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Briefing: Ahmadinejad Spars With CFR Members

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Bernard Gwertzman
September 20, 2006
Council on Foreign Relations

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sparred with a blue-ribbon group from the Council on Foreign Relations for ninety minutes Wednesday on virtually every contentious issue between the United States and Iran.

There were no obvious changes in the responses given by Ahmadinejad, who has been granting interviews to major news organizations over the past week ahead of his trip to the opening session of the UN General Assembly. But the Iranian leader engaged in a protracted punch and counterpunch with the panel.

“I’m not sure we learned anything new,” said Richard N. Haass, the CFR president, in comments afterwards. But he said it was possible the Iranian president might have learned something of American attitudes from the session. The meeting, which sparked controversy among members of the Council and some Jewish groups, featured nineteen Council members and some ten Iranian officials under tight security at the Intercontinental Hotel on East Forty-eighth Street in New York.

Differing views were apparent from the first question of the evening, when Peter G. Peterson, CFR's chairman, questioned Ahmadinejad’s frequent assertion that the Holocaust was a “myth” and that more research had to be done to ascertain the truth on whether the six million Jews who perished in World War II were victims of Nazi genocide. Peterson noted that he and David Rockefeller, who was also a participant in the meeting, had visited Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland, and he said that the majority of American Jews and non-Jews alike were “horrified” by Ahmadinejad's assertion that the Holocaust was a “myth.” The Iranian said he doubted Americans all held such a view.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.