Stromata Blog

What’s the Rest of Ricci?

The many pages of majority, concurring and dissenting opinions in Ricci v. DeStefano leave one large question unanswered: Why did New Haven’s promotion exam for firemen, so meticulously constructed to avoid any smidgeon of cultural bias, produce results that skewed so heavily against black and Hispanic test takers? It’s obvious from its subsequent actions – throwing out the scores and denying promotions to the top finishers – that the city had no desire to keep minorities out of its officer ranks. It was no business of the Supreme Court to delve into why its attempt to get equal results bore so little fruit, but one can’t help speculating.

I’ll start by dismissing out of hand the racist theory that, just like white guys can’t jump, black guys can’t take tests. That was, as PowerLine notes, the position of one of New Haven’s expert witnesses:

[T]he city took testimony from a professor at Boston College whose area of “expertise” was “race and culture as they influence performance on tests and other assessment procedures.” Declining even to look at the City’s exam, she testified that no matter what test the City had administered it would have revealed a disparity between blacks and whites, as well as Hispanics and whites, particularly on a written test. In the 1960s, liberals would considered such a claim to “racist.” These days, some liberals liberal rely on it.

Nor is it plausible to argue that the test actually administered was somehow designed to give an advantage to whites. The Court’s description of the procedures followed in designing it shows clearly that the city strained to avoid any taint of bias. For example, two-thirds of the assessors of the oral portion (weighted at 40 percent of the total score) were minorities. It’s hard in any case to imagine how even the wiliest klansman could devise questions that prima facie related to firefighting skills but covertly identified skin color.

That leaves a couple of credible explanations. One is that the minority group members in the New Haven fire department’s lower ranks weren’t as capable as their white counterparts, another that the whites put significantly more effort into test preparation. If either is the case, the blame can be placed squarely on the contemporary practice of “affirmative action”.

The original idea behind affirmative action was to seek out qualified minority applicants who were being overlooked because of gaps in the information available to employers and unwillingness to look beyond traditional sources of recruitment. That idea is a good one, but it isn’t easy to implement. The lazy substitute is to hire an arbitrary number of members of fashionable “underrepresented” groups, without being too particular about qualifications, then stop. The upshot is a work force that includes not the best minority workers who could be found but the selection that happened to be available at first try.

Then, too, workers’ awareness that standards are less stringent for some than for others affects expectations. In New Haven, the white candidates for promotion knew that they would have to stretch themselves in order to have a chance at advancement. As the Court notes, “Many firefighters studied for months, at considerable personal and financial cost”. We aren’t told whether whites were overrepresented among that “many”, but it would have been rational for a Frank Ricci to throw his all into a test whose “results would determine which firefighters would be considered for promotions during the next two years, and the order in which they would be considered”. An equally able black fireman, on the other hand, might well have been lulled into complacency by the assumption that he was the assured beneficiary of affirmative action favoritism.

New Haven, to its credit, put firemen of all races on a level playing field. To its discredit, it didn’t make it clear to them in advance that the field really would be level, and then it reneged on fairness when the outcome wasn’t what it had hoped for. Being fair from the start, without interruption, would have been better for everyone.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “Firefighter Justice”

Quotes of the Day

Jennifer Rubin on the President’s long-delayed (though welcome) criticism of the Mullarchy’s violence and fraud:

(For those keeping track, they may want to recall the statement which Joe Lieberman issued on June 14.) Perhaps after a whole week of cringe-inducing passivity, saner voices prevailed upon the president. Maybe now the White House realizes it is time to get on the right side of history. And those apologists who cheered Obama’s paralysis will of course now celebrate the more robust language. This is what they wanted all along, right? Well, hardly, but the criticism of those conservatives and some brave Democrats who pleaded with the president to get off the fence will go down the memory hole. The president’s spinners now will no longer need to excuse the inexcusable. What a relief that must be.

Now that the President has taken his first baby step toward “meddling”, we can hope that he will be willing to do more. He would do well to consider this:

As for the notion that American silence is helpful to reformers, this simply contradicts historical experience. Successful movements to alter authoritarian and totalitarian regimes almost always depend on internal dissent backed by strong international support. Those key factors are often required to get a regime's enablers — including domestic security forces — to lose confidence and eventually succumb.

Time and again and around the world — from as recently as Tibet in 2008, to Egypt in 2005, to Tiananmen in 1989 — the prospects of reform dim considerably without international support. In fact, we know of no modern democratic evolution or revolution that has succeeded without some support and pressure from the west.

