Politics & Power Quote by Dinesh D'Souza

A telltale sleight of hand hides inside that modest word: "somewhere". D'Souza frames the Iraq War not as a utopian crusade for universal democracy (an easy target after years of neocon rhetoric), but as a pragmatist's compromise: we are not trying to remake the world, just to plant one flag of freedom in a strategically chosen place. It's a clever repositioning because it trades grand moral overreach for a smaller, supposedly defensible ambition.

The subtext is triage. Democracy becomes less a principle than an instrument - a limited deployment, like an airbase or a deterrent. "Legitimate" is doing heavy work, too: it asks the reader to grant moral permission in advance, before debating costs, competence, or consent. And by admitting the effort isn't "to have democracy everywhere", D'Souza implicitly concedes the inconsistency critics often charge: close alliances with autocrats, selective outrage, freedom talk calibrated to interests. He doesn't deny that selectivity; he baptizes it as realism.

Context matters. Post-9/11 arguments for Iraq were whiplash-inducing: WMDs, terror links, humanitarian liberation, domino theories. This line reads like a post hoc stabilization of that narrative, a way to rescue the project from its own maximalist sales pitch. It's also a rhetorical attempt to lower the burden of proof. If the goal is only "somewhere", then any democratic gesture in Iraq can be treated as vindication, while failures can be reframed as implementation problems rather than a flawed premise. The quote works by shrinking the promise just enough to sound sane, without shrinking the power it claims to justify.