An Abiding Penchant for Foreign Follies : Armed intervention: Bad analysis sent Marines to the Caribbean 30 years ago; foreign misconceptions still plague us.

Thirty years ago this past week, 500 U.S. Marines landed at Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Armed and authorized to return fire, these were the first combat-ready U.S. forces to enter a Latin American country in almost 50 years. Within a few days, nearly 23,000 U.S. soldiers were ashore in Santo Domingo, half as many as were then serving in Vietnam, with another 10,000 ready just off the Dominican coast and thousands more on alert at U.S. bases.

President Lyndon B. Johnson and other U.S. officials at first told the American people that the Marines had landed to protect the lives of Americans and other foreign nationals during a period of political turmoil, although not a single American or other foreigner had been hurt. The State Department’s classified cable traffic, however, shows that the references to protecting American lives were a conscious pretext to justify an intervention actually motivated by Washington’s desire to thwart a “second Cuba” and prevent a feared communist takeover of the Dominican Republic.

Within a few days of the Dominican intervention, U.S. spokesmen began hinting and then talking openly about a communist threat. On May 2, Johnson himself, in a nationally televised address, declared “that what had begun as a popular democratic revolution in the Dominican Republic had been taken over and really seized and placed in the hands of a band of communist conspirators.”

Pressed by U.S. journalists for evidence of the alleged communist threat, the Administration released the names of 58 supposed communist activists participating in the April, 1965, uprising. The list turned out to be full of errors, including the names of persons who had been out of the country, in jail, ill or otherwise unavailable for revolutionary pursuits.

The U.S. government badly erred in evaluating the Dominican situation that April. Every specific report of foreign communist involvement during the Dominican crisis turned out to be mistaken.

So deep was the fear of a second Cuba that U.S. officials were genuinely concerned that Dominican radio broadcasts had an increasingly “Castro-communist” flavor, only to learn that the radio broadcasts in question were actually CIA-produced dark propaganda, intended to discredit one Dominican group.

The power of preconception, reinforced by official rhetoric and bureaucratic repetition, to determine foreign policy has rarely, if ever, been more conclusively demonstrated. No U.S. official expressed any opposition to the military intervention in Santo Domingo; it was generally accepted as an appropriate response. But the Dominican situation was badly misunderstood because of a faulty framework of analyses and dubious policy premises.

The main lesson that Robert McNamara’s recent memoirs about Vietnam should teach us is not about deception, stupidity or guilt. The underlying point in both the Vietnam and the Santo Domingo misadventures is how hard it is to challenge mistaken concepts and flawed premises.

Forceful and sustained criticism of questionable assumptions from within or outside a bureaucracy may sometimes erode their power. But such questioning rarely occurs within an organization, when every official’s vision is distorted by the need to look for what superiors are known to be most concerned about. Outside critics are easily dismissed; indeed, the response to them is often to give greater sanctity and power to dubious premises by authoritative public rhetoric, then further strengthened by bureaucratic formulations.

A flawed analytical framework shapes the questions that officials ask, the events they notice and remember, the evidence they select and use, so that a syndrome of misconception is strongly reinforced. That dynamic is pervasive, predictable and hard to reverse--but effective policy, foreign and domestic, depends precisely on learning how to do so. That continuing challenge is what we should be struggling with now--rather than replaying the arguments of the 1960s.