Some in the United States claim that between 2003 and 2007, you protected Iran because you did not want to see a U.S. military attack on it. In retrospect, do you think you allowed Iran to push the limits?

Low-enriched uranium. Iran was cooperating even more before. They cut the cooperation . . . when they were taken to the Security Council in 2005. That was a political decision. . . . I have said for the past six years that the policy of building trust between the West (and the United States in particular) and Iran has failed completely. We haven't moved one iota.

Trust-building. You're not going to have trust unless you have a direct dialogue. President Obama is saying he's ready to have a direct dialogue without preconditions, based on mutual respect. I say this is absolutely overdue.

So you think President Obama is doing the right thing?

I have no question about that. This was the missing part of the puzzle. . . . Regional security issues, particularly in the Middle East, will not move one iota until you sit around the table and discuss the grievances that have accumulated over the last 56 years between Iran and the international community -- from 1953, when the CIA and MI6 removed Mohammed Mossadegh, the first nationally elected government, to the hostage crisis in 1979. This is the past, but the present is fundamentally a competition of power in the Middle East between Iran, which has its own specific ideology, and the United States and some of Iran's neighbors.

The concern about Iran . . . is that if Iran were to develop [nuclear] technology, they'd walk out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, they'd develop highly enriched uranium and the weapon. These ifs are based on, "I don't trust Iran's future intentions." . . . Why isn't the world worried about Japan, which has the full cycle of technology? Because there is trust that this country is not aiming to develop nuclear weapons.

The Japanese government hasn't said that its aim is to destroy the state of Israel.

There have been a lot of offensive statements, frankly, on the part of Iran, although from what I understand, Iran wants a one-state solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] -- not, as reported in the media, that Israel should be wiped off the map.

And you know that one state means the end of Israel because there are more Palestinians than Jews.

I'm not taking sides on that. . . . We need to forget the past and say we have a problem on our hands.

People say you criticized Israel harshly for bombing the nuclear reactor in Syria -- that you weren't tough on Syria for building a nuclear reactor.

I have been very harsh on Israel because they violated the rules of international law on the use of unilateral force, and they did not provide us with the information before the bombing, which we could then easily have established whether Syria was building a nuclear reactor. To that extent, the blame is also shared with the U.S., who sat on the information for a year and six months after the bombing. Now we are doing our best to try to see what Syria was doing, but it's like Iran. I cannot jump the gun and say Syria was building a nuclear facility because what we are doing now is trying to verify what was there.