Iran letter to Bush criticizes US govt (AP) Updated: 2006-05-09 22:22
Iran's president declared in a letter to President Bush that democracy had
failed worldwide and lamented "an ever-increasing global hatred" of the U.S.
government. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice swiftly rejected the letter,
saying it didn't resolve questions about Tehran's suspect nuclear program.
Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, visits press fair, as he is accompanied by his
Culture Minister Mohammad Hosein Saffar Harandi, in Tehran, Iran, Monday,
May 8, 2006. The Iranian president wrote to President Bush proposing 'new
solutions' to turn around Tehran's plummeting relationship with the United
States and other Western powers a move announced Monday and apparently
timed to blunt U.S. determination for a U.N. Security Council vote this
week that could lead to punishing sanctions against the Islamic regime.
[AP] | "This letter is not the place that one
would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort,"
Rice said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It isn't addressing the
issues that we're dealing with in a concrete way."
Rice's comments were the most detailed response from the United States to the
letter, the first from an Iranian head of state to an American president since
the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
The letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made only an oblique reference
to Iran's nuclear intentions, asking why "any technological and scientific
achievement reached in the Middle East region is translated into and portrayed
as a threat to the Zionist regime."
Otherwise, it lambasted Bush for his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks,
accused the media of spreading lies about the Iraq war and railed against the
United States for its support of Israel. It questioned whether the world would
be a different place if the money spent on Iraq had been spent to fight poverty.
"Would not your administration's political and economic standing have been
stronger?" the letter said. "And I am most sorry to say, would there have been
an ever- increasing global hatred of the American government?
Ahmadinejad on Tuesday called his letter "words and opinions of the Iranian
nation" aimed at finding a "way out of problems" facing humanity, according to
the official Iranian news agency. He spoke briefly before boarding a plane for
Indonesia, where he was to attend a summit of developing nations.
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