The Gulf War military was rebranded as a multicultural force to justify intervention.

Evidence

Just as the objectives of the civil rights movement were co-opted and diffused through government policies, the objectives of the multicultural movement were co-opted by the media, corporations, education, and government in the guise of “progressive gestures in the name of ‘diversity.’” The U.S. government, during the 1991 Gulf War, redefined its global image in representations of the military as racially diverse, ideologically united, and winning the war in Iraq. McAlister demonstrates how the U.S. government and media strategically portrayed the U.S. military as a force for multiculturalism and democracy while unresolved and heated debates over multiculturalism continued at home, providing the United States with a mandate to intervene globally. … Yet demonizing the enemy during times of war is not a thing of the past. Rather, it has assumed new forms. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 97

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how diversity discourse gets weaponized as imperial justification — the military’s multicultural image as a marketing move that masks domestic inequality debates.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thread on how sacrificial/ideological framing gets deployed to justify violence and state action. — connects to: Post-Cold War US empire rebranded military force as benevolent multicultural intervention — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 403; US military diversity itself served as imperial branding after the Gulf War — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 416
• DEEPTHINKING: The co-optation of progressive movements’ language by the very institutions they challenged is a recursive, almost inevitable mechanism worth sitting with.