Rice rejects letter from Iranian president to Bush

IRAN’S president declared in a letter to US President George W Bush that democracy had failed worldwide and lamented “an ever-increasing global hatred” of Washington.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice swiftly rejected the letter, saying it didn’t resolve questions about Tehran’s suspect nuclear programme.

“This letter is not the place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort,” Ms Rice said.

“It isn’t addressing the issues that we’re dealing with in a concrete way.”

Ms 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 US 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 September 11 terror attacks, accused the media of spreading lies about the Iraq war and railed against the US 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?”

Mr Ahmadinejad yesterday 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.

Mr Ahmadinejad spoke before boarding a plane for Indonesia, where he was to attend a summit of developing nations.

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator called the surprise letter a new “diplomatic opening” between the two countries, but Ms Rice said it failed to resolve the dispute over the Iranian nuclear programme — the focus of intense UN Security Council debate this week.

The Iranian negotiator, Ali Larijani, also said Tehran had no intention of withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and promised to co-operate if the UN atomic watchdog agency dealt with the issue of its nuclear programme, rather than the Security Council.

On Sunday, Iran’s parliament threatened to ask the government to withdraw its signature from a protocol in the treaty that allows intrusive surprise inspections of nuclear facilities.

“We have no reason to leave the NPT. Our case is completely different from that of North Korea,” Mr Larijani said during a visit to Athens, Greece.

“The additional protocol is one thing and the NPT is another,” he said.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Mr Bush had been briefed on the letter, which was received on Monday.