US troops reinterpreted Iraq as Indian Country, casting Muslims as deserving genocide.

Evidence

An example of such racial semiotics in imperial warfare can be found in the recent invocation of the term ”Indian Country”—racial symbolism drawn from the colonial settlement of the U.S. West in the nineteenth century—by U.S. military personnel in the war in Iraq. Originally, ”Indian Country” had multiple meanings. From Native American perspectives, it denoted indigenous territory and ancestral landscapes; to the U.S. military, it meant hostile enemy territory and active war zones (Silliman 2008, 237). In the current racial encounter, the Middle East as a social imaginary thus has come to stand in for the American empire’s most recent colonial war. In the context of global racism and militarization, Muslims are compared to American Indians and are thus regarded as deserving genocidal violence. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 351

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Slotkin’s frontier-myth thesis and to the broader literature on colonial frameworks being re-applied to current wars.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone working on just-war rhetoric or the colonial imaginary in US military discourse.