From a conversation with the writer J.B. Mackinnon:JBM: The clearest example of this is when I was reading through Lyndon Johnson’s justifications for putting an occupying force in the Dominican Republic in 1965. You could take quotes out of LBJ’s mouth and put them in Bush’s mouth prior to the invasion of Iraq and the only difference you would notice would be that Bush was sounding unusually intelligent that day. The quotes are that transferable.There was the idea of “overwhelming force”, which is like an earlier version of “shock and awe”. There were reasons for invading the Dominican Republic that were fabricated out of thin air, or that were only believed by a minority of people who were completely disconnected to what was happening on the ground. In this case, the fear was that the Dominican Republic was going to be the second communist domino after Cuba. It wasn’t a realistic fear in any way.The Dominican Republic is a completely different country and a radically different political culture than Cuba.So you have all of these things, in the 1960’s you had this monomaniacal fear in America about international communism. Now it’s international terrorism.Q: Do you have any lessons or warnings for us today, because of the parallels with forty years ago?JBM: We need to demand much, much more of our political leaders before we follow them into any kind of combat situation. The people of the Dominican Republic know this better than anyone: the repercussions of occupation or war are extraordinary and they go on for decades. It affects all sides: the people who supported the American military, the people who’s revolution was crushed by the American military, both sides are still reeling from that. That’s the essential lesson: we have to demand more from our political leaders. We have to remember that the things we see on TV which are easy to forget about two years later, they are impossible to forget forty years later for the people who lived it.