Perplexing Persian

A Few Words With Iran’s President

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Before sparks began flying between me and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, he began my interview with an unusual olive branch: “I would like to, with your permission, greet all of your readers as well as Web viewers and wish all of them the success and blessings of the Almighty.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad is a complex, even bizarre, figure. A firebrand with a penchant for making explosive public statements, he is small in person, subdued and very soft-spoken. Even when I pushed him hard on human rights abuses and nuclear deceptions, he responded in even tones while claiming that Iran is manifestly more democratic than the United States.

Another olive branch came hours after our conversation with the release of the two American hikers who had been imprisoned unjustly for two years in Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad didn’t even attempt to suggest that they were spies, but he bristled at my questions about them. He claimed that they had entered Iran illegally and would have merited punishment in any country.

This was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s only print interview on his visit to the United Nations General Assembly, and he made a significant effort to be friendly and conciliatory. Most important, he repeated an offer made in a Washington Post interview this month to stop all nuclear enrichment if the West would supply nuclear fuel enriched to a 20 percent level. He insisted that Iran will happily give up its enrichment processing if it can get this enriched uranium for “cancer treatment medication.”

“If they were willing to sell us the 20 percent enriched uranium, we would have preferred to buy it,” he said. “It would have been far less expensive. It’s as though you wish to purchase a vehicle for yourself. No one is willing to sell it to you, then you must set up your own production line to produce your own vehicle.”

This sounds very much like an incipient deal that Mr. Ahmadinejad initially welcomed two years ago but was later scotched by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The chief of Iran’s nuclear program, Fereydoon Abbasi, seemed to reiterate recently that any such deal was dead.

But when I raised those points, Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted that there had never been any daylight between himself and the supreme leader on the nuclear issue and that Mr. Abbasi was not opposed today. When I asked skeptically if Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke for the full Iranian leadership, there was a flash of resentment at the question. He insisted that he did, indeed, have full authority.

Is this a real offer to stop all enrichment? I don’t know, but it’s worth it for the West to pursue it — without easing sanctions in the meantime. One question is how the West could verify an end to enrichment. I asked Mr. Ahmadinejad about that and noted Iran’s history of deceptions.

“We have done nothing wrong,” he said, denying sharply that his country had hidden anything.

Mr. Ahmadinejad called for Syria, his ally, to stop its violent crackdown on protesters, cautioning that “with clashes and confrontations problems will not be solved. They will be multiplied.”

Oh? What’s the difference with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s own harsh crackdown on dissidents?

“In Iran, things were quite different,” he insisted, a bit testy. Many of the dead in Iran were members of security forces, he claimed, suggesting that protesters were not deliberately targeted.

I asked Mr. Ahmadinejad what he thought when he saw the famous photos of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, lying on the ground and bleeding to death after she had been shot in the chest.

A hint of sadness crossed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s face. I thought, for a moment, that he was going to apologize. Instead, he constructed his own reality: He suggested that she had been murdered by his opponents, working with the BBC, as part of a bizarre snuff film.

“We do search for those who are truly guilty of murdering this young lady,” he said.

Our interview became more confrontational, and we tussled over Iran’s repression of the Bahai faith and other human rights issues. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s minders were signaling that the interview was ending, but he seemed to enjoy the give-and-take and ignored them.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also indulged in a bit of triumphalism. He acknowledged that the West’s “crippling” sanctions against Iran had “worked well.” But he added: “Does Iran face more problems or the United States of America?” He referred to the “collapse” of the American financial system and suggested that Iran’s economy is in better shape.

He added that the West will be driven by its weakness to “seek a rapprochement with Iran.”

Then the interview was over, and Mr. Ahmadinejad zoomed back from bombast to conciliation. He beamed and told me: “We truly like and love the people of the United States.”