Obama: violence harms dialogue with Iran

WASHINGTON, June 26 (UPI) -- The volatile situation in Iran likely will impact any chance of dialogue between the Middle Eastern country and the United States, President Barack Obama said.

"There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks," Obama said Friday during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "And we don't yet know how any potential dialogue will have been affected until we see what's happened inside of Iran."

Obama said he and Merkel "speak with one voice: the rights of the Iranian people -- to assemble, to speak freely, to have their voices heard -- those are universal aspirations," Obama said.

Reiterating his position that Iranians are the ultimate judges of their government's actions, Obama said if the country's government wants "the respect of the international community then it must respect the rights, and heed the will, of its people."

The Iranian government has cracked down on those demonstrating against the disputed June 12 election in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the landslide winner over his nearest challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Asked whether he would apologize to Iran as Ahmadinejad said he should because of U.S. meddling, Obama said, "I don't take Mr. Ahmadinejad's statements seriously about apologies, particularly given the fact that the United States has gone out of its way not to interfere with the election process in Iran."

He suggested that the Iranian president may want to think instead "about the obligations he owes to his own people."

Obama also clarified his statement that there would be little difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. Given the country's governmental structure invests the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with ultimate power, and some positions between the two presidential candidates at one point didn't seem too different, "we could not automatically assume that there would be a huge shift on those particular national security issues depending on who won that election."

Subsequently, he said, "Mousavi has shown to have captured the imagination or the spirit of forces within Iran that were interested in opening up ... ."