Word: iranianized
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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...
...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 to stone. Well, I asked, what about the argument itself, that Iran needed a nuclear weapon to deter Israel? "We believe that...
...pictures of the turbulent aftermath of the Iranian election...
President Barack Obama's strategy of engaging Iran finally got under way in earnest on Thursday with a positive response from Tehran to at least some of the concerns about its nuclear program. At a meeting in Geneva with officials from Western powers, Russia and China, Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect a hitherto secret uranium-enrichment facility under construction near Qum. President Obama and his allies expressed grave concern last week about the site after revelations of its existence, and they made the demand for its inspection...