The Bay of Pigs invasion is a tragedy over the years has been an important forgotten intelligence failure. However, within the last decade researchers have presented new evidence that validates previous research if President Kennedy and the CIA followed the trail of intelligence and red flags the operation would have been planned accordingly. This should have prevented the calling off the rest of the air support to the Cuban Patriots and which would have allowed the Cuban Freedom Fighter to overthrow Fidel Castro and his regime. Within the research several of the authors use groupthink, hindsight bias, and unethical decision making such as self-image, and arrogance to describe the decision making process or lack thereof of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Back in 1998, thirty seven years after the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba to remove President Fidel Castro the Pentagon officially confirms Cuba poses no threat to U.S Security (Delpama, 1998).
Even today in the year 2013, their still lies many unanswered questions about what really happened, who’s at fault and why did the United States get involved? Researches thus far have done a considerable amount of research to answer these questions. However, there is still a lot of information regarding the invasion still classified we might not ever get those answers. The articles as follows provides some insight into the decision making process up to and during the time of the invasion. This literature review will leave the reader understanding that even one of the most powerful countries has it flaws and arrogance can cost the lives of innocent individuals.
In the article 1961: The Bay of Pigs Invasion by Delpama describes the operation as misguided and armature. The outcome of...
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...ent very wrong. All authors presented in this literature review have made it somewhat clear that President Kennedy is ultimately to blame even though through the research it appear he was not told the whole truth behind the operation. President Kennedy at the time played a crucial if not the most important role in the invasion and failed to protect those who were fighting for their country through false promises. What is not so clear is why? All authors neglected to go into any great details answering this question. Surprisingly it was just touched on and their need to be further research done in order to get the answer to this question. When looking at different research that has been done on Bay of Pigs invasion one common theme is groupthink per the definition. When doing further research hopefully the information will be more defined within the readings.
After being assured that “a Japanese attack on Hawaii is regarded as the most unlikely thing in the world”(1), the sudden mass destruction of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet and deaths of roughly 2400 U.S. soldiers and civilians as a result of such an attack undoubtedly lead to confusion and racial hatred amongst many U.S. citizens. The assumption on the War Department’s behalf that Japan’s Navy was incapable of launching a full scale assault on the US Navy’s chief Pacific base was more than inaccurate. As a result, the US Naval base was unprepared and was quickly taken out. A hidden bias would soon become evident in both average civilians and higher-positioned government officials. This bias against Japan aided in the formation of the Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) on February 19, 1942.
In January of 1959 , Communist dicator Fidel Castro took over Cuba. The United States in 1961 tried to overthrow Fidel by arming rebels and attempting to support them. This was the failure known as the Bay of Pigs. In October of 1962 , The US finds evidence that medium range nuclear sites had been installed in Cuba. They annonce that on the twenty-third that a quatntine was being Cuba and that any ship carrying offensive weapons to Cuba wasn’t allowed. Five days later , the crisis was averted when the Soviets began to remove the
The evidence used in this book is very accountable and reliable by the author using personal stories and experiences and himself going and visiting the Hawaiian bases attacked and pored over the maps. With thousand pages of
BAY OF PIGS It seems that the United States has been one of the most dominant, if not the most dominant, countries in the world, since the Declaration of Independence. Yet, on Monday, April 17, 1961, our government experienced incredible criticism and extreme embarrassment when Fidel Castro, dictator of Cuba, instantly stopped an invasion on the Cuban beach known as the Bay of Pigs. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his advisors, and many Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials, made the largest error of their political careers. Once the decision was made to invade Cuba, to end Castro and his Communist government, Kennedy and his administration were never looked at in the same light nor trusted again.
The U.S.’s relationship with Cuba has been arduous and stained with mutual suspicion and obstinateness, and the repeated U.S. interventions. The Platt agreement and Castro’s rise to power, served to introduce the years of difficulty to come, while, the embargo the U.S. placed on Cuba, enforced the harsh feelings. The two major events that caused the most problems were the Bays of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis.
...ity of the blame went onto Kennedy's record as not being the one that had planned it out and not giving the go ahead for the second air raid. It was later proven that no matter what the outcome of the second air raid would have been, it would not have mattered. The CIA also released a document taking the full responsibility and blame for the incident at the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban Missile Crisis not only worried the U.S. but also worried the rest of the world as to how it would turn out. The Soviet's backed Cuba as an ally and fed them missiles and the supplies to build the missile silos in Cuba. The Soviet's said they did this as a counter measure incase we did in fact invade Cuba. Between these two major conflicts of the time, it can be said that the two countries were not battling over Cuba in itself, but more or less battling over the belief of Communism.
Made from contingencies and correlations, everything in history happens because of something else. Kennedy’s skepticism towards his advisors stems from the failures of the Bay of Pigs. The Bay of Pigs was a CIA operation in the early 1960’s. It involved Americans training Cuban exiles in Nicaragua before sending them to invade Cuba in the hopes of overthrowing Castro. Kennedy largely inherited the Bay of Pigs from the Eisenhower administration as “The decision to overthrow Castro’s regime had been taken by the Eisenhower administration in January 1960, and by March of that year the CIA had developed a program of action”.
“AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.” This is the message sent out by radioman Kyle Boyer at 7:58 a.m. Sunday December 7, 1941; a date which will live in infamy. The empire of Japan had attacked the United States’ Pacific Fleet based in Pearl Harbor. For months the US Intelligence community, as well as others around the world, had been intercepting and decoding transmissions from mainland Japan to their diplomats and spies in the US. We had cracked their Purple Code, and knew exactly what military intelligence was being transmitted back and forth. The Dutch also cracked Purple and informed our government of the Japanese plan and were shocked to hear reports that we were taken by surprised. Even more disturbing, months before the attack a British double agent, Dusko Popov, codenamed Tricycle, turned over to the F.B.I. detailed plans of the Japanese air raid, which he had obtained from the Germans. The government had the information, and did nothing with it.
He was also a Gulf War veteran who commanded an armored cavalry. His desire in writing this book was to examine, through the recently declassified documents, manuscript collections, and the Joint Chief of Staff official histories, where the responsibility for the Vietnam foreign policy disaster lay, but also examine the decisions made that involved the United States in a war they could not win. This book details the discussion of government policy in the stages of the Vietnam crisis from 1961-July 1965. It examines the main characters of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, in addition to the military, which included the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It began in the Kennedy era amidst the Bay of Pigs incident and how that led to mistrust of the military planning by advisors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink: a Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-14002-1.
The Attack on Pearl Harbor was a shocking blow to the United States that forced the U.S. into World War II. The United States goal was to stay isolated from foreign affairs, but Pearl Harbor changed all that, forcing them to get involved in foreign affairs. A young, power hungry United States wanted to control Southeast Asia, angering Japan along the way. The reason the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor was the results of decades of tension starting back in 1899 with arguments over the United States Open Door Policy; both countries desired control over the Pacific and East Asia, which made war unavoidable.
Operation Northwoods was perhaps known to be a false flag used to help the U.S. get the power they wanted from different counties. Although the year of 1962 seemed to busy, on March 10 Lincoln E. Bloomfield of MIT submitted a report entitled “A World Effectively controlled by the United Nations: A preliminary study of one form of a Stable Military Environment.” General Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, a chairman of the joint chiefs, filed and said that “Operation Northwoods,” was intended to create “pretexts providing justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. Using a false flag, such as “Operation Northwoods,” the government has the ability to play to get what they want by using fake attacks, hijacking airplanes, torching a naval base, sinking
The tropical island of Cuba had been an object of empire for the United States. Before the Missile Crisis, the relationship between Castro and the US were strained by the Bay of Pigs occurrence in 1961. This was where counterrevolutionary Cubans were American funded and tried to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. However, the counterrevolutionaries failed. Castro then found an alliance with the Soviet Union and an increase of distrust that Castro had on the US. On January 18, 1962, the United States’ Operation Mongoose was learned. The objective would be “to help the Cubans overthrow the Communist regime” so that the US could live in peace. Consequently, Castro informed the Soviet Union that they were worried about a direct invasion on Cuba, thus longed for protection against th...
In 2003’s Invasion of Iraq, America driven by greed invaded Iraq for acquisition of resources, oil in particular. This thirst for greed empowered America so much that they disregarded the thought of all the innocents who would be harmed during the process, they weren’t vigilant of the consequences which awaited them and how others would be affected as a result. The Americans said that their main intention and focus was to block the use of weapons of mass destruction and that the war on Iraq was solely about terrorism. But there are many facts which contradict their claim, for instance Al-Qaeda terrorists were not from Iraq and there were was no significant presence of Al-Qaida in Iraq before the invasion. In their fit for greed America lied to it’s citizens and discarded their morals in the process, just so that they could obtain resources and thus fulfil their greedy needs with no regards to those who would be affected in the process. Between the years 2003-2013 about 112,000-123,000 innocent civilians have been killed because of the invasion. This large number of casualties was very unnecessary and only occurred because of the greediness demonstrated by the Americans from when they chose to first invade Iraq for oil in 2003. This goes to show how one's greedy actions broadly affects the ones around them, unnecessarily putting their innocent lives in the
The invasion of Iraq by the US military in 2003 is considered as one of the most controversial actions taken by the US in modern history (Lynch and Singh, 2008, p.148). The decision to remove Saddam Hussain’s regime can be said to be motivated by many reasons and varieties of perspectives (Duffield, 2005). There is no consensus among scholars on the real motivation behind such decision but the decision to go to war can be understood from economic, ideological, political and strategic motives. The paper argues that; there is two class of reasons behind the decision i.e. the declared and undeclared reason as asserted by Amin (2014). The undeclared reason is advocated as the major reasons why the US invaded Iraq. The personal opinion