Most famous was the demise of the Eastern Bloc and then the Soviet Union itself, which came on the heels of years of sustained U.S.-led international pressure. Another example is South Korea, where energetic bipartisan U.S. pressure peaked in 1987 when U.S. ambassador Jim Lilley hand delivered a letter from President Reagan urging against a crackdown on protesters. The advice was heeded. Two weeks later the protesters' demands were met, and Korean democracy was born.

Other transitions in places like South Africa, Panama, Taiwan, Georgia, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Indonesia also all involved considerable pressure from the outside world.

Given this history, could Iran be the one exception?

The Worst of All Possible Worlds

As events move forward in Iran, the range of possible outcomes is narrowing. At this point, it seems highly likely that either the incumbent mullahs or their opponents will win a total victory. The regime will impose its will brutally, or it will collapse. Too many hopes have been betrayed and too many lives shattered to make it easy for the protests to dwindle as they have in the past, and the “Supreme Leader” can scarcely retreat or compromise after throwing his authority so conspicuously behind Ahmadinejad’s “reelection”.

Whichever of these outcomes the future holds, President Obama has positioned himself to make the least of it.

If the mullahs win, they will (at least for a time, though doubtless not for as long as they deserve) be international pariahs, and Barack Obama will be notable among Western leaders for not having condemned their misdeeds. Fairly or not, suspicion will cling to him: Did he want this result? Was he so eager to negotiate with the mullarchy, or so afraid of “instability”, that he felt no empathy with the opposition? The inevitable upshot will be severe damage to his personal reputation and, by extension, to America’s. Meanwhile, only a fanatasist will anticipate gratitude from Tehran.

But what if the other side prevails? Circumstances will then be fluid. The opposition includes disparate elements. Some, we may be sure, are perfectly happy with mullarchy, so long as they rather than their foes are in charge. At the other extreme are advocates of a Western-style democracy, such as many hoped for when the Shah was overthrown. There must be many shades of opinion in between.

In the ensuing conflict of visions, one fact will stand out: None of the victors will have any grounds to thank the United States. The protesters’ banners carry English slogans, in the obvious – so far vain – hope of arousing an American response. Mir Hussein Mousavi’s external spokesman has called for our overt moral support, likewise in vain. President Obama’s passivity will be a heavy cross (er, crescent) for the friends of constitutional democracy in Iran to bear. It is a gift to the forces that wish to change the personnel of the tyranny but not its nature or policies.

In short, whoever wins in Iran, the President’s strategy makes it probable that we lose.

I’m sure that the President has nothing but good intentions regarding Iran. Unhappily, his intentions are overmatched by his monumental bungling. Even his own Vice President and Secretary of State, it appears, are beginning to have doubts about this round of “smart diplomacy”. Rarely has a national leader been handed so promising a prospect and reduced it so rapidly to ashes.

Haven’t We Already Tried Not Meddling?

Although Barack Obama may not realize it (he seems to think that nothing important happened in Iran between 1953 and January 20, 2009), the current demonstrations are not the first large scale protests against the mullarchy. They’ve been a recurrent feature in the history of the “Islamic Republic”, which is, let’s not forget, a medieval dictatorship imposed on what had become, by the last years of the Pahlavi Dynasty, a modernizing nation with a large secular component to its population. Many of those who rioted against the Shah did so in the hope and expectation that his regime would be succeeded by a constitutional democracy, not by an oligarchy of ayatollahs.

Through all those disturbances, the United States, whoever was President, maintained a consistent policy: We did not “meddle”. And every time the sparks of rebellion were ruthlessly stamped out.

It may be that pro-resistance statements by the President would do nothing to weaken the mullahs. On the other hand, if experience teaches anything, it is that silence will not strengthen the protesters.

As a witness to the folly of the President’s limp platitudes, let me call Pat Buchanan, who backed Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003 and, so far as I can tell, has never seen an American riposte to despotism for which he wasn’t willing to put in a discouraging word. On cue, his latest screed urges us to do nothing and hope that the mullahs fall without being pushed. He has never in the past shown the slightest desire for their demise. Somehow I doubt that his tactical wisdom should be consulted now. Yet he and President Obama are slouching arm in arm toward another setback for liberty.

Quote of the Day: Wages of Bush Derangement Syndrome

An NRO Corner reader points out that President Obama’s denunciations of the liberation of Iraq have deprived him of an important message that he could otherwise send to the Iranian people at this moment of crisis:

Imagine how powerful it would be for Obama (or, more likely, a surrogate) to be able to stand up and say to the Iranian protesters, “Under the USA, your neighbor Iraq held free and fair elections. The government of Iran went out of its way to demonize the US and undermine those elections. We are now seeing the results of that mindset come home to Iran as you are denied a voice by your government in your own elections. The US government stands behind all who seek free and fair elections.”

