There is a distinction to be made between the charge of “playing the race card” and calling out coded racism. I wasn’t going to go here, but now that you’ve opened the door let’s go back to something you wrote earlier in this thread, with the quiet part written out.
That era’s reporting on ex-Western events was dominated by spin including othering, racism, and a giant superiority complex. Narratives of oppressed groups (Black South Africans under Apartheid, occupied Palestinians, occupied Kashmiris, and so on) were generally tempered by deference to the official narratives from their oppressors. That kind of othering is certainly spin, and harmful to liberty generally. Joshua Keating’s “If It Happened There” series at Slate is a hilarious sendup that applies tropes developed during the bad old days of white male imperialist dominance in international reporting to domestic events.
All stories about If It Happened There
slate.com
That’s not to minimize the heroic contributions of many international correspondents. I’ve met a number of them in informal settings in my travels and found them to be universally whip smart people who seem to be striving in good faith to inform the public. I’ve also stood in front of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn (the international press HQ) and stared at the skyscraper nearby that Serbian supremacists shelled into tatters in attempts to intimidate Samantha Power, Christiane Amanpour, and the other Western journalists to abandon their coverage of that city under siege.
I’m pretty sure oil has no personhood or religion, though it is black. Let me give you some background on the genesis of that war. Kuwait was slant drilling, I.e. accessing oil under Iraqi territory from holes originating in Kuwaiti territory. Iraq’s dictator brought this up to the US Ambassador, who at the very least did not discourage the dictator. See, e.g. this analysis by a (perhaps “the”) pre-eminent scholar of the “realist” school of international relations theory:
foreignpolicy.com
My impression from the time is the hawks in the Bush
fils administration saw an opportunity to showcase the dominance of American equipment and tactics against modern Soviet equipment and tactics, capitalize on existing trendlines in Eastern Europe to
win the Cold War, and secure lots of oil for US petrogiants. Sure enough, it worked. Within months of the US victory, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Gulf Arab counties were all newly solicitous of US business interests. But “liberation” of a sandlot from a vile dictator back to a venal but supplicant monarchy was not among the main goals.
