of limitless monarchial power to invade the home:
“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail; the roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter. All his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.”
Pompeo sneers at George Washington’s Farewell Address. It warned against “passionate attachments” or “habitual fondness” towards any nation. But Pompeo swoons over Saudi Arabia and MBS. As to the latter, Pompeo takes a page from former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young’s gushing praise of Iran’s fanatical Ayatollah Khomeini as destined to “be hailed as a saint.”
Pompeo similarly effuses that MBS “is leading the greatest cultural reform in the nation’s history. He will prove to be one of the most important figures of his time, a truly historic figure on the world stage.”
Sept. 18, 2019: U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)
But Pompeo’s own State Department indicted MBS’s Saudi Arabia for egregious serial human rights violations in 2020 as follows:
“[U]nlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees by government agents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet, including threats of violence or unjustified arrests or prosecutions against journalists, censorship, site blocking, and engaging in harassment and intimidation against Saudi dissidents living abroad; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; severe restrictions of religious freedom; restrictions on freedom of movement; inability of citizens to choose their government peacefully through free and fair elections; violence and discrimination against women, although new women’s rights initiatives were implemented; trafficking in persons; criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual activity; and restrictions on workers’ freedom of association, including prohibition of trade unions and collective bargaining.”
Pompeo’s disrespect for the rule of law was illustrated by his cavalier campaigning as secretary of state on official business for President Donald Trump’s re-election through a recorded speech played at the 2020 Republican National Convention in violation of the Hatch Act’s criminal prohibition.
He says not a word about what, in my view, was Trump’s orchestrated violent insurrection against the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power under the Twelfth Amendment and Electoral Count Act.
Pompeo, an honorable man like the men who assassinated Caesar, is courting Trump’s violent mobsters for 2024.
He has defected from the Constitution to limitless executive power.
Beware of his quest for the White House.
Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love. Broadside Books; Jan. 24, 2023
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and research director for Republicans on the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran. His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com. His twitter feed is @brucefeinesq.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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US fascism exemplar.
Pompeo, in one person, all the qualities and comments that represent the USA and what it has become today. A living example. But then again, based on the decisions from both houses of the Israeli controlled government in Washington, he is probably no worse that over 50% of the elected members of that fast crumbling empire.
Jesus had some choice words for somebody like Mike Pompeo, who considers himself a Christian: “It must needs be that trials and tribulations will come, but woe to those by whom they come. It would be better for such to have a millstone wrung about their neck and be thrown into the sea …” (Luke 17:1-2)
One wonders what possibly could possess someone to become as rabidly crazy as the likes of Mr. Pomous Ass and I have a thought.
When a person realizes how totally owned they actually are by the system they have involved themselves in what is it they are supposed to do to salvage what is left of their being’s time on earth.
Arrogance is energized by power, drugs do this to the humans psyche for instance. A false power no doubt, but one that fools the brain into compliance, “use more of me “(the drug) says you will be even greater.
What to do? Human nature says, hay I’m so comfortable why rock the boat.
When I look at this SOB I see Hitler!
Time has come to stop this B.S.!
To get a well documented, cutting view of Pompeo, that ignores characterizations such as “how smart” he is claimed to be, please access the following audio file: hxxps://laroucheorganization.com/article/2023/01/13/what-mike-pompeo
For a precise assessment of his relationship to Koch Industries largesse, please view hxxps://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2020/eirv47n35-20200828/31-43_4735.pdf
If you really love your country, Mike…you certainly have an odd way of showing it.
America, you are the bad guys.
Between Pompeo and the war criminal DeSantis, should they get in power, especially as running mates, the US will be burned at the stake.
Why is it that some of the worst warmongers are devoutly religious? How do their actions, statements and beliefs reconcile with the teachings of their religion? I’m not aware of any mainstream Christian religion that advocates war, murder, deception and other crimes against people.
Pompeo is a monster by any definition. He may not have blood on his hands personally, but he has certainly been directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of death and destruction.
Actually it should be noted and kept in mind that the Old Testament has accounts of the ancient Israelites slaughtering and committing atrocities against their “heathen” neighbors, allegedly at the command of God.
And the New Testament is inseparable from the Old Testament.
And the book of Revelation has some warlike descriptions as to what is supposed to happen to those who are not with Christ.
What a lousy excuse for a human being.
What happened to the famed ‘checks and balances’ of the US Constitution?
Isn’t someone, anyone, constitutionally responsible for bringing this man to justice for his war crimes?