Of course, he can’t say that with any legitimacy because he has spent years putting down Bush and Iraq.

Obviously, the President can’t pick up an Iraqi talking point now, after having trampled it into the dust for the past seven years. Strangely, he also has omitted from his public statements any allusion to America’s role in supporting Moslems in Bosnia and Kosovo (against Christian adversaries, yet). It’s almost as if he wants to avoid hinting that any American military effort, save for those that He Himself engages in, possesses any virtue.

In Other News of “Smart Diplomacy”. . . .

While the world waits to see whether the Obama Administration will deploy its vaunted “soft power” against the Iranian mullarchy or instead opt for “stability tout d’abord”, Deroy Murdock calls attention to its insouciance about trade wars developing on our northern and southern borders:

Canada and Mexico, our top two export markets, are embroiled in trade feuds with the U.S., both triggered by American protectionism. . . .

For starters, Canadians find February’s $787-billion stimulus package as stimulating as a cold shower on a hot date. It requires American-made construction materials in all federally funded public-works projects. This “Buy American” provision would keep U.S. roads, bridges, and tunnels free of Canadian iron, steel, and other components, although such Canadian inputs were allowed before the Democratic Congress passed and President Obama signed this measure.

Canada began fighting this provision at Halton Hills, Ont., where a water-treatment-equipment manufacturer called Hayward Gordon fears Washington will block its southbound exports. Ironically, such limitations will impoverish American companies that supply parts for this Canadian firm’s products. The Halton Hills council responded to February’s regulations with its own don’t-buy-American rule for purchases by the town government.

Expanding this local boycott, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities voted June 6 to back localities that refuse to buy from nations that block Canadian goods and services — primarily, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. . . .

Obama’s $410 billion omnibus spending plan defunded a pilot program in which about 100 Mexican trucks were allowed to drive goods into the U.S. beyond a 25-mile frontier zone. American trucks were given equal access to Mexican destinations. . . .

In exasperation at the ending of this program, Mexico has raised tariffs on 90 American exports worth $2.4 billion, including grapes and toilet paper. This will reportedly kill 40,000 American jobs. Mexico’s backlash against U.S. protectionism interrupted its unilateral reduction of average industrial tariffs from 10.4 percent in 2008 to a projected 4.2 percent in 2013.

The excuse for shutting out Mexican trucks is concern about safety. Aside from the lack of any evidence that Mexicano trucks are less safe than gringo, don’t we see here a whiff of what Democrats would label “bigotry” in any other context?

Whatever its faults, the Bush Administration didn’t assault and insult our friends and neighbors. So far, its successor’s “smartness” seems to consist mostly of solicitude for the feelings of our enemies.

Quote of the Day: What Obama Could Try

As protests surge in Iran, Stephen V. Hayes offers a suggestion that ought to appeal to President Obama’s admirers, “Mr. President, Another Speech Please”:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs put out a rather limp statement early Saturday afternoon: “Like the rest of the world, we were impressed by the vigorous debate and enthusiasm that this election generated, particularly among young Iranians. We continue to monitor the entire situation closely, including reports of irregularities.”

Shouldn’t the United States government be doing more than monitoring irregularities?

Let’s take the claims of President Obama and his supporters at face value. Let’s assume they are correct that his speech in Cairo, together with the mere fact of his presidency, has given the United States momentum in the region. Let’s assume that Obama meant what he said when he called for a “new beginning” for the region and relations with the United States.

Isn’t now the time to consolidate and build on those gains by using that popularity to destabilize Ahmadinejad and the hardliners in Iran? He does not need to call openly for an uprising, but he should be taking the accounts of reporters and our intelligence operatives in Iran and broadcasting them to the world. He should be amplifying the voices of the Iranians who have, once again, been deprived of any say in how they will be governed, and using them to pressure the Iranian regime at a time when it is plainly very fragile. . . .

Obama could tap into the enthusiasm and frustration of the protesters with a few well-chosen words about democracy, the rule of law, the will of the people, consent of the governed and legitimacy. He could choose a compelling story or two from inside Iran to make his points most dramatically, perhaps an anecdote about sacrifices some Iranians made to vote or an example of post-election intimidation.

When Barack Obama was elected, his supporters promised that his foreign policy would seek to effect important change in the world without using force, that he would deploy soft power – or, as Hillary Clinton put it during her confirmation, “smart power.”

Now is the time.

