Statesmen must make practical decisions based on imperfect information, and "retroactive judgment" by critics with the benefit of hindsight is an inappropriate fallacy, according to author Dinesh D'Souza.
D'Souza, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a former senior domestic policy analyst under President Ronald Reagan, promised a mostly-full Salomon 101 that he would cut through "a squid-like cloud of rhetoric" in his lecture, titled "In Defense of American Empire."
He recognized that President George W. Bush's original rationale for the war in Iraq as a search for weapons of mass destruction no longer holds, but he said that a "statesman is in the moving current of events. The statesman has got to make decisions based on the information that is available at the time."
D'Souza said Bush acted rationally in deciding to invade Iraq by weighing the costs and benefits of acting versus not acting. According to D'Souza, Bush had to ask, "What if I do nothing and Saddam has or is able to get (weapons of mass destruction) and a dirty bomb were to go off and kill 300,000 people? ... Well, who's going to take the responsibility for that?"
"It's not in the realm of theory, but in the realm of practical decision-making," he said.
The Brown College Republicans invited D'Souza to speak at Brown, but a large portion of the funding for the lecture came from President Ruth Simmons' newly created fund for intellectual diversity, which is designed to bring a wider variety of speakers to campus. D'Souza is the first conservative speaker brought to campus with resources from this fund.
The College Republicans invited D'Souza to speak because they wanted to bring a conservative to campus who was well known and would speak from an academic perspective, according to Chris McAuliffe '05, the group's president.
D'Souza colorfully compared the United States to a John Wayne-style sheriff, establishing authority by making an example of the most obvious offenders. Wayne's characters in movies D'Souza watched as a child in India would "walk into the bar with all the bad guys, find a few really obstreperous characters, bang their heads together ... and there's a new sheriff in town," he said.
He defended the United States' right to impose a system of democracy and Western civilization on despotic societies, but said that it does not have a responsibility to intervene in situations such as Rwanda where a commitment of "troops and treasure" would not advance U.S. interests.
Saddam Hussein has no moral right to stay in power because he came to power and maintained power through force, D'Souza said.
"We're not the world's policemen, but do we have the right to do it? Yes. Should we do it? That depends on strategic or self-interest considerations," he said.
D'Souza said U.S. economic interests were embedded in the decision to invade Iraq. "I don't deny for a second that American foreign policy is based on self-interest - in a democratic society, it should be," he said. "But it is also necessary to ask, are we making the world a better place?"
The embrace of Western technology, development and values in Asia has produced positive results, but the Middle East had been left out of the global transformation before the Iraq war, he said. Formerly agrarian or militaristic states have undergone "amazing cultural change" as a perhaps unintended but positive result of U.S. colonialism, he added.
"There is a democratic tide throughout the world except for in the Arab world," he said. "America does not see the type of society it would like to see in the Middle East."
Iran provides al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden evidence for the viability of a theocratic state in the Middle East, D'Souza said, and the Iraq war can now be viewed as an experiment to establish a counterexample in the Arab world.
Last night's lecture was D'Souza's second visit to Brown. During his first visit, in 1997, he was met with protests from Brown students during a debate over affirmative action with Howard University law professor Frank Wu. Monday, D'Souza's lecture rarely touched on his more controversial views surrounding race, but he joked about Brown's liberal reputation. "By the time the Berlin Wall fell, if you wanted to find a true-believing Marxist, you would probably have had to go to the department of romance languages at Brown University," he said.
