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LOS ANGELES - Ten months ago, I accompanied a visiting Australian columnist, Tim Blair, on a fact-finding mission to inquire whether there is a correlation between worldwide anti-war slogans and American public reality. Our first (and last) stop: the Glendale Galleria shopping mall.

Glendale is a middle-class city of 200,000, 10 kilometres due north of downtown Los Angeles. Though Disney headquarters is just a skate-ride away, and Hollywood a five-minute drive, the Galleria is psychically farther from Tinseltown than is Toronto. There are fewer grips and aspiring B-actresses per capita in Glendale than in LA or Toronto. You're more likely to bump into Sean Penn in Baghdad, or Charlton Heston on Mount Sinai.

STOP MAD COWBOY DISEASE! Among the 150 or so stores spread out over three floors and two wings, we found a single sad outlet hawking cowboy boots to an unimpressed public. A half-dozen sneaker retailers, meanwhile, were thick with teens in baggy pants and wallet-chains. Los Angeles may be an under-appreciated cauldron of country music, but around these parts you're more likely to see snakeskin on a left-leaning punk-rocker than anyone with access to The West Wing, let alone the White House.

THE AMERICAN FLAG HAS BEEN HIJACKED BY JINGOISTS! If this were true, then the jingoists sold the franchise rights to teenage Asian-American surfers hawking Laker flags, and omni-pierced pink-haired gals who can invent back-stories for inexplicable Japanese action figures named "Ken" at the drop of a skullcap.

STOP THIS RACIST WAR! After testing the evidence for this last chant, we retired the exercise on grounds of absurdity. The thousands of people milling about the mall that day could be described many ways -- "young," "loud," sometimes "obese" -- but "white" was not a word that came to mind. If you plugged your ears, you'd have the damndest time trying to figure out just what ethnicities and nationalities are on display at the Galleria on any given day.

According to the 2000 census, more than half of Glendale's residents were born in a foreign country. Of all the cities in the United States, Glendale ranked second -- behind only Honolulu -- in the percentage of respondents (10) who marked off the brand-new "two or more races" category.

Twenty per cent described themselves as Latino or Hispanic (of whom 11% were from Mexico). Sixteen per cent marked "Asian" (with 6% each for Filipinos and Koreans), and another 9% said they belonged to "some other race" not listed.

Yet this doesn't tell half the story. Glendale is home to at least 52,000 ethnic Armenians, "the highest concentrations of Armenians outside Armenia," according to the Los Angeles Daily News. The Mayor, and two of five City Councillors, are ethnic Armenians. The hottest geopolitical topic, year after year, is the effort to make the United States officially recognize the 1915 Turkish slaughter of Armenians as genocide.

These Americans with origins in the Caucasus generally describe themselves as "white" on the Census; they look more like swarthy, non-blond Russians than anyone you could imagine singing for the Beach Boys. Having settled in one of the most diverse cities in the country, they have got down to the business of marrying outside the tribe.

The upshot is that, in the Galleria at least, you have little idea of anyone's national background. People look vaguely brownish and have non-anglo noses, with girls tending toward silvery lipstick and guys dressing like gangsta rappers circa 1995. Close your eyes, though, and you'd still think you're on the set for the remake of Valley Girl.

If a racist war were being cooked up by the Bush administration, then you might expect Glendale to be a hotbed of opposition. It's not. But the tangled issue of race in America does have a direct and interesting impact on foreign policy, including plans for a post-war Iraq.

The United States, as any child brought up under communism can tell you, is a country founded on racist violence and nasty prejudice. This propagandistic caricature contains a chunky element of truth not always processed by American patriots. Commentators here have been outduelling each other for months to find the most comical new way to ridicule France for folding like a cheap tent against the Nazis in 1940, and for incubating modern strains of anti-Semitism, but the post-Second World War record of even a "progressive" state like California is tainted by an ugly racism that does not square with our popular self-image as the smiters of all things fascist.

The massive Los Angeles County suburb I grew up in, for example, was built and financed by Jews who weren't allowed to live there, due to foul post-war housing "covenants" (so instead they built a covenant-free Country Club on the other side of the main boulevard; it wasn't until my twenties that I realized not all Jews were rich). In the charming Hollywood-adjacent neighbourhood I've lived in for the past five years, the local homeowners association once maintained a popular "Race Restrictions Committee" to keep out those pesky "non-Caucasians" until the U.S. Supreme Court made such toxic behaviour illegal in 1948.

