In a lecture at Hampden-Sydney College broadcast on C-Span some days ago, John Agresto, who served as Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Education in Iraq under Paul Bremer, blamed affirmative action for some of the wrong-headed decisions the Coalition Provisional Authority made after the fall of Saddam. An example comes from the formation of the Iraqi Governing Council that was to rule Iraq until elections. Instead of encouraging the numerous factions to work together for unity and seeking out individuals capable of moderation and cooperation, the CPA appointed the most outspoken and partisan members of each of the political, religious, and tribal factions in Iraqi society, and ensured their representation on the council. This is an example of something Agresto brings out in his book, Mugged by Reality (Encounter), and in his interview in Academic Questions (Summer 2006), “Disquieting Lessons from Iraq,” that in our approach to Iraq we seemed to forget how our own liberal democracy was formed and has flourished — in the present example, not by empowering factions, but by softening their power in a larger unified whole. Perhaps one of the reasons we “forgot” this lesson is that America has herself become accustomed in recent decades to using affirmative action, encouraging group rights, and ensuring group representation, or “diversity,” instead of standing by its founding principles of equality of the individual before the law and the importance of civic unity. It’s a bad enough policy here, but in Iraq, it may be catastrophic. And this is only one of the lessons we forgot.