Continued efforts by the Oberlin College Republicans to gain visibility as an active student organization brought noted conservative Dinesh D’Souza to campus on Thursday to discuss American foreign policy in the Middle East. D’Souza is a best-selling author of books dealing with conservative political issues, and is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

D’Souza’s audience drew from a mixed crowd. His address was met at times with laughter, at others with impulsive interruptions and a lively discussion. During some moments, political debate turned to personal attacks. One student asked D’Souza, a former domestic policy analyst for President Ronald Reagan, “How did you sleep at night while working for Reagan?”

The cause of much of this controversy was D’Souza’s analysis of the Iraq war. He cited two reasons President George W. Bush decided to invade. One was to prevent Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. Another was the feeling that it was “not enough to do Afghanistan and shoot some guys climbing on the monkey bars.”

He explained, “The U.S. needed to go into the Middle East and slam a dictator’s head into the ground” in order to intimidate America’s foes. This was a rationale D’Souza called “utterly legitimate.”

Issues of international law were irrelevant to the invasion of Iraq, according to D’Souza. The rights of sovereign states depend instead on a government’s “legitimate right to rule in the first place,” which Sadam Hussein’s regime lacked.

He went on to defend the Bush administration’s decisions and course of action in Iraq. Policymakers, D’Souza said, had to act on information that is often “cloudy” and consider the costs of not acting.

“In retrospect, [the war on] Iraq should have been done differently,” D’Souza acknowledged. He stressed, however, that the issue now is not what should have been done. Rather, it is more important to ask, “Why are we there now?”

Despite the mistakes that have been made, D’Souza still insisted that the Iraq war is still a worthwhile cause. While the failure to uncover WMDs in Iraq led Bush to adopt a rationale of building a democratic Iraq rather than protecting the American people, D’Souza said he approved of this rationale.

“Democracy in Iraq could result in a historic transformation in the Middle East,” he said, which in turn could create a new model to compete with the one provided by Al Qeada.

D’Souza sought to clarify the broader issues of terrorism and Middle Eastern politics by criticizing terms and notions he thought were inaccurate. Debate, he said, was obscured by vocabulary that is “confusing if not outright misleading.”

The “war on terrorism” was one misnomer he singled out, comparing it to calling World War II the “War on Kamikazeism.” He preferred to describe the current conflict as a “war against a certain species of Islamic radicalism.”

D’Souza went on to criticize opponents of the war. He dismissed claims that the terrorists’ rage is caused by American support for undemocratic regimes, asking “how can they be mad when unelected and despotic regimes are all that exist or have ever existed [in the Middle East]?” He also rejected claims that terrorists were driven by hatred of the modern world.

Audience members vigorously disputed many of D’Souza’s arguments. One student asked whether American foreign policy was driven more by a desire to “impose capitalism rather than democracy.” Others questioned the United States’ moral authority to use force to promote its political values in light of its own failings and checkered history.

D’Souza defended his positions by using examples that ranged from pre-revolutionary Iranian politics to early American history. In general, he appeared to relish the Question and Answers portion of his presentation, referring to it as “the fun part.” He ended by saying that Oberlin students should “welcome this kind argument,” because liberalism is strengthened when it is challenged.