How bad has President Barack Obama mishandled his possible Syria bombing campaign?
“…President Obama finds himself in the biggest and ugliest public mess of his career, with a total policy meltdown playing out on the front pages and cable TV studios of the world,” writes Walter Russell Mead.
“It is like a slow motion Bay of Pigs, unrolling at an agonizing, prestige wrecking pace from day to day and week to week. It is almost impossible to defend whatever policy he actually has in mind at this point, yet the consequences of a congressional vote that opposes him are grave.”
Mead’s allusion to JFK’s Bay of Pigs fiasco is instructive. In 1961, the Kennedy administration armed and sent 1,400 Cuban exiles to topple Fidel Castro. However, they didn’t have air support or reinforcements from the U.S. military, and were quickly defeated.
Like Obama, Kennedy wanted to ‘send a message’ on the cheap, and got what he paid for.
The consequences to America were nearly disastrous. Not only did Castro and his Soviet Union patrons humiliate the United States in front of the world, they interpreted the defeat – and the resulting timidity – as a free pass to put ICBMs 90 miles from Florida. Without the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a precursor, it is almost impossible to imagine the following year’s Cuban Missile Crisis.
With this in mind, Members of Congress should be extremely skeptical about the Obama administration’s claim that those we attack won’t be “arrogant and foolish enough to retaliate.”
History indicates otherwise, and in ways we can’t easily predict.
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