Kerry: Iraq Is Equivalent To Bay Of Pigs

If you could imagine the most foolish analogy anyone could use in terms of our efforts in Iraq, you couldn’t possibly beat the one John Kerry chose at a rally in Toledo, Ohio today. Kerry used his idol John Kennedy as an example of how Bush supposedly can’t admit mistakes, and equated Iraq to the disastrous betrayal at the Bay of Pigs:

Kerry recalled how President John Kennedy took the blame for the bungled Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba in 1961.
“Can you imagine President Kennedy … standing up and telling the American people he couldn’t think of a single mistake that he had made? When the Bay of Pigs went sour, John Kennedy had the courage to look America in the eye and say to America ‘I take responsibility, it is my fault.”‘
Challenging Bush, Kerry said: “Mr. President, it is long since time for you to start taking responsibility for the mistakes that you’ve made.”

Good grief. As a military and political historian, John Kerry is every bit as incompetent as he is a presidential candidate. The Bay of Pigs was a military and diplomatic disaster of the first order. Kerry’s favorite president arranged to have a large group of Cuban ex-pats invade Castro’s Cuba with the promise of air support and political cover. At the last moment, Kennedy chickened out and withdrew the promised Air Force cover, allowing Castro to annihilate the bewildered invading army and defeat the United States. The operation was widely condemned by our friends and foes alike, the latter for the attempt and the former for the incompetence with which it was carried out.
Further, Kennedy never did take complete responsibility, although he did make that speech. At first he tried to deny that the US had any part in it. Later on, he and his staff maintained — and still do, to this day — that Eisenhower had put the invasion plans in motion and that Republicans hamstrung Kennedy with political threats if he canceled it of being painted as “soft on Communism”.
I’d like to know how John Kerry sees the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein as analogous to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We haven’t lost as many men in the nineteen months since our invasion than were killed or captured in a single week at the Bay of Pigs. In Iraq, Bush resolutely pushed forward until our objective was achieved — the fall of Saddam — and insists on staying until a democratic and representative government is established. He didn’t chicken out and turn tail, even when the Left kept crying out that, in the words of Janeane Garofalo, we would be “doomed, doomed!” and tens of thousands of American soldiers would lie dead in the desert of Mesopotamia.
Only John Kerry, the cut-and-run candidate, could possibly compare the Bay of Pigs favorably to the remarkable victory in Iraq. It’s yet another example of Kerry hysteria, and another reason why Kerry cannot be trusted with the position of commander-in-chief.
UPDATE: Val Prieto shares his family’s connection to the Bay of Pigs betrayal and has a few eloquent and choice words for Senator Kerry.