By NAZILA FATHI
But if the United States was willing to recognize Iran’s right to pursue nuclear power, “we are willing to negotiate over controls, inspections and international guarantees,” he said. “The ground for such negotiations has been prepared.”
To end the international standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, the United States has offered to enter talks if Tehran agrees to halt uranium enrichment activities. The offer was a significant departure in American foreign policy, given that Iran and the United States severed diplomatic ties after student hard-liners attacked the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Despite the shift, Ayatollah Khamenei said, “Negotiation with the United States has no benefits for us,” the ISNA student news agency reported. Even so, his remarks did not directly address Iran’s position on the package of incentives that six nations the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany submitted to Iran early this month in hopes of persuading it to freeze its enrichment activities.
At the White House, the press secretary, Tony Snow, called Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments “ambiguous,” and said the administration would not interpret them as a response to the offer to engage in negotiations. He noted that the original offer to Iran had been delivered through the Europeans to Iran’s chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, “and we expect Ali Larijani to transmit the response.”
Mr. Snow also said that while Ayatollah Khamenei “may not be one in the chorus,” the White House had “seen people provide different kinds of answers, sometimes different responses between morning and afternoon.”
A senior administration official said this week that he expected Iran to offer “something well short of full suspension” of its nuclear activities, and that the administration was now working to “make sure there is no backsliding on the conditions Iran has to meet.” He declined to speak on the record about internal administration discussions.
In a major policy change of his own, Ayatollah Khamenei created a foreign policy committee on Sunday and appointed a former foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, a moderate politician, to lead it for five years. The committee has four other members, all moderate former ministers.
Ayatollah Khamenei said in his decree that the committee was to “help major decision making and search for horizons in Iran’s foreign policy,” the daily newspaper Shargh reported.
Rashid Jalali, a member of Parliament, said one of the major responsibilities of the committee was to give its analysis to the Iranian leadership about Iran’s nuclear policy, the daily newspaper Etemad Melli reported.
David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
