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“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama said in the address, which was streamed online. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”

“If the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you,” he said.

The commencement address was delivered to 27,000 students at 78 historically black colleges and universities in a two-hour event called “Show Me Your Walk HBCU Edition.”

Obama is expected to participate in a second commencement ceremony hosted by NBA star LeBron James for graduating high school seniors. The event will be televised.

Since leaving office three years ago, Obama has rarely criticized Trump publicly.

“President Trump’s unprecedented coronavirus response has saved lives,” said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement Saturday evening. “His early travel restrictions and quarantines protected the American public while his Paycheck Protection Program and direct payments to Americans got needed economic relief to our country.”

“Moreover, President Trump directed the greatest mobilization of the private sector since World War II to fill the stockpile left depleted by his predecessor,” the statement said. “As we look to the future, we have the President who ushered in the hottest economy in modern history ready to do it a second time.”

In a private phone call with thousands of alumni of his administration last week, Obama called the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic an “absolutely chaotic disaster.”

Obama also said during the call that “seeing others as an enemy” had “become a stronger impulse in American life” and had weakened the response to the global crisis, NBC News reported.

Last month Obama endorsed his former vice president, Joe Biden, for president, saying he was the right person to “guide us through one of our darkest times.”

In the commencement address Saturday, Obama also touched on the racial disparities of the coronavirus pandemic that is disproportionately impacting people of color.

“And let’s be honest — a disease like this just spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country,” Obama said. “We see it in the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on our communities, just as we see it when a black man goes for a jog, and some folks feel like they can stop and question and shoot him if he doesn’t submit to their questioning.”

Obama was referencing the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who his family says was out for a jog when he was chased and fatally shot by two white men in late February. The shooters were not arrested until May, after a video of the killing was shared widely online.

“Injustice like this isn’t new. What is new is that so much of your generation has woken up to the fact that the status quo needs fixing; that the old ways of doing things don’t work,” Obama added.

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In a leaked conference call with former members of his administration, the ex-president said: “What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy – that has become a stronger impulse in American life.”

Mr. Obama said that the world’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak had been “anemic and spotty”, Sky News reported.

Although he said the fallout from coronavirus in the US would have been bad “even with the best of governments”, he added: “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset – of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ – when that mindset is operationalized in our government.”

The former president also vowed he will be “campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden” ahead of November’s election.

With more than 75,000 deaths, the US has had more fatalities from COVID-19 than any other country. Almost 1.3 million people have been infected there so far.

Mr. Obama has made few public comments about America’s response to the pandemic, even as Mr. Trump accused his administration of failing to stockpile supplies.

White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany has described Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus as “unprecedented” – and claimed the president’s actions have helped save American lives.

“While Democrats were pursuing a sham witch hunt against President Trump, President Trump was shutting down travel from China. While Democrats encouraged mass gatherings, President Trump was deploying PPE, ventilators, and testing across the country,” she said.

Polls suggest that the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is tight, with just six months to go until Americans cast their vote.

Mr. Obama’s remarks were first reported by Yahoo News, and the former president’s office has declined to comment on the leak.

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The main theme was the familiar one that U.S. policy before the Trump presidency was uniformly awful and, since then, the current administration has spectacularly turned everything around for the good. Another familiar theme is that nearly everything in U.S. foreign policy ought to be subordinated to confronting Iran. Whatever the speech may have accomplished for Pompeo back home, as a statement to Middle Eastern listeners it was remarkably tone-deaf.

The speech invited comparison with the speech Barack Obama delivered in the same city during the first year of his presidency and that was carefully crafted for Middle Eastern ears. Obama’s main message was that the Muslim world and the West can enjoy better relations than their history would suggest, but that improvement will require frank recognition of both the positive attributes and the shortcomings that each side brings to the relationship. While respectful toward Islam, Obama, as veteran Al-Arabiya journalist Hisham Melhem observed at the time, “boldly discussed some thorny, tough, sensitive issues that sometimes Muslim leaders and Arab leaders don’t like to hear.” Obama made a strong statement of the positive values that America has brought to Middle Eastern affairs while honestly acknowledging mistakes the West has made in its encounter with the Muslim world, from conduct during the Crusades to present-day Islamophobia. He also laid out a comprehensive positive agenda for a better relationship, covering topics from control of nuclear weapons to expansion of democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, and economic development. Obama’s speech was favorably received and widely recognized as an important statement.

Pompeo himself explicitly invited comparison with the Obama speech—evidently believing that 10 years is enough time for people to have forgotten what Obama said—and denigrated it as filled with “fundamental misunderstandings” that have had “dire” results. According to Pompeo, Obama “told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from an ideology.” No, Obama didn’t say that. He did discuss the main factors, such as political oppression and some of the economic consequences of globalization, that help to build an audience for such ideologies. As Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution commented after Obama’s address, one of the most important aspects of the speech was “to attack directly the narrative and ideology of al Qaeda. For too long the war of ideas was ceded to al Qaeda. By explaining his view of Islam, his vision of Arab-Israeli peace and other key issues the President took on al Qaeda’s argument for terror.”

Also, according to Pompeo, before the current administration took office the United States “grossly underestimated the tenacity and viciousness of radical Islamism.” That assertion certainly does not reflect the Obama speech in Cairo, in which Obama expressed determination to “relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security.”

Erroneous Claims

Like typical campaign rhetoric, Pompeo’s speech baselessly claimed credit for any positive result that has been achieved by anyone, even before the current administration took office. Referring to the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS or IS), for example, Pompeo talked about what has been done “just last year” in the same breath as a reference to 99 percent of IS territory having been liberated, without mentioning that most of that liberation occurred during the previous administration.

