Word: ahmadinejad
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...precisely the moment that Barack Obama plus the leaders of Britain and France were announcing the existence of the secret Iranian nuclear facility near Qum, a group of TIME editors were sitting down to interview Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at his New York City hotel. Our strategy was to avoid the obvious questions - Ahmadinejad has been grilled relentlessly about his heinous views on the Holocaust - but there was an obvious question that needed to be asked immediately: What was his reaction to the impending Obama statement? He seemed befuddled. His first response was incomprehensible: "So, is all the information that...
...those of us who sat with Ahmadinejad, the real headline was his apparent cluelessness. It was almost as if Obama's announcement had taken him by surprise. It is well known that Ahmadinejad doesn't have operational control over the nuclear program or Iranian foreign policy - that resides with Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei - but the exact extent of his powers, beyond management of the domestic economy, remains a mystery. He did not seem very powerful to us. His answers to our questions were sometimes opaque, often blatantly false, though not confrontational. Almost every question brought forth a flurry...
...during the national trauma of the Iran-Iraq war, whether he had seen combat or lost friends. When I asked his opinion of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's famous 2001 Quds Day speech, in which he called for an "Islamic bomb" to counter Israel's nuclear arsenal, Ahmadinejad denied that Rafsanjani had ever made such a speech. I said that I'd been there, using an official Iranian translator, and that the speech had made headlines worldwide. "None of the Iranians here around the table recall such a statement," he said - and the assembled Marx brothers turned...
...second-level danger to the U.S. The Obama Administration should continue its attempts to engage the Iranians while preparing to contain and deter them if they actually try to build a bomb. It should not revert to the foolish bellicosity of the last Administration. And there is good news: Ahmadinejad assured us that he would not attempt to change Iran's constitution and run for a third term in 2013. That should come as some small relief to the mass of Iranians who yearn to breathe free...
...representatives are likely to subtly hint of cooperation to come - but only if talks continue. However, such gestures do not mean Iran is prepared to offer meaningful concessions and impose any restraints on its nuclear ambitions." And the most distasteful aspect of the process may be that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad uses the talks to burnish the legitimacy of a regime at odds with millions of its own people...