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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

If Bay of Pigs "obviously" wouldn't work, why didn't anybody with authority cancel it (or the exiles refuse to go)? My guess is that they wrongly believed it would work.

LBJ made the decision to send in troops, so the buck stops at his desk.

Comparing Black Hawk Down to the subjugation of territory is silly. They weren't an occupying army but Special Forces in helicopters sent to kidnap somebody (a person unimportant enough that nobody remembers his name). Also, Il Duce did not conquer Somalia, which had been an Italian territory since the 1880s. He did conquer Ethiopia, but the minor setbacks in the course of it claimed more lives than the U.S lost in Somalia.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

TGGP,

For the Bay of Pigs, see Decision for Disaster by Grayston Lynch, one of the CIA planners. Basically, what happened is that State abused the interagency policy process to nibble away at a military plan which obviously would have worked (not counting the original, absurd, constraint of plausible deniability), until it turned into a plan which obviously wouldn't work. Similarly, Curtis LeMay once characterized the US effort in Vietnam as "trying to dress and undress at the same time." The US government can hardly be described as the personification of LBJ's personal will.

It's true that in Somalia the US didn't even really have a definition of success. Kind of an extreme case. However, if you take the last success in subjugating that territory, Il Duce's colonial effort, you can use that as the yardstick. Making the Italian army look effective is a pretty impressive demonstration of artificial ineptitude.

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