DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: The Necessary Risk

COMPARED with most other areas of cold-war conflict, the Dominican Republic is a small country, its civil war a minuscule affair. Yet in the six weeks since the first of 20,500 U.S. Marines and paratroopers landed in Santo Domingo, the Johnson Administration has faced a drumfire of criticism unequaled in range and volume since John F. Kennedy tried and failed to blast Fidel Castro out of power at the Bay of Pigs.

In the Dominican crisis, as in the Cuban fiasco, the deepest source of disquiet is the widespread assumption--at home and abroad--that the U.S. intervention marks a return to "gunboat diplomacy." Many persistent critics, particularly in academic circles, further argue that the Administration acted, in fact "overreacted," without provocation; that the rebels in Santo Domingo represent a legitimate democratic revolution. "On the evidence presented so far," wrote Notre Dame History Professor Samuel Shapiro in the Nation, "the Dominican revolution is no more Communist-controlled than the C.I.O. or the civil rights movement." Poet Archibald MacLeish attributed the U.S. response to "the old myopia of the McCarthy days." On more realistic grounds, a number of experts concede that the intervention may have been justified, but they object that by acting "unilaterally" and in violation of the OAS charter, the U.S. irreparably damaged its standing in Latin America.

In both the Dominican and Vietnamese wars, much of the mistrust of U.S. policy is related to the belief held by many intellectuals that the Communist threat would disappear if the free world would only quit fighting it. Some Americans, said Presidential Adviser McGeorge Bundy after returning from Santo Domingo, seem to think that "the bear will turn into a golden retriever if only we treat him that way." Bundy argued pointedly: "There is in many--and perhaps especially among those whose concern is for ideas and ideals, and those whose hope is primarily for peace and progress--a reluctance to give full weight to the role of power and its necessity in the world's affairs, a reluctance to recognize and accept this element in the affairs of men."

Spain Without Content

Doubt and dissent have not been dispelled by the oversimplified and curiously defensive fashion in which President Johnson and his aides have at times presented their case. Thus, in releasing the names of 58 known Communist agents who had infiltrated the rebel movement, the State Department made it appear that only 58 Reds in all were involved. Undeniably, even a few dozen trained subversives are enough to manipulate the rebels' cause, as the Castroites did in Cuba. But many skeptics agree with Stanford Professor John J. Johnson that "You can find 58 Communists in New York City or San Francisco or anywhere else you want to look" --ignoring the fact that neither New York nor San Francisco is in the throes of bloody civil war.

The senseless, savage nature of the struggle in Santo Domingo discourages clear-cut answers. Likening the conflict to a "Spanish civil war, without content," Presidential Emissary John Bartlow Martin reported that "distinctions had become meaningless, and each man had rebelled for his own reasons--Boschist idealism, revenge, plunder, Communist directive. All had become extremists in the true sense, men of violence, almost animals." Some commentators claim that the bloodbath would have ended if the rebels had succeeded in their avowed aim of bringing back deposed President Juan Bosch--who even under peaceful conditions proved a sadly ineffectual chief executive. In fact, the U.S. several times offered to fly Bosch home.

Many other criticisms of the intervention are more reflex than reasoned. "Gunboat diplomacy" is a handy catch phrase but an inexact parallel. Only the most rabid anti-American propagandist could argue that the action in Santo Domingo resembled the armed interventions of the early 20th century, when marines were sometimes dispatched to "those wretched little republics," as Theodore Roosevelt called the Latin nations, to protect U.S. investments. Teddy's "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting the U.S. right to punish Latin American governments for "chronic wrongdoing," was buried forever by Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, and by the U.N. and OAS charters; its final repudiation is the Alianza para el Progreso. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of the Dominican crisis has been the extent to which other American nations accepted Washington's right to intervene. Only two Latin American heads of state condemned the U.S. action, and no serious anti-Yanqui riots erupted in a single Latino capital. Admittedly, five states--Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador and Mexico--opposed the OAS resolution committing its members to multilateral intervention. By contrast, 13 others --two-thirds of all Latin American nations--not only recognized their collective duty to restore stability in the Dominican Republic but, more important yet, committed the normally dilatory OAS to direct, effective action for the first time in its 75-year history.

Subversion Without Fingerprints

Ironically, the most unequivocal indictment of Communist influence within the rebel movement did not come from Washington officials or from the oddly skeptical U.S. newsmen on the scene, but from a five-man OAS delegation that visited Santo Domingo. Its report, which got scant play in the U.S. press, warned that the rebel movement was in danger of being captured by Cuban and Soviet-trained subversives, and that conditions there were so chaotic that "any organized group" could easily land on the island and "dominate the situation." One delegate, Colombian Ambassador Alfredo Vazquez Carriozosa, impatiently demanded of the OAS: "Do we all sit down as if we were at a bullfight, waiting for the crew to drag away the dead bull?"

The arduous task ahead will be to restore political and economic stability to the hate-riven, impoverished nation. While the Administration so far has managed to block a regime that it does not want, it has yet to win the kind of government it wants. The dilemma, despite Johnson's oft-stated aim to establish "a broad-based" government, is that: 1) there are no centrist parties of any strength, and 2) the individual hatreds of possible leaders are hard to reconcile.

The greatest danger facing Latin America, Adlai Stevenson reminded critics last week, is not the threat of armed conflicts between nations but "camouflaged aggression, subversion so subtle that it can sometimes be exported without a fingerprint." Today's world, Stevenson warned, "is too volatile to permit the spread of militant violence. And until the international community is ready to rescue victims of clandestine aggression, national power will have to fill the vacuum. It is the most costly, the most dangerous and the least desirable kind of peace-keeping--and the sooner it becomes unnecessary, the better it will be for all of us."

The most valuable consequence of the U.S. response in Santo Domingo may thus be the development of an effective, permanent, regional peace-keeping force along the lines of the multinational OAS expedition that has now formally taken over from the U.S. As for Washington's initial intervention, no one can yet prove conclusively that the Dominican Republic would have become the hemisphere's second Communist state if the U.S. had not sent in troops. The fact remains that no responsible U.S. Administration facing a risk of this magnitude could have afforded to act otherwise--for the stability of the hemisphere or for the peace of the world.

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