REFUSES TO PLAY ZIONIST GAME
Iran president rattles cage
of U.S. foreign policy establishment
AN ACCOUNT OF THE ENCOUNTER BY A LEADING SYSTEM MOUTHPIECE
Iran’s Leader Relishes 2nd Chance to Make Waves
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times Thursday, 21 September 2006
NEW YORK — When President Bush and his advisers decided to allow President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran into the country to address the United Nations, their strategy was simple: containment.
There would be no visits to other cities where he could denounce Washington or question Israel’s legitimacy. There would be no opportunities, beyond his speech to the General Assembly, to turn questions about his nuclear intentions into repeated diatribes about America’s nuclear arsenal.
It turned out that Mr. Ahmadinejad had a Plan B.
The scope of his determination to dominate not only the airwaves but the debate became evident yesterday evening, when he entered a hotel conference room on the East Side with a jaunty smile, a wave and an air of supreme confidence.
Over the objections of the administration and Jewish groups that boycotted the event, Mr. Ahmadinejad, the man who has become the defiant face of Iran, squared off with the nation’s foreign policy establishment, parrying questions for an hour and three-quarters with two dozen members of the Council on Foreign Relations, then ending the evening by asking whether they were simply shills for the Bush administration.
Never raising his voice and thanking each questioner with a tone that oozed polite hostility, he spent 40 minutes questioning the evidence that the Holocaust ever happened — “I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this,†he said after hearing an account of an 81-year-old member, the insurance mogul Maurice R. Greenberg, who saw the Dachau concentration camp as Germany fell — and he refused to even consider Washington’s proposal for Russia to provide Iran with nuclear reactor fuel, and take it back once it is used. (Without the capacity to enrich fuel on its own soil Iran would be unable to make fuel suitable for a nuclear weapon.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/world/middleeast/21iran.html?hp&ex=1158897600&en=fd75007868ac87af&ei=5094&partner=homepage
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