They are all communists...

Pompeo rips Obama's Middle East 'mistakes' in Cairo speech

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Thursday that the United States has learned from its past “mistakes” and “reasserted its traditional role as a force for good” in the Middle East, lobbing criticism at both the Obama administration and Iran by denouncing “false overtures from enemies.”

Pompeo’s remarks in Cairo, delivered as part of a broader speech about the U.S. role in the Middle East, focused in part on the notion that U.S. allies in the region need to unite to counter threats from Iran.

The address was a direct rebuke of former President Barack Obama’s policies in the Middle East, referencing multiple times a speech Obama delivered in Egypt in 2009 aimed at the Muslim world.

Though the former president was not mentioned by name, Pompeo ripped his attempts to engage Iran and his “penchant for wishful thinking” in approaching Middle East policy, accusing previous administrations of “misjudgments” that proved “dire,” and outlining what he said were the results of those miscalculations.

“In falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East, we were timid about asserting ourselves when the times – and our partners – demanded it,” Pompeo argued Thursday, declaring that Trump’s presidency has brought to an end “age of self-inflicted American shame.”

The address comes as Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton embarked on a campaign through the Middle East to assuage concerns from allies after Trump abruptly announced that he would pull U.S. troops out of war-ravaged Syria, claiming that countries in the region should handle the conflicts there.

The trip has resulted in conflicting messages from both men, with Bolton telling allies earlier this week that the withdrawal plans were conditional on receiving certain assurances from partners in the region and in conditions on the ground.

The White House has denied that his comments were a reversal of Trump’s original plan to pull troops out within one to two months, an announcement that prompted the resignations of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the U.S. envoy to the coalition to defeat the Islamic State.

On Thursday, Pompeo repeated that assertion.

“We remain committed to the complete dismantling of the ISIS threat and the ongoing fight against radical Islamism in all its forms,” he said, pledging that the Trump administration would continue to engage in the region for as long as it was warranted.

“But, as President Trump has said, we are looking to our partners to do more in this effort going forward,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo also slammed the Iran nuclear agreement, negotiated in part by the Obama administration, framing Trump’s withdrawal from the pact as a reversal of “willful blindness” to strike a deal with a “common enemy” and praising countries who he said “are rallying to our side to confront the regime like never before.”

“The nations of the Middle East will never enjoy security, achieve economic stability, or advance the dreams of its peoples if Iran’s revolutionary regime persists on its current course,” Pompeo said, declaring that U.S. sanctions on Tehran “are the strongest in history, and will keep getting tougher until Iran starts behaving like a normal country.”