Secretary of state slams Obama’s ‘misguided’ Mideast policy
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a scathing rebuke of the Obama administration’s Mideast policies on Thursday, accusing the former president of “misguided” thinking that diminished America’s role in the region while harming its longtime friends and emboldening Iran.
In a speech to the American University in Cairo, Pompeo unloaded on President Trump’s predecessor, saying he was naive and timid when confronted with challenges posed by the revolts that convulsed the Middle East, including Egypt, beginning in 2011.
Pompeo denounced the vision outlined by then-President Barack Obama in a speech he gave in Cairo in 2009 in which he spoke of “a new beginning” for U.S. relations with countries in the Arab and Muslim world.
“Remember: It was here, here in this very city, another American stood before you,” Pompeo told an invited audience of Egyptian officials, foreign diplomats and students. “He told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from ideology. He told you 9/11 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East. He told you that the United States and the Muslim world needed ‘a new beginning.’ The results of these misjudgments have been dire.”
Pompeo said that the U.S. under Obama was “timid” about “asserting ourselves when the times — and our partners — demanded it.”
“The good news is this: The age of self-inflicted American shame is over, and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering,” he said. “Now comes the real ‘new beginning.’ In just 24 months, actually less than two years, the United States under President Trump has reasserted its traditional role as a force for good in this region, because we’ve learned from our mistakes.”
“President Trump has reversed our willful blindness to the danger of the regime and withdrew from the failed nuclear deal, with its false promises,” Pompeo said.
Trump and his actions have been directly and indirectly criticized by Obama, Bill Clinton and even George Bush, in a departure from past practice under which former presidents avoid second-guessing the current occupant of the Oval Office.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/01/10/trumps-secretary-of-state-slams-obamas-misguided-mideast-policy/
