Correspondence
Correspondence UNIVERSITY DIVERSITY REGARDING JENNIFER RUBIN’s article on left-wing attempts to uphold racial preferences in Missouri (“Missouri Asks a Loaded Question,” October 22), it...
...In my book, I quote a senior U.S...
...There was already direct dialogue between the United States and Iran above Guldimann’s and Sadegh Kharrazi’s level...
...Other reporters recognized the red herrings involved in the Guldimann offer: (1) Most diplomatic correspondence is signed...
...Armitage said Wolfowitz and Feith blocked a swap of leaders of the Mujahedin e-Khalq, the Iranian terrorist group harbored by Saddam Hussein, for al Qaeda detainees in Iran...
...at his 2003 meetings, Guldimann said the proposal had the “80 percent” acceptance of the Iranian government...
...The merits don’t matter when people get mesmerized by a symbol...
...2) Real diplomatic correspondence is on offi cial letterhead...
...MICHAEL RUBIN RESPONDS: Barbara Slavin is wrong...
...And, when he sees the opportunity to use credulous journalists to pour fuel on the political fi res, he does not hesitate...
...the Iranian offer was not...
...The reference to Wolfowitz and Feith comes in a quote from Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state...
...Nor can Slavin explain why Guldimann would pass an Iranian offer to undersecretarylevel American offi cials when British foreign secretary Jack Straw was an established go-between with the Iranian foreign minister on sensitive American issues...
...Correspondence UNIVERSITY DIVERSITY REGARDING JENNIFER RUBIN’s article on left-wing attempts to uphold racial preferences in Missouri (“Missouri Asks a Loaded Question,” October 22), it should be noted that when California stopped using “affi rmative action” a decade ago, minority students still went to college, but their enrollment dropped at the top U.C...
...3) Governments do not send proposals with which they disagree...
...Far from being merely “circulated,” as Rubin writes, the agenda was approved by Iran’s senior leadership, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—a relative by marriage of Kharrazi...
...ambassador Mohammad Javad Zarif represents the Islamic Republic’s interests...
...It’s a commitment to social justice, so never mind that such social engineering has no effects other than to put downward pressure on academic standards and create racial tension on campus...
...schools, while increasing elsewhere...
...BARBARA SLAVIN Washington, D.C...
...Former Iranian U.N...
...I think that many on the left fi ght for racial preferences because “affi rmative action” is a symbol of their imagined righteousness...
...indeed, American and Iranian offi - cials had met in Geneva the day before Guldimann unveiled his proposal...
...GULDIMANN MEMO REDUX THERE ARE A NUMBER of inaccuracies in Michael Rubin’s article (“The Guldimann Memorandum,” October 22...
...He did not know with which portions they disagreed...
...Guldimann’s memo was not...
...GEORGE C. LEEF Raleigh, N.C...
...This was not a catastrophe...
...The agenda was not shot down by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith but by Bush administration indifference...
...The 2003 memorandum was written by Sadegh Kharrazi, Iran’s ambassador to France at the time, with Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador to Iran, and edited by Javad Zarif, then a deputy foreign minister and one of Iran’s premier experts on the United States...
...In a May 4, 2003, cover letter, Tim Guldimann writes that he developed the proposal in conversation with Sadegh Kharrazi...
...Degrees from elite universities are neither necessary nor suffi cient for success in life...
...Slavin has been misled by her sources...
...You may fax letters: (202) 293-4901 or email editor@weeklystandard.com...
...THE WEEKLY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor...
...He lied when he promised a month prior to the start of the Iraq war that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps would remain outside Iraq...
...diplomat then dealing with the Iran issue as saying that the overture was never seriously considered by the administration, then in a triumphalist mood over Iraq...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 8
