TEHRAN – Iran’s Foreign Ministry has reacted to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s obsession with Iran, saying the U.S. regime is responsible for coups and wars against regional countries.

“The outgoing Mr. #WeLiedCheatedStole is obsessing with Iran again,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh wrote in a tweet on Saturday.

Khatibzadeh was making a reference to Pompeo, who said during his lecture at Texas A&M University in April 2019 that when he was the CIA director, “we lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses...it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

The spokesman further said, “Reality: US regimes have long plotted coups & waged wars against Iranians and their neighbors. Countless have been killed. And most vulnerable Americans abused as cannon fodder.”

“This is his regime's true nature,” he added.

The remarks came after Pompeo claimed in a Friday tweet that the United States has always sought peace with the people of Iran.

Pompeo wrote, “For 41-years the despotic Islamic Republic of Iran and its ruling clerics have oppressed the Iranian people while seeking conflict and promising violence against the West. This is the regime's true nature.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has also occasionally referred to Pompeo as “Mr. We lied, We cheated, We stole”.

Back in September, Zarif advised U.S. President Donald Trump to change tack before his secretary of state turns his administration into a global laughing stock.

“The world says NO Security Council sanctions were restored,” the foreign minister wrote in a tweet on September 20. “But Mr. ‘We lied, We cheated, We stole’ threatens to punish a world that refuses to live in his parallel universe.”

Under the Trump administration, the United States imposed the “harshest ever sanctions” against Iran in order to force Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement, after Trump withdrew the U.S. from an already working nuclear deal that was signed in 2015 under his predecessor Barack Obama.

The Trump administration has also escalated tensions with Tehran by imposing sanctions on Iran’s top officials, including Zarif, and top state bodies, including the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and the office of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” policy against the Islamic Republic, which was championed by Pompeo, reached its peak with the assassination of Iran’s top anti-terror commander, Qassem Soleimani, on January 3 of this year – a move that prompted Iran to attack the United States Ain al-Assad airbase in western Iraq, where the assassination had taken place.

MH/PA