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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On the Duck

Earlier today, I blogged "Diversion dangers" over at the Duck of Minerva. The post discusses Anne-Marie Slaughter's concern that the Bush administration might attack Iran in part to help a Republican win the White House in 2008.

On Monday, August 6, I posted "Acting Chair" about my new role in the Political Science Department at University of Louisville.


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Diversionary tactics

Are you familiar with the "diversionary theory of war"? Prof. William D. Baker, though skeptical of the phenomenon, nonetheless provides a succinct description:

...the diversionary theory of war posits that such internal domestic factors as presidential approval, election cycles, and the state of the economy may affect decisions to employ force... The popular presumption that presidents will turn to military adventurism to divert attention from dismal economic conditions, faltering popularity ratings or pending electoral misfortune is well represented both historically and in the mainstream media...

In recent decades, leaders as diverse as Argentine's 1982 junta leader Lieutenant General Leopoldo Galtieri, George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton have been accused of boosting their political standing by engaging or escalating military conflict with other states.

In the case of the Bush administration, however, a foreign war has created a domestic calamity -- Iraq has "shattered" the President's popularity.

As revealed in his May 18 interview with NBC's David Gregory, even the President knows "that’s what colors everybody’s vision, it seems like. People are worried about Iraq."

Given this political context, the future of the Bush administration may depend upon the American people forgetting about Iraq (and, and...just where was that other war? Oh, yes, Afghanistan).

One alternative might be war with Iran: a new diversionary war.

Then again, the administration seems committed to diplomacy (at least for now) and a war would be quite risky, for a number of important reasons.

Another alternative is to reframe various policies as part of the "war on terror" rather than the war in Iraq. This is the strategy that helped save Bush in 2004.

Interestingly, the nomination of Mike Hayden to head CIA helps distract attention away from Iraq and Afghanistan. Any time the public focuses on the "war on terrorism," rather than the hot wars abroad, Bush wins. In Hayden's confirmation hearings, he even suggested that the CIA needs to shift its attention away from these wars. William Arkin of the Post:

The intelligence community, Hayden said, was too focused on the immediate and not enough looking to the future. It was an ever so subtle criticism of a core Bush administration position that Iraq and Afghanistan are THE fronts in the war on terrorism. We may have made them that, Hayden seemed to be saying, but throwing the preponderance of resources into these battles merely perpetuates a culture of satisfying immediate needs while neglecting a longer term and broader view of the challenges posed by radical Islam.

These various tactics may be working. Iraq is often bumped to the back pages of the newspapers or out of prime time television, stories lack context, and just about everyone seems to agree that Americans aren't getting the full story about Iraq. Various media outlets are now overtly listening to critics in and out of the administration who want to see the sunny side of Iraq.

And, you know, neither the war in Iraq nor the nation's rebuilding is going all that well.

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Filed as: Iraq