If the President follows this course, I for one will forgive a great deal of what he has done over the past five months. If he sits back and “monitors”, afraid to risk his superficial popularity by angering our country’s inveterate enemies, we’ll know for certain what the next 43 months are going to be like.

Who Blames the Jews?

Bill Kristol notes an interesting academic study, summarized by its authors (professors from Stanford and Columbia) in the Boston Review. Asked how much “the Jews” were to blame for the current economic crisis, 25 percent of non-Jewish Americans assigned them “moderate” blame or greater. Among Republicans, the figure was a troubling 18 percent; among Democrats, an astonishing 32 percent.

This wasn’t a question about Israel, Palestinians, Likud, Zionism, Iran’s nuclear threat, the invasion of Iraq or whatever. It was a straight test of one of the most enduring of antisemitic prejudices. And Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to be infected by it.

I won’t suggest that the Democratic Party bears a share of the blame for last week’s murder at the Holocaust Museum, but shouldn’t the party’s leaders be concerned that one out of three of its members endorses a particularly vile species of bigotry? How about sensitivity training for the Dem rank-and-file?

“Hope and Change” in Tehran

Did Mahmoud Omygodwhatanutjob win Iran’s Presidential election fair and square? I don’t know. Nor do you, unless you’re a mullah insider. What we do know is that his reelection was not displeasing to the “Supreme Leader”, Ayatollah Ali Hoseyni Khamene’i, and that fact suggests that the mullarchy is happy with the current trajectory in Iran’s foreign relations. It wouldn’t have been difficult to secure the election of an ostensible “moderate”, second place finisher Mir Hossein Mousavi. It was, in fact, the obvious course of action – “a sweet-talking Mousavi who again lulls [the world] to sleep, even as thousands of centrifuges whir away”, as Daniel Pipes put it – obvious, that is, if the mullarchs have any real worries about provoking effective American action against their plans to become a nuclear power.

Somehow Barack Obama’s appeal for peace and understanding neither charmed Tehran nor made it apprehensive. In a sense, he cleared the way for Ahmadinejad. Why not stick with the extra-chromosome Islamofascist when his antics arouse so tepid a response from the Leader of the Free World? Installing Mousavi in his place would bring no appreciable gain and might inspire unwelcome expectations of liberalization.

Well, perhaps the President is playing a really clever game of Smart Diplomacy: Looking like a jellyfish encourages the mullarchs to reelect Ahmadenejad. His reelection sparks outrage on the “Iranian street”. The outrage leads to the overthrow of the mullarchy. Quod erat agendum.

Yeah, and maybe Government Motors will be a really terrific investment for our tax money.

Democracy for Me But Not for Thee

Maybe the rhetorical flourishes toward democracy in the President’s Cairo oration shouldn’t be taken all that seriously. The Wall Street Journal takes a look at what the new Administration is doing to aid pro-democracy forces in the place where the President spoke:

Start with Egypt, where U.S. support for democracy programs was reduced to $20 million, from $50 million, in the budget Congress adopted this spring. Funding for independent democracy groups will drop 70% or more despite record spending on just about everything else. The U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Margaret Scobey, last month cut some $11 million in funding controlled by the State Department for civil society programs. From now on only groups approved by the ageless regime of Hosni Mubarak will qualify for these “economic support funds” – essentially a local veto over U.S. aid. That was U.S. policy before the Bush Administration changed it in 2006, and now it is again.

See – in some ways, it isn’t the third Bush term.

Selling Peace to the Moslems

PowerLine has encapsulated most of what struck me as wrong about the President’s oral epistle to the “Moslem world”. What was right can be summed up as, it could have been worse. When an American President gets merit badges for denouncing Holocaust denial and tepidly praising democracy, it’s obvious that he’s being graded on a very lenient curve.

One could, however, brush aside a great deal of discomfort about the speech’s content if it were likely to be successful as salesmanship. The objective, everyone agrees, was not to present an historically accurate picture of relations between America and the religion of Mohammed. It was to dissuade Moslems, as individuals and as states, from allying themselves with our enemies. We won’t know for months, if not years, whether this effort and its follow-ups (for a single speech, even delivered with the tongues of angels, cannot change the minds of millions of people) will be successful. President Obama’s admirers are already certain that it will be. Unfortunately, their confidence rests on weak foundations.

