By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, January 07, 2020
In the torrent of idiotic commentary unleashed by the
killing of Qasem Soleimani, Colin Kaepernick’s deserves a place of honor.
The NFL washout and Nike persona who makes sure the
company doesn’t produce any overly patriotic sneakers tweeted, “There is
nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for
the expansion of American imperialism.”
For Kaepernick, Soleimani is just another dark-skinned
man brutalized by the United States. The Iranian terror master was, in effect,
driving while nonwhite and paid the ultimate price. For all we know, the
operator of the MQ-9 Reaper drone that took him out was making a
white-supremacy hand signal while unleashing this racist attack.
This interpretation of events takes identity politics to
a whole new level, defining the blood-drenched hit man for a terrorist,
profoundly anti-Semitic, deeply intolerant theocracy as a victim, based on his
skin color alone.
Obviously, no one will mistake Colin Kaepernick for an
original thinker; he’s only repeating things he’s read or been told, in a
slightly more lurid form. His worldview is disproportionately represented in
academia and on the left, which objects to calling Soleimani a monster (hence,
Elizabeth Warren’s pathetic backtracking after forthrightly condemning Soleimani
in her initial statement).
It is certainly true that racism has had a large hand in
U.S. foreign policy through much of our history. We drove Native Americans from
their lands, in part based on racial animus. Thomas Jefferson refused to
recognize an independent Haiti after a successful slave revolt, for fear it
would fuel insurrections here. The American South coveted lands in Latin
America prior to the Civil War, seeking more territory for slavery. After World
War I, Woodrow Wilson opposed a racial-equality proposal made by Japan at the
Paris Peace Conference.
All of this, and more, is a stain on our nation’s
history, but to consider racism the chief principle of a rapacious U.S. foreign
policy is reductive, malicious, dishonest, and incredibly stupid.
The fact is, and counter to the Left’s typical narrative,
racism acted more as a brake on American expansion rather than an accelerant.
Anti-imperialists didn’t want to incorporate more nonwhite people into the
United States. This is a reason that we didn’t acquire more territory after the
Mexican-American War, and the land we took control of tended to be lightly
populated by native Mexicans. In his study of the aggressively expansionist
period at the end of the 19th century, the historian Eric T. Love writes that
“race ideas were used most openly, aggressively, and effectively by the enemies
of imperialism.”
More to the point, the U.S. engaged in titanic struggles
in the 20th century against Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet
Union, none of which were brown or black. Enormous resources of blood and
treasure were poured into stopping these truly imperialist powers from
subjecting foreign peoples to their rule.
The United States opposed European colonialism, and its
biggest wars since World War II were fought shoulder to shoulder with Asian
people in Korea and Vietnam who didn’t want to be overrun by rival Asians
allied with totalitarian powers.
In the more immediate, post-9/11 period, we toppled the
Taliban and Saddam Hussein. These were interventions motivated by national
interest, but also optimistic and idealistic to a fault. Viewing these
conflicts through a racial prism requires ignoring that the Taliban and Saddam
overwhelmingly killed, tortured, and repressed other nonwhite people.
The same is obviously true of Qasem Soleimani. He has
prodigious amounts of American blood on his hands (of Americans of all races
and creeds), but he mainly killed other people in the Middle East — Syrians
opposed to Bashar al-Assad, Iraqis protesting Iranian influence, anyone who got
in the way of the Iranian imperial project.
His end is a boon to humanity, which should be obvious to
anyone who’s not drunk on ideology or racial obsessions.
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