If Trump can be indicted and investigated, why not Pompeo?
Among the things that made America truely exceptional, admired and kept the world in awe of it was its political concept of “checks and balance”. This concept is still very much there but profitably corrupted even bipartisanly as “cheques and bank balances”. And Pompeos’ pursuit of the absolute executive ideal is perhaps to PRIVATELY monopolize that lucrative conceptual transformation and its rewards. It is all part of the American Dream, I guess !
Mike Pompeo is a sick man and is proud of all the death and destruction he has caused.
For many year my mother had claimed they would come after her and kill her….she suffered from schizophrenia. It is disease that progressively gets worse to the point that one ultimately realizes the person is mentally ill. Pompeo is in an early stage of schizophrenia.
I am not a USA citizen and the name of the POTUS is merely a media identity. But DJ Trump holds a degree in economics, more than equal to any degree in law, which is not at all “impressive”. Lawyers are unable to work with whole numbers let alone draw a graph. Regular saluting at West Point is merely a sign of Mr Pompeo’s supplication to the machine. Mr Trump appears to have a more innovative nature. Evangelical Christians must have a DNA flaw that leads to materializing fantasies. Although Mr Trump owns a Bible his DNA seems less obviously flawed. Mr Pompeo’s belief in illegal wars of aggression is less appealing than Mr Trump’s statement that, under his hand, the USA would not be at war in Ukraine. Mike’s belief in anticipated guilt resembles the movie Minority Report on steroids. I don’t vote in the USA but prefer Donald John Trump by a wide margin.
This video of Pompeo went viral everywhere, except in the US probably because of CIA pressure on US MSM not to magnify it.
Anti-Trump CNN or MSNBC didn’t show it over and over again all day long for Days, as they usually do for anything that discredits the Trump Administration.
Here is Trump’s SoS incriminating himself before a friendly audience cheering him on, laughing and applauding him when he said,
“I was CIA Director. We Lied, we Cheated, we Stole. It’s – it was like – We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American Experiment.”
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac
That’s Delusional & Blind American Patriotism this report points out.
Anybody else think that the book jacket photo has been worked to make Pompeo thinner?
Also graduating 1st in one’s class at West Point isn’t supper hard, if your memory works, and you’re eager to please. There are correct answers to engineering questions [albeit there are massive ambiguities and contractions in the physics, electrical science, and the history of science underlying those contradictions and paths not taken].
As for Harvard Law; that “constitutional scholar” Tom Cotton (who has a Clarence Thomas level of understanding of the Bill of Rights) went there too.
Would be much more impressive if Pompeo had graduated first in his class at MIT, still largely engineering, but there one is exposed to some of the fallacies of “science” and challenging humanities, and then graduated from Fordham Law, or the University of Chicago, with honors.
In other words, for undergrad and graduate school Pompeo only attended academically decent institutions. It’s not like he went to Harvard Medical School, one of the best in the world. He went to a second rate undergrad engineering school, and then attended a second rate law school that happens to be connected to some of the paths of/to power in the USA.
Pompeo has appeared in public that thin for more than a year and was a tipoff that he’s running next year.
Then the author should have used Shakespeare’s full quote: “Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
The tendency for authors to ad hominem attack (“Trump is Hitler!”) and elevate (“Zelensky is another Churchill!”) in comparison to more substantial figures in history (our leaders are mostly mediocre megalomaniacs), really detracts from their arguments.
Suffice to say that Pompeo has internalized CIA morality and lacks self-awareness, and is unqualified for public office. Comparing Pompeo to Mussolini insults the latter who was THE leading Socialist in Italy before he “invented” Fascism; if not for the war-mongering NAZI empire, Mussolini would have been another Franco or Tito, well-regarded by many more.
Perhaps he’s sick.
He would unlikely run for president in that case.
It’s surprising that this man has such credentials: first in his class at West Point, graduate of Harvard and editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. From his experience in government, which I adamantly apposed on certain occasions, I thought he was a charity case with a special ed background. This tells me that intelligence on its own is not indicative of true leadership and that Harvard is not necessarily the venue for governmental timber. He is a dangerous man.
Robert: Indeed. I think that although he has drive and intellect, he is deeply in the thrall of raw authority. This may also be an outcome his religious upbringing and beliefs.
