.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Born at the Crest of the Empire

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Ridiculous

According to David Broder, keeping Gates and elevating Geithner is going to lead to another Bay of Pigs. (No, I'm not kidding.)

posted by mikevotes at 7:45 AM

10 Comments:

  • The key phrase is...

    "There may be nothing at all similar to the Bay of Pigs invasion on the secret books of Gates's Pentagon. If there were, we would not know. But we do know that Special Forces units are operating in Iraq and in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, and we have been told that they have been deployed on anti-terrorism missions in many other countries."

    Sorry Mike, but what's ridiculous about that?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:00 AM  

  • Well, the assumption that Obama is about to lead us into a "Bay of Pigs" level disaster.

    It assumes that his decision making process is absent serious foreign policy thinkers, is going to get pushed around the way the naive Kennedy administration was, and that Robert Gates espouses the Bay of Pigs and will influence Obama over all other advisers to do it.

    This is a semi-fruitless speculative argument, but, I would argue, the early evidences from the Obama administration would seem to argue against it.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 8:08 AM  

  • I hope you are right.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:13 AM  

  • My guess is that if the Obama admin makes foreign policy mistakes, it will probably be something that's way overthought and interventionist, not something secret and surprise.

    Unlike Kennedy, Obama's fault is probably more towards deliberateness and caution.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 8:19 AM  

  • I don't think it matters much if a decision is a knee-jerk reaction or the result of long deliberation. Getting it right is what counts.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9:12 AM  

  • Agreed. My point was, Obama is probably more prone to late or not enough on foreign policy rather than too much.

    Different kind a problems, but not Bay of Pigs.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 1:17 PM  

  • I'm just hoping he'll be less easily influenced by people with their own agendas.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1:30 PM  

  • Isn't a better Bay of Pigs analogy, the GHWB policy post Desert Storm? Where he encouraged the southern Shia to rise up, then took a pass when they actually did and things got hot?

    I have to read up, 'cause I really don't know the history of the Bay of Pigs cock up.

    By Blogger -epm, at 2:13 PM  

  • the bay of pigs was a fiasco that JFK saw through and refused to be bluffed into a full-blown cuban fiat...i would expect Obama to be equally smart if the idiot neo-cons brought him a similiar GWOT mishmash...

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5:29 PM  

  • EPM, I'm not sure. It would be a little different because our troops had just pulled out and we had air supremacy, and it wasn't cold war, so some international reaction would have been expected if the US had violently aided.

    .....

    Anon, yeah, I expect him to be cautious on his foreign commitments.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 5:55 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home