Pompeo made multiple references to the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons, contrasting a previous approach of doing “nothing” in response with how “President Trump unleashed the fury of the U.S. military not once, but twice, with allied support. And he’s willing to do it again, although we do hope that he does not have to.” The secretary will need to keep hoping, because the very fact that the Assad regime has kept doing what it was doing despite the U.S. military strikes indicates that the strikes are not working. By the measure of how much time transpires between chemical weapons incidents, the strikes have worked less well than the diplomacy-centered approach used earlier.

The speech’s lengthy excoriation of Iran also was written in a tone suggesting great accomplishment, even though nothing has been accomplished in the last two years. Despite all the pressure the Trump administration has exerted on Iran, there is still no sign of any “better deal” on nuclear matters or anything else to replace the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and Security Council Resolution 2231, of which the United States is in material breach following Trump’s reneging on U.S. obligations. Pompeo tried to claim accomplishment by asserting that the pressure campaign had “cut off the revenues the regime uses to spread terror and destruction throughout the world,” but such assertions do not reflect any positive results. As recent analyses by both the International Crisis Group and the Congressional Research Service have concluded, there has been no correlation between more sanctions being imposed on Iran and any retrenchment in Iran’s regional activities.

Some passages of Pompeo’s speech that supposedly describe past policies can only be met with a bemused shaking of the head and the question, “Where did he get this?” One such passage is “Our eagerness to address only Muslims and not nations ignored the rich diversity of the Middle East and frayed old bonds. It undermined the concept of the nation-state, the building block of international stability.” Previous administrations did not “address nations”?

There will be similar head-shaking among most Arabs and most Muslims who heard or read the speech. They will see almost nothing positive in it, from the standpoint of undercutting radical agendas, resolving conflicts within the region, or anything else. It is almost all negative and all about conflict and confrontation, especially with a military emphasis. Many will interpret the speech as a combination of domestic U.S. political combat overlaid on the Trump administration’s penchant for drawing rigid lines of conflict within the Middle East, of which the obsession with stoking hostility to Iran is a part.

 Significant Omissions

Most listeners in the Middle East will be struck by the omission of some major current regional concerns. Yemen, for example, is mentioned primarily as a supposed front for confronting Iran, with no mention of how the Saudi-led war has generated the humanitarian disaster there.

Or consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama’s speech included a significant and carefully balanced segment on this subject, which paired a strong defense of the “unbreakable” U.S. bonds with Israel (and a review of the history of persecution of Jews) with a recognition that Palestinians “have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.”

Pompeo offered just a single line promising to “press for a real and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians” and made no reference at all to any rights for Palestinians. He instead spent several lines defending the moving of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, saying that this honored “a bipartisan congressional resolution from more than two decades ago,” not addressing why several presidents of both parties wisely did not try to implement this congressional gesture.

In an even lengthier passage, Pompeo talked about how an Israeli judo champion was crowned the winner of a tournament in the United Arab Emirates and how the Israeli sports and culture minister shed tears of joy over Israeli participation in the meet. Don’t expect the average Middle Eastern man in the street to get as overcome with emotion about this as the minister did.

Pompeo referred to “truth” at both the beginning and end of his speech, which is enough to raise eyebrows coming from a senior official working for a president as truth-challenged as Donald Trump. A major credibility deficit exists for this administration on the issues the speech addressed, and the speech itself did nothing to reduce the deficit.

(Source: Lobelog)

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However, at that time President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not approve of talks with Americans by current nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi, who was foreign minister from 2011-2013, Hossein Amir Abdollahian said in an interview with Tasnim published on Sunday.

“Dr. Salehi made great efforts and took risks for the start of the talks… Mr. Ahmadinejad believed that the issue was complicated and should not have been followed by foreign minister,” he stated.

Amir Abdollahian said Ahmadinejad was not against negotiations with the United States but opposed the “level of Iranian negotiator”.

Ahmadinejad was of the opinion that this issue entails “complicated coordination” at the top level, said Amir Abdollahian who was deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs at the time.

“This was his belief that if Dr. Salehi entered” the talks with Americans “he would face many problems but Dr. Salehi, while respected Dr. Ahmadinejad, tried to pursue his own messages and expert views.”

He said Salehi entered the nuclear talks with Americans through a mediation effort by Oman. The mediator was an Omani national named Salem Abdulsalam, Amir Abdollahian said.

Salem, a senior advisor to the Sultan of Oman, played a “key” role in mediation between Iran and the U.S. and made a visit to Iran in in 2011, two years before Hassan Rouhani was elected president, Amir Abdollahian stated.

Amir Abdollahian went to say that as Salehi has stated in his book and also confirmed in interviews by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, nuclear negotiations with the United States started before Rouhani’s presidency.

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How former US president Obama is getting positioned to challenge the current US President Trump is a topic of heated debates among political pundits.

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“This notion that somehow Iran is in violation of the spirit of the deal… There’s no spirit of the deal. There’s the deal, and Iran is in compliance with the agreement,” said Tony Blinken, a former deputy national security adviser to Obama and former deputy secretary of state.

“The IAEA, which monitors the agreement, has said that repeatedly. Ironically, so has the Trump administration,” Blinken added, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency by its abbreviation.

He was speaking to the American National Public Radio (NPR).

The deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was reached between Iran and six other countries — France, Russia, China, Britain, Germany, and the US — in July 2015 and took effect in January 2016. Under the agreement, Iran undertook to apply certain limits to its nuclear program in exchange for the termination of all nuclear-related sanctions against Tehran.

But since rising to the presidency in the US a year after the implementation of the Iran deal had begun, Donald Trump has been actively seeking a pretext to potentially initiate an American withdrawal.

In the face of repeated IAEA reports verifying Iran’s full adherence to its obligations, however, US officials have resorted to claiming that while Iran is in “technical compliance” with the deal, it is breaching the wider spirit of it.

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