Obama Slams Ahmadinejad but Pushes Talks With Iran

(Sept. 24) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be the United States' best bet for isolating and forcing change from Iran.

President Barack Obama, in an interview today with the BBC service directed at Iran, lambasted Ahmadinejad for once again suggesting the U.S. government orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, even as the White House and its allies work to revive talks with Iran aimed at restricting Iran's nuclear program.

"It was offensive. It was hateful. And particularly for him to make the statement here in Manhattan, just a little north of ground zero, where families lost their loved ones, people of all faiths, all ethnicities who see this as the seminal tragedy of this generation. For him to make a statement like that was inexcusable," Obama said.

"It stands in contrast with the response of the Iranian people when 9/11 happened, when there were candlelight vigils, and I think a natural sense of shared humanity and sympathy was expressed within Iran," Obama added. "And it just shows once again sort of the difference between how the Iranian leadership and this regime operates, and how I think the vast majority of the Iranian people, who are respectful and thoughtful, think about these issues."

A senior administration official today told reporters on a conference call the administration was hoping that Obama's interview would reach the millions of Iranians who can hear the radio arm of BBC Persian and access its Farsi-language website, and that the U.S. would try to amplify the message by reaching out to bloggers, using Twitter and by posting the interview on YouTube.

And if Obama's goal is to prod Iran back to the negotiating table, Ahmadinejad might already be headed in that direction. The Iranian leader later told reporters in New York that his government hopes to resume talks sometime next month.

Ahmadinejad's comments Thursday before the United Nations General Assembly prompted the American delegation and diplomats from most of the Western world to walk out, and came at a time when global support is growing for U.S. pressure on Iran to curtail the country's nuclear ambitions.

Washington got a major boost on that front earlier in the week when Russia canceled a long-debated deal to sell its S-300 air-defense missile system to Iran, saying the sale was banned by sanctions adopted by the U.N. Security Council in June. Those sanctions, the fourth and toughest set in as many years against Iran, have been followed by a series of unilateral and multilateral moves by the the U.S., Europe, Japan and others that are aimed at ratcheting up pressure on Iran to return to the nuclear negotiating table.

Last October, Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment of uranium in a deal with the five permanent U.N. Security Council members -- the U.S., France, Britain, Russia and China -- as well as Germany. But the Iranian government quickly walked away from the agreement, giving Washington enough diplomatic capital with the so-called P-5+1 group to eventually pass the new sanctions.

A senior administration official this week said Washington is fully behind an effort by Catherine Ashton, the top European Union foreign affairs official, to restart the dialogue with Iran.

Meetings of the P-5+1 group this week, on the sidelines of the annual U.N. summit, included discussion of what the official called "a phased approach to resolving the nuclear issue," and specifically a revised arrangement aimed at halting Iran's enrichment of uranium.

The original deal involved an offer to provide Iran with uranium enriched -- or purified -- enough for the Tehran Research Reactor, which would theoretically relieve Iran of the need to enrich on its own. Such enrichment is a process key to the creation of atomic weapons.

But since the deal fell through, Iran has managed to produce much more highly enriched uranium, enough to build one or two weapons if the uranium is processed more. And the official said one issue Iran would have to address now is the larger uranium stockpile, possibly by agreeing to give some of it to Russia or France as part of any trade.

The senior administration official who spoke today said the administration bases its hope for new negotiations on the economic pain Iran has felt with the new sanctions.

"There's a choice before the Iranian government," he said. "The costs associated with ... failure to live up to its obligations are growing. And those costs, frankly, have exceeded even what I think the Iranian government thought they would be. And you've seen not just the very real consequences of the sanctions -- including private companies pulling out of Iran, people seeing the cost of doing business in Iran, the international isolation of Iran -- but you've also seen statements from prominent Iranian leaders expressing concern about the sanctions."

Asked about the discomfort sanctions bring to average Iranians, Obama sought to emphasize in his interview with BBC Persian that Russia, China and others have backed the sanctions as well. And he argued that "this is a matter of the Iranians' government, I think, ultimately betraying the interests of its own people by isolating it further."