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 "affirmative action" a decade ago, minority students still went to college, but their enrollment dropped at the top UC schools, while increasing elsewhere.
This was not a catastrophe. Degrees from elite universities are neither necessary nor sufficient for success in life.
I think that many on the left fight for racial preferences because "affirmative action" is a symbol of their imagined righteousness. 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.
The merits don't matter when people get mesmerized by a symbol.
GEORGE C. LEEF
Raleigh, N.C.
GULDIMANN MEMO REDUX
THERE ARE A NUMBER of inaccuracies in Michael Rubin's article ("The Guldimann Memorandum," October 22). 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. 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.
The agenda was not shot down by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith but by Bush administration indifference. In my book, I quote a senior U.S. 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. The reference to Wolfowitz and Feith comes in a quote from Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state. 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.
BARBARA SLAVIN
Washington, D.C.
MICHAEL RUBIN RESPONDS: Barbara Slavin is wrong. In a May 4, 2003, cover letter, Tim Guldimann writes that he developed the proposal in conversation with Sadegh Kharrazi. Other reporters recognized the red herrings involved in the Guldimann offer:
(1) Most diplomatic correspondence is signed; Guldimann's memo was not. (2) Real diplomatic correspondence is on official letterhead; the Iranian offer was not. (3) Governments do not send proposals with which they disagree; at his 2003 meetings, Guldimann said the proposal had the "80 percent" acceptance of the Iranian government. He did not know with which portions they disagreed.
Nor can Slavin explain why Guldimann would pass an Iranian offer to undersecretary-level American officials when British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was an established go-between with the Iranian foreign minister on sensitive American issues. There was already direct dialogue between the United States and Iran above Guldimann's and Sadegh Kharrazi's level; indeed, American and Iranian officials had met in Geneva the day before Guldimann unveiled his proposal.
Slavin has been misled by her sources. Former Iranian UN ambassador Mohammad Javad Zarif represents the Islamic Republic's interests. 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. And, when he sees the opportunity to use credulous journalists to pour fuel on the political fires, he does not hesitate.