Hiding the Heart of Darkness

In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he refers to the Congo as Europe's heart of darkness. However, in America we have our own heart of darkness. The Middle East. From an outside view, Americans typically believe that in places like Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran are full of violence and hatred. The media is the main contributor that objectifies those situations and overall put that country in a bad light. When Americans attempt to help out those countries, it seems that they have different motives. In those places there are rare natural resources like oil, which are expensive and rare. While Americans are their to protect the people and lessen the violence, another motive would be to help the country so we can use their precious resources. I think similar to Heart of Darkness the government finds a way to justify its presence by saying things like they are protecting the country or ridding of dangerous terrorists. However, they hide the fact that the main reason they are there to influence a country and try to steal that country's resources. I don't understand why other countries would want to change the culture of another. Maybe the world is just power hungry. And maybe countries like to show off their wealth and power to the rest of the world by proving that they can change a country into something similar to them. I think it is just interesting that while people, or governments in this case, promote diversity and the idea that being different is good, we still find people forcefully pushing their views and ideas on people.