We have long documented the disastrous effects affirmative action has had on higher education, but the deleterious extremes to which making a god of diversity can lead us go far beyond academia. Heather Mac Donald writes in an NRO article:
Gender imperatives undoubtedly played a role in this debacle of leadership [at Abu Ghraib], ensuring that Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was left in charge long after her inability to maintain order had become glaringly apparent. As the Abu Ghraib independent-review panel, led by former defense secretary James Schlesinger, delicately put it in its August 2004 report: Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez’s “attempt to mentor Karpinski, though well-intentioned, was insufficient in a combat zone in the midst of a serous and growing insurgency.”
But Ricardo Sanchez might have figured that the quickest way to jeopardize your standing in the U.S. Army is to question a woman’s leadership ability. Better to allow gross mistreatment of prisoners and blackening of America’s name than to go that route. And now we are scarred with the Abu Ghraib episode and the ammunition it has given to America-haters and the support it lends, however erroneously, to those who want to outlaw all types of stress-interrogation as torture, as Mac Donald details.