TEHRAN - Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has said that U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent remarks are disgraceful.

“Over the past few years, the Americans have made great efforts to show that the Islamic Republic of Iran is unreliable, while it is now clear that those countries are unreliable that impudently threaten other countries with nuclear attack. Thus, the remarks of the president of the United states are disgraceful,” he told a group of military commanders at a meeting in Tehran on Sunday.
Ayatollah Khamenei said that Obama’s remarks are really odd because “in the twenty-first century, which is the century of claims about supporting human rights, a country’s president threatens a nuclear attack.”
Such remarks are detrimental to the U.S. because they give the impression that the United States is an “unreliable and wicked” country, he added.
“Those who are the real warmongers are talking of peace, and these individuals, who recognize no rights for humans, are chanting slogans about human rights,” the Supreme Leader stated.
He went on to say that a number of countries resort to every measure to advance their policies but hypocritically adopt friendly positions to influence world public opinion.
Obama’s recent statement is an example of such a hypocritical stance, he noted.
The U.S. government released its “Nuclear Posture Review” last week, which the administration called a manifesto ""achieving substantial further nuclear force reductions.""
Although it explicitly states that all non-nuclear weapons states are immune from nuclear attack, the statement reserves the option to use nuclear weapons against countries like Iran and North Korea, labeled as outliers in the paper.
Also, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that non-nuclear states that abide by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would not be threatened with nuclear retaliation by the United States -- even if they conducted conventional, biological, or cyber attacks.
However, he added, “if you’re not going to play by the rules, if you’re going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you,” the New York Times reported.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Ayatollah Khamenei said that in light of the current global situation, the might and vigilance of the Iranian armed forces are of the utmost importance.
The armed forces should always be prepared to counter threats, he said.
The Supreme Leader also said that the Iranian nation has shown that it is ready to confront any external threat