Top U.S. official to Post: No Iran regime change, but keeping max pressure

The Trump administration is not seeking regime change, but rather to maintain its “maximum pressure campaign to get Iran back to the table” for a “better deal than the JCPOA,” a top US state department counter-terror official told the Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

Speaking to the Post on the sidelines of the ICT-IDC Herzliya counter-terror conference and only days after US National Security Adviser John Bolton exited the scene and Trump himself hinted to a lighter hand with Iran, Nathan Sales tried to clear the air.

Asked if the Trump administration’s standards of what would be an acceptable improved deal would be lower now that Trump seems more intent on talks with Iran, Sales said that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 12 principles remained the standard and that an improved deal would be a major change, not merely cosmetic.

Questioned by the Post, the US counter-terror official agreed that Iran’s ballistic missile testing and aggressive behavior in the region would need to be part of such a deal, without limiting a deal to those additions.

Pressed about whether Trump is intent on meeting with Iran President Hassan Rouhani and on whether he might agree to a French compromise of temporarily restoring some waivers to sanctions while leaving most sanctions in place, Sales demurred.

He did not want to discuss one way or another whether a Rouhani meeting at the UN later this month could advance the goal of getting a better deal with Iran.  

Waiving aside theories that Bolton’s leaving the administration signaled a shift toward going easy on Iran, Sales said that “US Iran policy is the president’s Iran policy. The president has been very clear that it is the worst state sponsors of terrorism…and imposed historically severe sanctions on Iran.”

While the US is not looking for regime change, “We want them to behave like a normal state which doesn’t use terror as a basic tool of statecraft,” he said.

For example, Sales slammed Iran for continuing to host al-Qaeda operatives on its soil and permitting it to move funds around the region.

Sales also discussed with the Post the fact that sanctions against Iran and Hezbollah are separate.

In other words, in a theoretical scenario where the US and Iran were on a negotiations track with reduced sanctions, “Hezbollah and its front companies and its leaders are sanctioned in their own right as a terror organization. Those designations remain in place for as long as it engages in terror activity.”

He added, “this is fundamental to what Hezbollah is. It is not a political party, not a defender of Lebanon, it is a terror organization – full stop.”

Sales was also in Israel to commemorate the 9/11 terror attacks and to announce the US was offering rewards for catching or locating three additional al-Qaeda leaders.

At a speech at the ICT conference late Thursday, he announced a $5 million reward for the identification or location of any of three of al-Qaeda’s senior leaders:  Faruq al-Suri, Abu Abd’ al-Karim al-Masri and Sami al-Uraydi.

He said that the US “has decimated the core of the [original] al-Qaeda leadership in South Asia. The group adapted to that pressure. We are increasing the use of civilian tools” in addition to heavy “kinetic [often drone strikes] pressure” against a range of al-Qaeda affiliated groups across the world.

Also, Sales wanted to highlight a new executive order signed by Trump this week which “allows better targeting of [terrorist] leaders and those participating in training. We used to need to show a direct link to a terror attack or plot. Sometimes this was easy to establish, sometimes it needs lots of leg work.”

He said the executive order “dramatically simplifies the process. We can target [terrorists] leaders irrespective of if they are tied to a particular plot,” noting the US State Department issued dozens of new terror designations on Tuesday as a sign of being “more nimble and agile” with sanctions and law enforcement crackdowns.

In addition, he said the order would “make it easier to target Hamas and Hezbollah for sanctions,” adding that four members of Hezbollah’s senior leadership council had been newly designated.

Sales did not deny statements earlier this week at the ICT-IDC Herzliya conference by Jay Tabb, the executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, that al-Qaeda currently has a new high of 20,000 followers worldwide.

But his point was that the US, more than possibly any other country, “has kept its eye on the ball” with al-Qaeda and attacked and harassed it in a proactive way sufficiently that its central management apparatus has fallen apart.

That does not mean that al-Qaeda might not grow by absorbing dejected former ISIS members and does not mean it cannot present a more decentralized threat.

But he said it does show the US is doing all it can against al-Qaeda on the kinetic, financial and ideological planes.

Another big priority that Sales has pushed on behalf of the US, is trying to get around 2,000 ISIS foreign fighters in Syrian Democratic Forces’ custody back to their countries of origin.

“These are dangerous terrorists. They left comfortable lives behind to go fight in the desert…The position of the US is that every country is responsible to handle their own citizens, to repatriate them and to prosecute them,”

“Some cannot be prosecutable and need rehabilitation programs to help deradicalize them. We would like to see more progress,” on all of these issues.

“A number of countries in North Africa, the Gulf, and Kazakhstan – which has been a leader on this issue by repatriating hundreds of fighters and fighters’ family members” – have made progress, but “one area where there has been insufficient progress is Western Europe.”

“I would like to commend Italy for repatriating a fighter and prosecuting that person. That is what the US does for our citizens who fight in Syria and Iraq. Italy’s neighbors have the same ability to prosecute terrorists. Our European neighbors need to take more responsibility.”

While exact numbers were not given for how many of the 2,000 fighters the SDF is holding came from Western Europe, experts have said over 5,000 traveled to the Middle East battlegrounds – meaning Western Europeans are likely a substantial number of the 2,000.

Next, Sales was pressed about the difficulty of Europeans prosecuting these ISIS individuals if all the evidence there was against them came from problematic battlefield conditions.

Sales said that evidence could be collected from the battlefield and that the US had started to introduce such evidence even in civilian courts, such that evidence against the foreign fighters should not get Western Europe off the hook for dealing with its citizens.