Gulf of Tonkin: The Deceptions that Justified War

August 4 was the 51st anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's speech about the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents that were used to justify the Vietnam war. Here's a brief excerpt describing his claim:


Here's former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara years later in "Fog of War" admitting that the incident didn't happen:



In February 2008, U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Pat Paterson wrote about the historical evidence for the U.S. Naval Institute's Naval History Magazine:

But once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

On 2 August 1964, North Vietnamese patrol torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox (DD-731) while the destroyer was in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. There is no doubting that fact. But what happened in the Gulf during the late hours of 4 August—and the consequential actions taken by U.S. officials in Washington—has been seemingly cloaked in confusion and mystery ever since that night. 

Nearly 200 documents the National Security Agency (NSA) declassified and released in 2005 and 2006, however, have helped shed light on what transpired in the Gulf of Tonkin on 4 August. The papers, more than 140 of them classified top secret, include phone transcripts, oral-history interviews, signals intelligence (SIGINT) messages, and chronologies of the Tonkin events developed by Department of Defense and NSA officials. Combined with recently declassified tapes of phone calls from White House officials involved with the events and previously uncovered facts about Tonkin, these documents provide compelling evidence about the subsequent decisions that led to the full commitment of U.S. armed forces to the Vietnam War.... 

These new documents and tapes reveal what historians could not prove: There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defense McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.

Paterson explains in the article that the August 2 attack was provoked by US actions.  These are his final concluding sentences about the events and the Vietnam war:

The administration's zeal for aggressive action, motivated by President Johnson's election worries, created an atmosphere of recklessness and overenthusiasm in which it became easy to draw conclusions based on scanty evidence and to overlook normally prudent precautionary measures. Without the full picture, Congress could not offer the checks and balances it was designed to provide. Subsequently, the White House carried the nation into the longest and one of the most costly conflicts in our nation's history.

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Summer Duck

Today, at the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "Is America cool again?" The piece looks at results from the latest Pew Global Attitudes Project, which finds some big improvements in the U.S. image around the world -- apparently attributable to the Obama administration.

On Monday, July 6, I posted "RIP: Robert McNamara." I saw the former Secretary of Defense speak a couple of times and dined with him once.

On Friday, July 3, I blogged "Oops" about an unfortunate mistake concerning a book ad (since corrected) at the Barnes and Noble website.


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The lies that lead to war

Iraq is merely the latest example of the US going to war under apparently false pretenses. In the debate leading up to the war against Iraq, the "mushroom cloud" fears were almost completely unfounded.

Ironically, of course, intelligence to challenge the claim was publicly available before the war. Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel prize winning Director of the IAEA, reported on March 7, 2003:

After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.

The IAEA conducted 281 inspections at 141 sites, examined the forged Niger documents, looked into the question of uranium importation and enrichment, looked at the importation of aluminum tubes and high-strength magnets, and interviewed key scientists and public officials.

Did the administration distort the evidence? Or, were the intelligence agencies completely and horribly wrong? A third possibility also exists: did some intelligence sources knowingly distort the evidence?

Don't dismiss the third alternative out of hand.

The work of an historian for the National Security Agency (NSA) has recently been disclosed by a non-governmental historian, revealing that NSA officers may have intentionally cooked the intelligence about a North Vietnamese attack on a US warship that never happened. This transgression was deliberate, but it was apparently designed to cover up honest mistakes of tradecraft. There had been an attack against US assets on August 2 and someone completely misinterpreted followup communiques about the first attack. The New York Times, October 31, 2005:

The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.

The claim that the attack did not happen is now new. For some time, historians have been pointing out that the alleged second North Vietnamese attack on US destroyers, ostensibly on August 4, 1964, never happened. In 1988, for example, Admiral James Stockdale revealed in The Washington Post that he was a personal observer to the supposed incident -- and that it did not happen.

The new claim is that intelligence operatives intentionally relayed false information about an alleged threat (a second attack).

In reaction to the phantom attack, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Lyndon B. Johnson adminstration used that to prosecute all-out war against North Vietnam. By 1969, the US had over half a million troops "in country."

