UPPLANDS VASBY, Sweden — Iran thinks U.S. voters have had it with the Bush administration’s foreign policy and says the campaign for the 2008 election is proof.
President Bush and his top aides might sneer and try to isolate Iran, but the Islamic Republic is waiting to see how their successors approach the world, particularly the Middle East, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Thursday.
“What is very clear in the United States is that everybody is looking for changes. That is very important,” he said on the sidelines of an international conference on Iraq. Bush accuses Iran of supporting extremists in the country.
“The foreign policy of the United States will affect this presidential election in the United States, and that’s why all the candidates are trying to say something new to public opinion,” Mottaki said.
The Bush administration has adopted a hard-line approach to Iran over Iraq and other issues, notably its nuclear program, its alleged support for terrorist groups and its hostility toward Israel, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said should be wiped off the map.
Mottaki’s comments came in an impromptu corridor encounter with a small group of Washington-based reporters who accompanied Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Iraq conference outside the Swedish capital.
He appeared eager to speak to the reporters after Rice was seen on live television snickering as Mottaki spoke to event participants. Rice and her team pointedly avoided the Iranian delegation at the meeting.
Iran’s message to present and future U.S. leaders is that they should “correct their policies toward our region,” Mottaki said.
But he said Tehran doesn’t have a favorite, even though Democratic hopeful Barack Obama has said he is willing to meet Ahmadinejad without preconditions. “We do not consider the different candidates and what they say,” he said. “We look to the policies of the United States toward our region in general and toward Iran in particular.”
