News reports are often pretty grim, so I’d like to start with a little entertainment, from a song by the great Tom Lehrer—-”Send the Marines”. Lehrer sang this song in 1965. Sixty one years have passed and here we are yet again, sending in the Marines.
At the time, the US was ‘seemingly’ at the height of its power, even though it couldn’t defeat the peasant armies of North Korea and the People Liberation Army of China. Instead, it was, to quote another great folk singer, Pete Seeger, walking into the Vietnam quagmire.
Comparing Two Epic Fails
The Battle of the Bulge and The Bay of Pigs were two humiliating defeats. Comparing them, I see it as Germany's last attempt to salvage a war they were losing, and Bay of Pigs was a failed US attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Cuban government that the US bitterly opposed and strove to remove. The CIA thought invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, would provoke an uprising of the Cuban people against Castro. Both were major strategic miscalculations with historically important consequences. Let me explain.
The Essential Nature of Both Events:
They were indeed high-stakes gambles born from strategic desperation and flawed assumptions, and their failures had profound and lasting consequences. While separated by two decades and vastly different contexts—one a conventional World War II battle, the other a Cold War covert operation—the Battle of the Bulge and the Bay of Pigs Invasion are compelling to compare as classic examples of strategic miscalculation.
Both were “major strategic miscalculations”. In both cases, the aggressors were blind to the reality of their situation.
Overconfidence and Wishful Thinking: Hitler’s plan was described as “wishful thinking,” hoping to replicate the conditions of 1941 against an enemy that had fundamentally changed . The Soviet Union suffered serious defeats initially, not unlike the initial attack on Iran. But by 1944, the Soviet Union had counter attacked, similar to Iran’s counter attack on USA/Israel. Similarly, the CIA and the Kennedy administration suffered from a “victory disease” born of recent successful overthrows in Guatemala and Iran, assuming that a small force could topple a government without understanding the deep popular support for Castro’s revolution . The assumption that “if the invaders got into trouble... then JFK would “send in the Marines” proved to be a fatal oversight .
Intelligence Failures: The Allies in 1944 were caught off guard in the Ardennes, despite some warnings, due to overconfidence and a failure of technical intelligence (ULTRA) to detect the build-up . At the Bay of Pigs, the failure was more profound: it was a complete misreading of the political landscape. The CIA’s reconnaissance failed to spot a radio station that broadcast the invasion’s start, and planners were ignorant of the coral reefs that would sink ships .
The “Last Throw of the Dice” vs. The “Perfect Failure”: The Battle of the Bulge is often described as a desperate gamble by a dying regime, a “final throw of the dice” that accelerated its own demise . The Bay of Pigs, in contrast, was seen within the CIA as the “perfect failure”—a well-funded, meticulously planned operation that went wrong from the start, not because the enemy was overwhelmingly powerful, but because every single assumption upon which it was based was wrong .
✨ The Enduring Significance
Both events serve as powerful historical lessons about the limits of military power and the danger of making policy based on assumptions rather than reality. The Battle of the Bulge, despite being a German defeat, demonstrated the remarkable resilience and adaptability of the American soldier and the Allied command structure . The Bay of Pigs, though a humiliation, was a harsh lesson for the new Kennedy administration, leading to a more cautious, though still confrontational, approach to the Cold War, as seen in the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis.
Other Examples of Imperial Hubris Getting Smacked
John Mearsheimer similarly compares the US/Israeli attack a replay of the disastrous attack of Gallipoli, where the Winston Churchill, the British serial warmonger and genocidal orchestrator of the Bengal Famine, attacked the Ottoman Empire and lost 250,000 British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers.
Another example is Trump’s allusion to the great Armada he sent to the Persian Gulf. Spain was the great imperial power in 1588. England was a rising power. So the Spanish assembled a great fleet, the Spanish Armada to put England down. The English outwitted the Spanish, and along with bad weather, the Spanish Armada suffered a humiliating defeat.
President Trump, apparently a poor historian, omits to tell the American people that Spain made history when the great Spanish Armada to defeat a rising England and suffered catatrophic defeat. The US ‘Armada of 2026’ is also suffering serious setbacks. Two aircraft carriers in bad physical condition due to either Iran missile strikes, worn out equipment and even possible mutinous sabotage by crews who’ve been forced to be on duty way beyond what is reasonable or bearable.
The Case of Iran
The US and Israel had different reasons for attacking Iran. Israel sees Iran as the last obstacle to its Greater Israel project. The US wants to both disrupt China’s energy needs from being fulfilled, as well as capturing Iran as a crossroads. Iran is at the heart of Asia. If a new puppet government of Iran would block Russia’s North South corridor, as well as China’s Belt and Road Initiative—East West.
I am hardly a military analyst, but I fail to see how a 1000 man landing force can occupy and defeat Iran and bring back a US puppet. If the plan is to simply disrupt Iran shipping oil and gas, why not just blow Kharg Island to dust?
Berletic points out that the US, in order to maintain global primacy, which it sees slipping away in favor of China, is willing to wage a brutal destructive war that would not only destroy Iran’s energy industry, but also induce Iran to destroy the Gulf Monarchies’ industries.
The US would control its own oil and gas, Venezuela’s and then most likely Nigeria and other oil and gas producing countries, making the US dream of controlling the entire world energy market a reality.
The Folly of ‘Sending the Marines
Brian Berletic, a long time military and geopolitical analyst points out the folly and inevitable failure of ‘sending in the Marines’.
Conclusion
The goal is for the US to be ‘the King of the City on the Hill’. Which entails crushing China. That would destroy the US consumer economy which has depended on China.
And somehow, US ruling elites consider this a victory. The whole Iran episode, like Ukraine, like Israeli genocide, and all the other US wars are suicidal. Can this March of Folly by US ruling elites be stopped?
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