As John Prados and others have previously discussed, the US conducted a covert operation on August 2, 1964, which provoked the initial North Vietnamese attack that day. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, however, later misleadingly told Congress that the covert operations were conducted by South Vietnamese forces. The US conducted additional covert raids on August 3-4, but the North did not respond with another attack on the US destroyer deployed near the Gulf.

The White House knew by August 5, 1964, that the evidence for the second attack was uncertain, at best. However, it appears that the initial US response was made in relatively good faith -- the Secretary of Defense and President thought the North Vietnamese had made a second attack.

Want another case? This one is harder to assess because the Pentagon data has not yet been declassified.

Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002:

When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.

Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.

But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert.

"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story....

Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up – jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases – but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis.

"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis – offering to hold the story if proven wrong.

The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified.

A House Armed Services Committee report also later concluded that Iraq had only 183,000 troops in 1990, less than half the number the Pentagon claimed it was facing at the time.

As some sources in the CSM story point out, the same people who lied (and/or were wrong) in 1990 were many of the same people talking about Iraq's threat in 2002. For example, the first Bush's Secretary of Defense in 1990-1991 was Dick Cheney.

Death star

National security and defense debates never seem to die -- but they sometimes become more colorful.

More than twenty years ago, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on "Managing the Perils of Nuclear Proliferation." I'd like to say it was ahead of its time, but Lewis Dunn had just published Controlling the Bomb (Yale, 1982). My library research was thorough, but ultimately derivative. Hell, in 1980-81, Dartmouth's top debate team (actually, they were ranked as the best team in the country) advocated that the US pass along PALs and other technological protections to potential new proliferants. The biggest risks could be mitigated by making the new proliferant forces invulnerable to rival first strike and safe from unauthorized use and theft. By the end of that year, my sophomore season, my colleague and I occasionally argued that case too.**

A few years later, spurred by Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" address, I set about studying the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Because there wasn't too much new to say about missile defenses -- after all, "anti-ballistic missiles" (ABM) were thoroughly debated in the 1960s by defense intellectuals -- I decided to focus on the recurrence of the debate itself, and the arguments employed by the various advocates. Hence, my dissertation concerned "Communication Strategy and 'Strategic' Weapons: Case Studies of ABM Decisions." I also explored some of the Reagan administration's threat inflation concerning SDI.

Last week, the New York Times (I read the same story in the International Herald Tribune), reported that the Air Force is now recommending variants of missile defense that focus directly on the proliferation problem. This is not a new idea either. Robert McNamara's 1967 ABM proposal was designed to mitigate threats from China's new atomic threat.

The air force believes "we must establish and maintain space superiority," General Lance Lord, who leads the U.S. Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting."

...A new air force strategy, called Global Strike, calls for a military space plane carrying precision-guided weapons armed with a half-ton of munitions. Lord told Congress last month that Global Strike would be "an incredible capability" to destroy command centers or missile bases "anywhere in the world."

Pentagon documents say the weapon could strike from halfway around the world in 45 minutes. "This is the type of prompt Global Strike I have identified as a top priority for our space and missile force," Lord said.

Opponents have rallied quickly. Just as foes of Reagan's plans used the phrase "Star Wars" to frame opposition to SDI, current skeptics have again borrowed from the imagination of George Lucas. This time, the weaponry of Lord Darth Vader comes more directly to mind:

Another space program, nicknamed Rods From God, aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour, or 11,500 kilometers an hour, with the force of a small nuclear weapon...No nation will "accept the U.S. developing something they see as the death star," Teresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information, a policy-analysis group in Washington, said at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. "I don't think the United States would find it very comforting if China were to develop a death star, a 24/7 on-orbit weapon that could strike at targets on the ground anywhere in 90 minutes."

Academically, I may have to return to this colorful new debate. After all, as other bloggers have noted, the neoconservative right openly admires Vader's empire. And Bush has selected a General named Lord to oversee a program dubbed Rods from God? Incredible.



