When defending the “empire-building” foreign policy of the Bush administration, Dinesh D’Souza labels America “a different kind of empire.”

“We are willing to risk the lives of our troops to prevent (Iraqi) civilian casualties,” D’Souza said in a speech for about 100 people in McCormick Auditorium at Norris University Center on Thursday night. “We are distributing food among the civilians of the enemy. What would the Romans have done?”

D’Souza — a senior domestic policy analyst for President Ronald Reagan and New York Times bestselling author of “What’s So Great about America?” — called his talk “In Defense of Empire.”

Recent events in Iraq, such as the torture of civilians in prisons, D’Souza said, have caused America’s critics to decry the United States as an imperialist power.

“The prison scandal confirms the worst suspicions of American Empire,” D’Souza said. “Torture, loot, plunder, take advantage of people — it’s what empires have always done.”

D’Souza, however, claimed that the underlying motivations of the U.S. government — purer than critics in the Islamic world and at home argue — act beyond the traditional “Machiavellian realpolitik.”

D’Souza argued that the reason for the behavior that critics of the United States, both foreign and domestic, have titled “empire building,” is that “there is a universalism built into the American system” — and now, he said, America has the power to spread it.

“The Declaration of Independence doesn’t say ‘All Americans are created equal,’ it says ‘all men,'” D’Souza said. “Ours is a system designed for human benefit.”

D’Souza — who while attending Dartmouth College, founded the conservative newspaper “Dartmouth Review” — said although U.S. action certainly should serve its self interest, there is also a responsibility to world liberty that he thinks the country is serving. He attributed the perception of America practicing only its self-interest in part to the communication difficulties of President George W. Bush.

“Bush has, at best, a quarrelsome relationship with the English language,” D’Souza said. “He acts and he expects people to see the reasoning behind his actions.”

D’Souza said he had a problem with the liberal left’s complaint of America acting only for itself, because that is the purpose of a democratic nation. He said the question that they should be asking is not whether America is protecting its self-interest, but whether or not “you are, on the whole, benefiting or hurting the world.”

He pointed to the current conflict in Afghanistan, motivated by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as defense for his claims.

“America got involved in Afghanistan for reasons of self interest, but liberated the country in the process,” D’Souza said. “Someone said that we’ve just taken Afghanistan from the 11th century to the 13th, but hey, that’s progress.”

Meghann Ostertag said that she would not make use of the word empire as D’Souza did.

“I don’t think ’empire’ should be used because it brings a lot of ideas that are not correct,” said Ostertag, a Weinberg sophomore. “I would not agree that America is taking over countries. We’re trying to give them sovereignty.”

Medill freshman Guy Benson applauded D’Souza for making a reasoned case for America’s policy in Iraq and elsewhere.

“I think that Mr. D’Souza articulated the case for America through a fairly non-partisan lens,” said Benson, the former conservative co-host of WNUR’s political debate show “Feedback.”

“He is not a conservative bomb thrower,” Benson added. “He’s an intellectual who, in a very compelling fashion, makes the case for current American foreign policy.”