| ‘US must change policy if it wants better ties with Iran’ |
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| Written by Harris Badar | |
| Sunday, 05 October 2008 | |
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src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> “Whatever candidate becomes the next president of the US, he will have no other option than to bring about new developments in American foreign policy,” he told a symposium sponsored by the Asia Society here in New York. Speaking through an interpreter, he added that the next US president would have to try to “reach out to other countries around the world, including the countries in the Middle East.”“If such developments happen in the White House, in words and in deeds,” Mottaki said Tehran would consider them.“So like everybody else we have to wait and see what the new US policies (will be after next month’s presidential election),” he added. He also squarely blamed Washington for the dismal state of bilateral relations.“The behaviour shown by US officials in the past decades has not been encouraging, has not encouraged Iranian officials to work to improve relations,” he noted. “If serious changes come about with regard to such behaviour, we will certainly study the possibility,” Mottaki said.And he restated Tehran’s view that the Iranian nuclear Programme is peaceful and not geared toward the production of nuclear weapons, pointing out that possession of weapons of mass destruction violates Islamic teachings. US-Iranian ties were broken off in 1980 after Islamist students took US diplomats hostage at the embassy in Tehran. Over the past years, Washington has taken a tougher line toward the Islamic Republic, accusing it of backing armed groups in Iraq, thwarting any Middle East settlement with its support for the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement and Lebanon’s militia Hizbullah, and using its nuclear Programme as a cover to acquire nuclear arms. Meanwhile, according to the Maariv newspaper report on Friday Israel will install two massive radar antennae near the Dimona nuclear plant to bolster its defence measures against Iran, The 400 metre-high (1,300 feet) antennae will be erected in the Negev desert near a top-secret military site where Israel is widely believed to have developed the only nuclear weapons cache in the Middle East, the paper said. An Israeli army spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the report. Maariv said work on the twin masts, which would be the largest in the region, would begin in two weeks and would be completed in three months, but did not provide details on what the system would be used for. The newspaper said the antennae were part of a massive new radar system that the United States will deploy in Israel, a project announced by the Pentagon earlier this week. The deployment comes amid heightened fears regarding Iran’s nuclear enrichment Programmeme, which the United States and Israel say is aimed at developing weapons that could threaten the Jewish state’s existence. Iran insists its Programme is entirely peaceful. The Pentagon was scheduled to deploy the radar to Israel in the fall of 2009 for a joint exercise, but moved it up a year following high level talks in Washington. The United States deployed a similar radar to Japan in 2006 in response to a North Korean missile test. |
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