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** My ultimate career choices were strongly influenced by that 1980-1981 debate season. In response to teams that wanted to ratify the SALT accords, I developed an argument called "The Russian Revolution" that claimed the Soviet Union and its empire was going to collapse under the weight of the arms race. Most of the key pieces of evidence came somewhat dubiously from a Taiwanese magazine and more reasonably from the book, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Remember, Poland was cracking at the seams that year.

By the end of the 1981 season, my colleague and I were arguing that the 1980 death of Marshall Tito meant that civil war in Yugoslavia was inevitable. The US needed to act then to prevent that violence. This was all based on secondary research in scholarly journals and books. Retired NATO General John Hackett had published The Third World War, which also considered the implosion of Yugoslavia.

Kids, do you understand why I think debate was so valuable?

Big Bad Wolf

The Bush administration is full of surprises.

First, it decided to send John Bolton to the UN. Now, it is dispatching Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank.

Paul Wolfowitz is arguably the chief neocon hawk responsible for the Iraq war, which has never been popular around the world.

Apparently, when his name was recently floated by the Europeans, they reacted quite negatively. Indeed, some editorial pages are suggesting that European states might veto Wolfowitz, just as the US (under Clinton) rejected European candidate Caio Koch Weser to head the IMF in 2000.

Some development organizations fear that this signals the Bush administration's attempt to use the World Bank to advance its democratization goals. Neoliberal economic conditionality might be supplemented by new political conditions, which are supposed to be forbidden by the Bank's Charter. From Reuters:

"If the Bush administration wanted to poke a finger into the eye of every nation on Earth, it couldn't have made a better choice," said John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank.

"Wolfowitz does not have an interest or knowledge about poverty and development problems. With him at the helm, the bank will be seen more and more as a tool of U.S. foreign policy, not a multilateral institution," wrote Alex Wilks, a Brussels-based activist whose Web site (www.worldbankpresident.org) tracked speculation over the presidency.

And from The Guardian:

Peter Bosshard, the policy director of the International Rivers Network, an American NGO, said: "In his career, Wolfowitz has so far not shown any interest in poverty reduction, environmental protection and human rights. His election as World Bank president would most likely exacerbate the current backlash against social and environmental concerns at the World Bank, and would initiate a new era of conflict between the Bank and civil society."

The historial parallel that leaps immediately to mind is Robert McNamara, who moved from the Secretary of Defense running LBJ's Vietnam war to the Bank. He served from 1968 to 1981.

McNamara actually helped do good at the Bank, orienting it more completely toward anti-poverty goals.

We can hope.

And on the bright side, Bolton and Wolfowitz are now in much weakened positions within the US foreign policy establishment. Especially in a Republican administration, nobody cares that much about the UN, and the Bank isn't exactly a great place to plot neoimperial strategy.

I suspect that someone close to Wolfowitz advised him that his security-related career was over (he's not going to be Secretary of Defense any time soon), so he might as well take this post.

The Fog of War

Tonight, I finally watched "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" (2003) by film maker Errol Morris. It won an academy award for Best Documentary.

"The Fog of War" is a disturbing movie, but well worth a viewing. Essentially, Morris just lets 85-year old McNamara talk to the camera, while he shows relevant archival footage.

If you don't know McNamara's background, you will after the film. He was a Harvard professor, an executive at Ford Motor Company (the first leader not from the Ford family), Secretary of Defense from 1961-1967, and then President of the World Bank until 1981.

The Vietnam discussions are unsettling of course, but for me the most troubling parts of the interview addressed McNamara's time in World War II.

McNamara explains how the U.S. bombed and burned something like 65 Japanese cities before the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over half the civilian populations of those cities. In Tokyo, the best known firebombing, an estimated 100,000 people were killed in one night as the city burned.

As it happens, I spent the day working on a paper about the Bush doctrine, which addresses threats from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists or rogue states.

The World War II memories put current concerns in a different context. Conventional bombings can be quite devastating in their own right -- and war is a very blunt instrument for pursuing national security goals.

