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Originally Posted by willravel
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Ameri-lateral n.
When the US decides completely on their own and against the stern advice of basically all of their closest allies to commit to a military or covert, pseudo-military action. Usually the US's fan club will join in, despite not being consulted, not being provided with all the evidence/intelligence, and it not being in their best interest. See: US intervention in Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq 2.
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I like the new word, but Obama said "unilateral". That said, I don't think there's much more to discuss. Both of us are wearing our pig heads.
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Originally Posted by willravel
As for the Bay of Pigs, I suppose you don't think the US bears any responsibility? Didn't we have a large part in planning and didn't we basically fund the entire thing? This is not dissimilar from how the US used the Mujahideen to fight the soviets in Afghanistan. We trained them, we armed them, we funded them.... but we don't get to think of the US as bearing responsibility?
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Responsible? Sure. But that doesn't matter to the topic at hand in the slightest.
And Tully, we may have supported it - and I've conceeded from the beginning that we did - but we weren't involved. If Kennedy had sent the promised air support, that would have been something different, but he didn't. So there we are.
If we want to start a list of proxy fights during the Cold War, I'm all for it, but that's what this was - a proxy fight. Soviets versus US, with various flavors of Cubans doing the heavy lifting. We can talk about the Germans or the Greeks or the Pakistanis and Indians doing the exact same thing, but it boils down to the fact that the two major players in the event had exactly zero troops on the ground.
And, btw, Castro was well into the Soviet sphere of influence by mid-1961. Remember that the Missle Crisis was less than 2 years away when the BoP happened.
To wrap this all up into the neat little package it is, regardless of any US equipment or planning that went into the Bay of Pigs invasion, it wasn't anything that would be described by what will said:
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Bay of Pigs: US unilaterally invades part of Cuba against the advice of all our allies and we have our asses handed to us.
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We didn't invade. We didn't have our asses handed to us. It's a strawman in the overall argument.