are often perceived to be high:better to keep up the flow of support funds than to slow down, reassess, and risk falling into a ditch. In most countries, the making of foreign policy typically produces a rich trove of "policy-based evidence." American institutions seem to specialize in distorted problem formulation and flawed policy execution. Before the 2003 intervention in Iraq, which was based on amateur group think screening out critical definitions of the problem (see Pfiffner 2010, 201), the classic example of weak problem diagnosis was US participation in the Vietnam War. Successive definitions by core foreign policy institutions over time (including the State Department, the CIA, the Department of Defense) led to American support of a series of puppet regimes in South Vietnam and increased US military participation to stop Communist-threatened "dominoes" from falling. The mistake was to move ahead in the early 1960s, ignoring such core lessons from the past as the French debacle in Indochina, since many of these lessons were institutionally inconvenient for justification of the expansion option (Tuchman 1984).