Tillerson OUT Pompeo IN

It looks like the much-rumoured ousting of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state is now high on Trump's mind. He wants Mike Pompeo, his trusted like-minded outspoken CIA director to take over at State. The State Department is located in Washington's Foggy Bottom district, but Trump thinks Tillerson's brain has been much too foggy of late, particularly over Iran and North Korea, so he has fallen out of favour. Pompeo, on the other hand, wlll not let Trump down. He knows what his master wants and he agrees with him anyway on all the key issues. There will be nothing very diplomatic about Pompeo when he confronts Iran over the nuclear deal and Kim Jong-un over his nuclear weapons. Pompeo gave a brilliant insight into his way of thinking in the summer during an interview he gave at the Aspen security forum in Colorado. He was asked why he felt dubious about the Obama nuclear deal with Iran which was signed by all the five major nuclear powers plus Germany. In exchange for restricting its nuclear programme over the next ten years, Iran was promised a phased lifting of the heavyweight sanctions which had helped to cripple the country's economy. Pompeo revealed, presumbaly based on classified CIA intelligence, that Iran was cheating and getting away with it, despite a tough verification programme agreed with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as part of the nuclear deal. This is what he said: "I kind of think of Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal like a bad tenant. How many of you have had a bad tenant? You now, they don't pay the rent, you call them and then they send a cheque and it doesn't clear and they send another one. And then the next day there's this old tired sofa in the front yard and you tell them to take it away and you know they drag it to the back. This is Iranian compliance today. Grudging, minimalist, temporary with no intention of doing really what the agreement was designed to do, it was designed to foster stability and have Iran become a reentrant to the Western world, and the agreement simply hasn't achieved that." He went on to say he didn't know what would force Iran to honour the agreement in the proper manner. "But I can tell you what won't, is continued appeasement, continued failure to acknowledge when they do things wrong and forcing them into compliance." So, with Pompeo at the State Department, there would be a new tough approach with Tehran. Trump has already refused to certify the deal the last time he was supposed to put his initials to the continuing agreement, despite Tillerson's recommendation that he should. Pompeo in the background obviously told the president to step back. The rest of the world community condemned Trump. But if Pompeo is moved to State, then Tehran is going to face a much tougher secretary than Tillerson who was persuaded by his counterparts in Moscow, Beijing and London that the deal was good and that Iran was NOT cheating. Pompeo believes Tehran IS cheating and getting away with it, and is making more gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment than the deal allows, is stalling over allowing IAEA inspectors into the military/nuclear complex at Parchin and is generating more heavy water tonnage than is laid down in the deal - all signs that Iran is slowly pushing ahead with its nuclear programme under the noses of the IAEA, AND getting sanctions lifted. Incidentally, the plan is for Senator Tom Cotton to go to the CIA as Pompeo's replacement. Cotton and Pompeo are birds of the same feather. They were the ones who discovered, by accident, that there were secret annexes at the end of the nuclear deal, relating to the powers and limits of the verification programme which not even Obama had seen. The secret annexes were for the eyes only of the IAEA and Tehran. How scary is that? With Pompeo and Cotton in top positions, the Iran nuclear deal is going to be changed to suit Trump, whatever the likes of Boris Johnson in London says.