Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in an interview aired on US television Monday that if Washington adopted a genuinely new approach to his country Tehran would respond in a positive way. "Today, we see new behavior shown by the United States and the officials of the United States. My question is, is such behavior rooted in a new approach?" the Iranian leader told NBC in an interview.
"In other words, mutual respect, cooperation and justice? Or is this approach a continuation in the confrontation with the Iranian people, but in a new guise?" he said. If American behavior represented a genuine change, "we will be facing a new situation and the response by the Iranian people will be a positive one," Ahmadinejad said.
The interview follows Ahmadinejad's announcement on Saturday that Iran had boosted the number of uranium-enriching centrifuges to 6,000, in an expansion of its nuclear drive that defies international calls for a freeze.
Ahmadinejad reiterated in the interview that Tehran was not working to build atomic bombs. "We are not working to manufacture a bomb. We don't believe in a nuclear bomb," he said when asked if Iran sought to be a nuclear power. History had shown that possessing atomic bombs did not help other countries with their political goals, he added.
Ahmadinejad said he hoped the negotiations with the Western powers would yield progress. "They submitted a package and we responded by submitting our own package. They again submitted a work plan and we submitted our own work plan," he told the US channel.
"It's very natural that in the first steps, we are going to negotiate over the common ground as it exists inside the two packages. If the two parties succeed in agreeing over the common ground, that will help us to work on our differences as well, to reach an agreement."
When asked about the proposal from Western powers that offers improved trade terms and other incentives, Ahmadinejad said Iran was a "mighty country" that was not at all isolated. "Well, the world -- the doors, rather, of the larger world are not closed to us. This is a great and mighty country, a great nation with a great economy, a rich culture, thousands of years of history and civilization and we have very good economic and cultural relations with countries around the world," he said.