I've seen McNamara speak twice, once in 1987 or 1988 at Stanford, when he primarily talked about missile defense (if I recall correctly) and once a couple of years ago (post 9/11) when he discussed militarization, war and disarmament. Later that night, I had dinner with him and a few other faculty and students.

Maybe I'll blog more about that night some other time.

Meanwhile, see "The Fog of War."

Post-war Planning: "To Be Provided"

This is quite disturbing, but relatively well-known now:

[A] Knight Ridder review of the Bush administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that the president and many of his advisers ignored repeated warnings that rebuilding Iraq would be harder than ousting Hussein, committed less than two-thirds of the troops the military originally requested to secure Iraq, tossed out years of planning about how to rebuild Iraq and thought pro-American Iraqi exiles could quickly pick up the pieces.

In other words, reporters Warren Strobel and John Walcott have another excellent national security story for readers of Knight-Ridder newspapers, "Winning war vs. winning peace."

The Bush administration never provided a plan for postwar Iraq, nor did it provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

In fact, some senior Pentagon officials had thought they could bring most American soldiers home from Iraq by September 2003. Instead, more than a year later, 138,000 U.S. troops are still fighting terrorists who slip easily across Iraq's long borders, diehards from the old regime and Iraqis angered by their country's widespread crime and unemployment and America's sometimes heavy boots.

"We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory," said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy.

Their reporting seems to be about as fully informed as it could be, given that this is a security issue inflamed by partisanship.

This report is based on official documents and on interviews with more than three dozen current and former civilian and military officials who participated directly in planning for the war and its aftermath. Most still support the decision to go to war but say many of the subsequent problems could have been avoided.

Some senior officials spoke up about their concerns for the first time for this report. President Bush and top officials in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office didn't respond to repeated requests for interviews....Every effort was made to get those who were interviewed to speak for the record, but many officials requested anonymity.

The report blames US failings in Iraq on similar problems that quite apparently distorted the case for war in the first place: wishful thinking, reliance upon untruthful Iraqi exiles, and contempt for dissent.

That's not the way to conduct a debate.

The reporters make clear that there was much, much less internal dissent about the need to plan for post-war Iraq and the difficulty of the task. They cite a public War College report and note the existence of numerous intelligence reports from various agencies (DIA, CIA, etc.).

Some internal experts have expressed criticism on the record:

Longstanding Army doctrine calls for beginning reconstruction in freed areas of a country while fighting rages elsewhere. It also calls for a shift in military forces from combat troops to civil affairs, military police and the like.

"Unfortunately, this did not occur despite clear guidance to the contrary," Army Col. Paul F. Dicker wrote in an assessment.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks emerge as McNamara-like micromanaging technocrats -- and that's not a good thing in the post-Vietnam era:

...three top officials who served with Franks at the time said the plan was the product of a lengthy and sometimes heated negotiation between Central Command and the Pentagon in which Rumsfeld constantly pressed Franks and other senior officers to commit fewer troops to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Central Command originally proposed a force of 380,000 to attack and occupy Iraq. Bush and his top advisers approved the 250,000 troops the commanders requested to launch the invasion. But additional troops that the military wanted to secure Iraq after Hussein's regime fell were either delayed or never sent.

Four senior officers who were directly involved said Rumsfeld and Franks micromanaged the complex process of deciding when and how the troops and their equipment would be sent to Iraq, called the Time-Phased Force and Deployment Data, canceling some units, rescheduling others and even moving equipment from one ship to another.

As a result, two Army divisions that Centcom wanted to help secure the country were delayed, and a third, the 1st Cavalry from Fort Hood, Texas, fell so far behind schedule that Franks and Rumsfeld dropped it from the plan.

Civilian officials in the Pentagon were so convinced that these "follow-on forces" -wouldn't be needed that they thought they could withdraw 50,000 troops from Iraq in June 2003; 50,000 more in July; and a final 50,000 in August. By September 2003, Rumsfeld and his aides thought, there would be very few U.S. troops left in Iraq.

I hope this story has some legs.

It's time for some public accountability.