These are some of the less publicized aspects of recent American racism. But this is not to say that we've ignored the problem. On the contrary! Few movements have been so lionized as the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and '60s, which has gained as many after-the-fact participants as the French Resistance. No 20th-century American athlete is as venerated as the colour-barrier-breaking baseball player Jackie Robinson, unless it's the Vietnam War-protesting Black Muslim Mohammed Ali. Martin Luther King, a controversial figure 40 years ago, is now a holiday. We enshrine today those we persecuted yesterday, and try to learn from our mistakes with all the noisy zeal of recent converts.

This pattern appears in foreign policy, too, especially since the end of the Cold War. In the 1980s, anti-Soviet realpolitik clearly trumped racial concerns. When the U.S. Congress attempted to levy sanctions against apartheid South Africa in 1986, for example, Dick Cheney, now the Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld, now the Secretary of Defence, were among the outspoken opponents of the plan. After the Cold War, Nelson Mandela was treated like a conquering hero, and America started placing multi-ethnic harmony high on its list of international priorities.

Racism, and the guilty memory of standing on the sidelines until December, 1941, while Hitler and his puppets ran amok over Jews, Gypsies and other nationalities, have quite a bit to do with how America exerted its power in the 1990s. There's a reason why U.S. presidents always compare their dictatorial opponents to Hitler, and warn against the lessons of the Munich Agreement, when Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, sold Czechoslovakia to the Nazis to make "peace in our time" -- Americans of today can't quite fathom a world where we would shy away from a challenge that, in retrospect, seems so obvious.

Multiculturalism of a sort is enshrined in some unlikely corners of foreign policy. When Washington decided to expand NATO, for example, new countries weren't allowed to join unless they passed legislation explicitly protecting national minorities (this, along with the requirement to sign border-guaranteeing treaties with all neighbours, helped defuse escalating tensions in the mid-1990s between Hungary and Slovakia, which has a 10%Hungarian minority). Part of the strong American revulsion toward Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaigns in Kosovo and especially Bosnia sprang from the blood-curdling recognition that these republics once lived in comparative multi-ethnic peace, as we do in New York and Los Angeles.

But the peace here is relative. Glendale may be a terrific place to go shopping, but it has also suffered from an Armenian-Latino gang war that has taken many young lives. Some programs enacted in the sincere desire to put our racist past behind us -- bilingual education being the most obvious example -- have made difficult situations worse, and led to a public policy battleground over affirmative action, welfare, sentencing guidelines and a host of other hot-button issues.

Meanwhile, the bogeyman of actual racism still lurks alarmingly near the surface: the California Republican Party, which is riven in two by largely unspoken racial divisions, narrowly averted electing a chairman last month who thought it was a swell idea to pass around an asinine essay about how things might have turned out better for American blacks had the Confederacy won the Civil War. Democrats hint darkly about Republican motives, Republicans scream about the "multiculturalists," and everyone's knickers get tied up in knots when President George Bush does something like nominate a conservative Latino for a key judicial post.

Projecting our experience abroad has proven just as contentious, especially when weighing Woodrow Wilson's ideal of national self-determination against the international community's norm of keeping borders stable. The Clinton administration was so dedicated to the principle of preserving a multi-ethnic post-war Bosnia, it helped create a patchwork of a country that seems very unlikely to exist as it is 20 years from now. Meanwhile, intervention in Kosovo meant that Washington enforced the republic's separation from Yugoslavia, but few dare utter such truisms out loud for fear of exciting Chechens, Abkhazians, Basques and any other minority not yet blessed with a state to call their own.

Especially the Kurds. With the war on terrorism dovetailing with a war on Iraq, the realpolitik days of the Cold War are back with a vengeance. Turkey, a key ally that borders Iraq to the north, has treated its Kurdish minority appallingly through the years. Saddam Hussein has done likewise, until the British and Americans enforced de facto autonomy to the now-thriving Kurdish regions to the north. Washington has been on the losing end of negotiations with Ankara to use Turkey as a key staging ground for the attack, and seems on the verge of allowing 40,000 Turkish troops to enter Iraq from the north.

As Timothy Noah has warned in Slate: "The United States is poised to screw the Kurds one more time." Here's hoping the non-racist war doesn't end up damaging the unluckiest tribe of them all.

Matt Welch is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. His work is archived at www.mattwelch.com