According to the late writer and psychotherapist Alice Miller, a person’s ability to resist conformity and group think and going along with evil is not a matter of intelligence but a matter of access to one’s “true self” (which includes awareness of our own true feelings, desires, and thoughts). Such access to one’s “true self” is harmed by childhood mistreatment, which is almost universal, and in particular mistreatment that is not acknowledged as being such but is accepted without question as being “for one’s own good”. In fact one of Alice Miller’s first books, written in the early 1980’s, is titled For Your Own Good, with subtitle “Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence”.
Alice Miller in her book has a long section dealing with horrendous child-rearing practices advocated in books which were popular in previous centuries, including during the time when future participants in the Third Reich were being raised as children. Here is an excerpts from this section:
hxxp://www.nospank.net/fyog8.htm
Totally agree. I remember I was shocked at the beliefs of Jeane Kirkpatrick. She was a highly educated person and was a true war hawk. I thought an education opened one’s mind to other cultures and concerns and that an education led to self refection. I came to realize I was completely wrong. If a person was a psychopath they had no concept of empathy or self reflection. I think our State Department has been run by psychopaths for thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union. They want to dominate every square inch of the earth and want to remain the world’s sole superpower. They have no concern for the deaths and destruction they’ve caused.
A very dangerous person! I left off “man”. Heaven help us if we fall for his snake oil and he gets back into power.
The most dangerous entity is the one that is certain he is always right.
Robert. May I suggest that, maybe, it is wrong to equate intelligence with academia or, for that matter, good passes in university or other education institutions. Passing exams does not necessarily correlate with intelligence. My experience is, that all too often, formal education and intelligence do not comfortably coexist but, more frequently, are mutually exclusive.
Cheers,
jack
I’m glad that Mr. Fein informed me that it was Benito Mussolini, a notorious fascist, who said you’re either with us or against us. Of course, the other notorious fascist that said that was Shrub. I also find it interesting that someone with such a pedigree in The Law should cavalierly ignore what Rumpole described as the golden thread that runs through English common law – the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven.
I like to think that one day all of the Shrub Family will be desiccated homeless Tumbleweeds.
An unbearably pompous monster. Hang around him long enough and you will just wish you were dead. Did he go on a diet to run in 2024, or sell his book, or both..?
hah hah..you noticed that too.
His ambition must be stronger than his appetite….
It’s hard to believe that he is “smart”. Ted Cruz was thought to be a genius. Donald Trump took him down with Lyin’ Ted.
If he’s going for the throne, one good thing that Trump could do for this country is to out bully him, Trump style.
When will voters come to their senses and stop picking the loudmouth bullying marauder and start picking the guy who cares about average working people, and is willing to fight for them/us.
People are sheeple and sheep are born to be bullied and killed.
However, sheeple who claim enlightenment often become lemmings, and end up equally dead.
People would most likely start picking the guy who cares about average working people tomorrow if that person were actually on the ballot.
Amen! It scares me that this villain has crawled from under his rock.
You just might have not noticed there were NO NEW WARS with Trump/Pompeo as the world knew immediately they would give no quarter. I strongly believe Putin would not have gone into Ukraine if Trump was president. When Dumb Joe won, I guarantee Putin and Xi toasted their good fortune to have another Obama-style spineless wimp in the WH.
Putin and Xi took Crimea and the South China Sea island during Obama’s pathetic years, and they both had taken measure of idiot Biden during those years. Now we have the most dangerous period in US history since the fall of the USSR.
As an example of Dumb Joe, he assailed Trump for taking out Soleimani, the Iranian general and sponsor of Mid-East terror. He decried it as harming any chance of getting Iran back to the negotiating table. Haha, what a sad fool Biden has turned out to be.
Not quite. Trump laid the groundwork for our coming war with China, by ginning up anti-China fever to scape-goat that country for all of the US of As ills.
Mike Pompeo must be remembered for the clearest and truest statement made about modern America:
“We Lie! We Cheat! We Steal!”
Truer words have rarely been spoken, and with such pride. They should print that on the money.
He was supposed to add, “And We Murder!” but he forgot about that.
Morality etc. aside, Pompeo is a clever speaker. It is bad style to recite long list, a list of three is a good principle, “Omne trium perfectum”. So he skipped the most obvious, and thus, most boring.
And the rest of the “We lied. We cheated. We stole” quote, referencing CIA activity under his directorship, is “We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac
Great idea, yes as a byline of “In God We Trust” !
That is for the currency. With gold standard gone, the currency is supported by duct tape (all the good works of Federal Reserve) and a prayer (fervent hopes of those of us who keep it, lacking a better choice).