Another olive branch came hours after our conversation with the release of the two American hikers who had been imprisoned unjustly for two years in Iran. Before sparks began flying between me and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, he began my interview with an unusual olive branch: “I would like to, with your permission, greet all of your readers as well as Web viewers and wish all of them the success and blessings of the Almighty.” 
 
 Mr. Ahmadinejad is a complex, even bizarre, figure. Is this a real offer to stop all enrichment? Mr. Abbasi-Davani, the head of the Iranian nuclear program, was quoted as saying that that was no longer a possibility. “We have done nothing wrong,” he said, denying sharply that his country had hidden anything. Most important, he repeated an offer made in a Washington Post interview this month to stop all nuclear enrichment if the West would supply nuclear fuel enriched to a 20 percent level. He insisted that Iran will happily give up its enrichment processing if it can get this enriched uranium for “cancer treatment medication.” 
 
 “If they were willing to sell us the 20 percent enriched uranium, we would have preferred to buy it,” he said. “It would have been far less expensive. It’s as though you wish to purchase a vehicle for yourself. No one is willing to sell it to you, then you must set up your own production line to produce your own vehicle.” 
 
 This sounds very much like an incipient deal that Mr. Ahmadinejad initially welcomed two years ago but was later scotched by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mr. Ahmadinejad didn’t even attempt to suggest that they were spies, but he bristled at my questions about them. He insisted that he did, indeed, have full authority. This was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s only print interview on his visit to the United Nations General Assembly, and he made a significant effort to be friendly and conciliatory. Even when I pushed him hard on human rights abuses and nuclear deceptions, he responded in even tones while claiming that Iran is manifestly more democratic than the United States. I don’t know, but it’s worth it for the West to pursue it — without easing sanctions in the meantime. Mr. Ahmadinejad called for Syria, his ally, to stop its violent crackdown on protesters, cautioning that “with clashes and confrontations problems will not be solved. They will be multiplied.” 
 
 Oh? “In Iran, things were quite different,” he insisted, a bit testy. I asked Mr. Ahmadinejad what he thought when he saw the famous photos of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, lying on the ground and bleeding to death after she had been shot in the chest. but if BBC makes the complete footage from beginning to end available to us, we will analyze it, we will research it because we do search for those who are truly guilty of murdering this young lady. : Mr. President, it’s true that many of the criticisms of your government come from the United States, but it’s not entirely from the West. But when I raised those points, Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted that there had never been any daylight between himself and the supreme leader on the nuclear issue and that Mr. Abbasi was not opposed today. Many of the dead in Iran were members of security forces, he claimed, suggesting that protesters were not deliberately targeted. He added that the West will be driven by its weakness to “seek a rapprochement with Iran.” 
 
 Then the interview was over, and Mr. Ahmadinejad zoomed back from bombast to conciliation. He acknowledged that the West’s “crippling” sanctions against Iran had “worked well.” But he added: “Does Iran face more problems or the United States of America?” He referred to the “collapse” of the American financial system and suggested that Iran’s economy is in better shape. We truly like and love the people of the United States like people from any other country. When I asked skeptically if Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke for the full Iranian leadership, there was a flash of resentment at the question. One question is how the West could verify an end to enrichment.
– In his only print interview during a visit to the UN, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared “complex, even bizarre,” writes Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. The “firebrand” in public was “subdued and very soft-spoken” in person, offering repeated “olive branches” to his interviewer: "We truly like and love the people of the United States," he noted. But after opening with a blessing for all Kristof’s readers, he grew testy over some of the journalist’s questions. Ahmadinejad renewed an offer to end Iranian nuclear enrichment if the West provided the country with fuel already 20% enriched. The material would be used for “cancer treatment medication,” he said. Meanwhile, the Iranian president appeared frustrated by questions over the American hikers held in Iran; while he didn’t call them spies, he said any country would have punished them. As for the mid-protest killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, Ahmadinejad “constructed his own reality,” Kristof writes. “He suggested that she had been murdered by his opponents, working with the BBC, as part of a bizarre snuff film.” Click through for the full article, or an interview transcript.