Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Read Online Free PDF

theft.
    Progressives are certainly right that America makes these alliances to protect its self-interest. In the Middle East, that self-interest is oil. Now America is not stealing and has never stolen that oil—we purchase it at the world market price. America, however, seeks to avoid hostile regimes or instability in the region that might cause a disruption in the oil market. Progressives don’t seem to realize that there is nothing wrong with this. Some years ago I debated a leftistprofessor who harangued me, “Mr. D’Souza, will you admit that the main reason America is in the Middle East is because of oil?” I replied, “I certainly hope so. I cannot think of any other reasons to be there, can you?” The audience laughed. My opponent looked sullen. I could see he wasn’t convinced. And in a sense he was right. The question he was wrestling with was not self-interest per se. Rather, he was asking: In protecting America’s self-interest, are we making the overall situation in other countries better or worse? This is a legitimate question.
    In order to answer it, we must consider the central principle of foreign policy—the principle of the lesser evil. This principle says it is legitimate to ally with the bad guy to avoid the worse guy. The classic example of this was in World War II. The United States allied with Stalin—a very bad guy—because another bad guy, Hitler, posed a greater threat at the time. In the same vein, the United States was right to support the Shah of Iran, and when under Jimmy Carter we pulled the Persian rug out from under him, we got Khomeini. The Shah was a pretty bad guy, a dictator who had a secret police, but Khomeini soon proved himself a far worse guy. American and Iranian interests would have been better served if Khomeini had been prevented from coming to power. During the 1980s, the United States briefly allied with Saddam Hussein. This was during the Iran-Iraq war. Again, Saddam was the bad guy and Khomeini was the worse guy.
    When America provided arms to Osama bin Laden, he was part of the mujahedeen, a Muslim fighting force seeking to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. The mujahedeen could never have succeeded without American aid. Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. It was a spectacular triumph of American foreign policy. Of course no one knew that bin Laden and his minions would subsequently makeAmerica their main target. We see here a danger of “lesser evil” thinking: lesser evils are still evils. The bad guys you support today may turn against you tomorrow, as bin Laden did. Bin Laden may have been a “good guy” in fighting the Soviets, but he remained a “bad guy” seeking the eventual destruction of both the Soviet empire and what he took to be its American equivalent. So was America wrong to back the mujahedeen? No. At the time, radical Islam was not a major force in the world and we did not know bin Laden’s intentions. Foreign policy does not have the privilege that historians have—the privilege of hindsight. And even in hindsight America was right to do what it did.
    What went wrong in Vietnam, and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq? In Vietnam, America miscalculated its self-interest. Of course the South Vietnamese were threatened by the North. Of course Vietnam would be worse off if it went Communist. But America committed large numbers of troops because it believed its vital interests in deterring Communist aggression were at stake. In fact, America had no vital interests in Vietnam; it was a drain on American resources rather than an intelligent use of them. So Vietnam was a stupid war, but it was not a wicked war. America had no intention to rule Vietnam, or to steal the resources of the Vietnamese people; America had no colonial designs on Vietnam. Still, Vietnam was an irresponsible use of American power—on this the progressives are right.
    The Iraq War, undertaken by George W. Bush,