Viewed as salesmanship, particularly as salesmanship aimed at building long-term customer satisfaction, the speech had, I think, two flaws. The first was that it gave its audience no especial reason to prefer the United States to Iran, al-Qa’eda and other hostile groups and powers. The President’s messages were that we Americans are “mostly harmless”, that we have foolishly antagonized Moslems in the past, and that his Administration will rectify our faults. Thus, for instance, he asserted (a complete falsehood) that American laws restrict Moslems’ ability to carry out their charitable obligations and promised to undo those discriminatory measures. Similarly, he put much of the blame for Moslem underdevelopment on Western colonialism (amazingly, as the never colonized Ottoman and Persian Empires lagged even more than those areas, like Egypt, that fell under Western rule), declared that his Presidential duties include refuting slanders against Islam, and repeatedly intoned Moslem verbal formulas (“peace be upon them”, “Holy Koran”).

What this display of panderism did not do was tell a rank-and-file Moslem – with no favorable predisposition toward democracy, religious toleration, women’s rights or empathy with Jewish tribulations – why America is right and al-Qa’eda, Palestinian extremists and Iranian mullahs are wrong. Reassurances that our country bears no ill will toward Islam, even if believed, don’t refute our enemies’ claim to be restoring the dar-al-Islam to its rightful position of world leadership. Indeed, a mufsidun has two obvious lines of response:

1. The President’s evidence is ambiguous. He says that America has no quarrel with Islam yet admits that we discriminate against Islamic charities. He cites a conciliatory statement by President John Adams yet ignores the fact that Adams’ successor sent military expeditions against the Moslem states of the Barbary Coast, and he calls the American campaign in Iraq a “war of choice” (tantamount to labeling it unjustified aggression). He makes capital of Americans’ willingness to vote for Barack Hussein Obama, yet anyone who paid attention to the election knows that the utterance of candidate Obama’s middle name, or any reference to his tenuous Moslem background, was then stigmatized as defamation.

2. But supposing that the case were stronger, all that it would prove is that the U.S. is prepared to acquiesce in a great expansion of Islamic political activity. The President pleaded for the acceptance of Western values but without suggesting that their rejection would have any dire consequences. In essence, he declared America to be a “weak horse” and urged everyone to admire the grace of its carriage and the beauty of its coat. In no way did he imply that one cannot simultaneously follow the “strong horse”.

The second flaw, complementary to the first, is that the President made a number of promises, explicit or implied, about our country’s future conduct, some of which will be either difficult or unwise to keep. He repeated his pledge to shutter the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison by next January; will he be able to overcome domestic opposition and the intractable difficulties of relocating the terrorists? (Palau won’t take them all.) He treated the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq as a hard-and-fast imperative and renounced all interest in permanent bases there; what if events don’t cooperate? He committed the U.S. to opposing Israeli settlements on the West Bank, another stance unpopular with his fellow citizens. He said that we will not give tacit approval to Israeli actions that we won’t back publicly; that is dream world diplomacy.

In short, our enemies will be able, within a few months, to pick through the Cairo oration and inveigh against a slew of discrepancies between words and deeds. If the President were selling a pair of shoes that couldn’t be returned, that would be fine. If he’s trying to sell a long-term change in international relationships, it isn’t.

As is often not noted, the soft-and-fuzzy, “we respect our Moslem brothers and sisters” approach to influencing Islamic public opinion was the persistent strategy of the Bush Administration. President Bush himself praised the “religion of peace” and invited Moslem leaders to the White House. Our government engaged in constant outreach to Moslem organizations. We flooded the Middle East with pamphlets touting the freedom that Moslems in America have to worship and proselytize. We raised no objection when the new constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan enshrined shari’ah as the source of legislation. We did nothing to protect beleaguered Christians from Moslem persecution. Did all of those emollients, adding up to much more than one speech, accomplish anything worthwhile?

Only believers in the irresistible charisma of Barack Hussein Obama can imagine that what failed for the past seven years will work now. Notwithstanding Newsweek editors, he isn’t “sort of God”. Nor is Islamic dislike of the West a superficial reaction to George W. Bush, the war in Iraq or the establishment of the State of Israel. We patronize and misunderstand Moslems if we presume to dispel centuries of deep-seated hostility by spattering them with the milk of human kindness.

What is needed, if we are to avoid a perpetual brushfire war with Islam, is an appeal not to Moslems’ sentiments but to their interests. The good will of the United States is worth a lot more than the good will of the mufsidun. Moreover, it’s not difficult to gain. If Moslem governments recognized Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state on the tiny sliver of land that it occupies, granted Christians and Jews a substantial fraction of the religious freedom that we grant Moslems as a matter of course, stopped subsidizing anti-Western agitation, and refrained from giving material or moral assistance to terrorists, their relations with America would zoom upward, without a great deal of sacrifice on their part. Wouldn’t a candid talk along those lines be a better use of the President’s charm than a round of useless pandering?