The lesson I've learned? Fifty years of war lies are enough.
"50 years after Tonkin, which lessons to draw?" by Peter S. Canellos | August 03, 2014
The Vietnam War began, fatefully, with an almost unanimous vote of Congress, based on sketchy, and ultimately incorrect, information. Fifty years ago this week, a Navy destroyer, the USS Maddox, was patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin when three North Vietnamese torpedo boats approached. The ships exchanged fire, with no hits. Two days later, the Maddox and another destroyer reported again being under attack, and fired at the shore.
President Lyndon Johnson, in the midst of his civil rights initiative, worried about political pressure from military hawks. A week earlier, Barry Goldwater had accepted the 1964 Republican presidential nomination with a fiery anti-communist speech. Aggressive action against communist North Vietnam would neutralize Goldwater’s campaign. But it was based on hazy information.
While the administration insisted there had been two attacks, there were doubts within the military. The National Security Agency later determined there was no second attack. Plus, the administration declined to reveal that the Maddox was on an intelligence mission, aiding South Vietnam against the North. An uninquisitive Congress, however, granted overwhelming approval.
The war caused more than 58,000 US deaths and many times that many Vietnamese deaths, without preventing a North Vietnamese victory. Now, as new hotspots emerge around the world, the United States faces more and more questions about when and how to intervene. So, what lessons does the infamous Tonkin Gulf Resolution hold for today’s policymakers?
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"‘Do something’ groupthink took fateful toll" by Andrew J. Bacevich | August 03, 2014
The further the Vietnam War recedes into the past, the more preposterous it becomes. How could Americans have allowed President Lyndon Johnson to drag the United States into such a needless and futile struggle? Sending hundreds of thousands of US troops to fight in Southeast Asia turned out to be a monumental blunder. Was there no one in a position of influence or authority who could see that at the time? Where were the voices of sanity and reason?
Fifty years ago this month, in August 1964, Johnson offered the sane and reasonable a chance to make their case. What followed was a stupefying demonstration of groupthink. The guardians of conventional wisdom in the United States — its leading public officials and its major news outlets — all but automatically accepted the premise that the United States could, and should, determine the course of events in faraway Vietnam.
Think Iraq, 2003, and look at the world now and you know AmeriKa's leaders have learned nothing.
Citing alleged North Vietnamese attacks on US warships on Aug. 2 and 4, the president had requested congressional authorization “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force” to defend our South Vietnamese ally and thereby “prevent further aggression.” Unpack the language and Johnson was in effect asking Congress to declare war.
He also famously made the comment that our guys were shooting at flying fish. That is what is so mind-boggling. After the outrageously open lie has been exposed Americans have allowed their government time and again to wage war with its approval.
Related: LBJ Overshadows MLK
Goes without saying.
In what became known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the Congress promptly complied. In the House of Representatives, the vote was 416-0. In the Senate, it was 88 to 2, with Alaska’s Ernest Gruening and Oregon’s Wayne Morse, both of the president’s own party, the sole dissenters.
Related:
"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."
Said by the man who would have gotten us out of Vietnam (as blog editor feels a tear on his cheek).
And look what I'm reading.
Some of those voting aye had their doubts, but these they duly suppressed. As Senator George Aiken, Republican of Vermont, put it, “As a citizen, I feel I must support our president whether his decision is right or wrong.” This was especially true when it came to standing up to communism.
I couldn't do that then or now. It borders on if not being actual dictatorship. That has never done the world good.
The nation’s leading newspapers concurred with Aiken. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution found great favor with the Washington Post, which complimented legislators for “responding with commendable promptness and an almost unanimous voice.” Notwithstanding, “the reckless and querulous dissent of Senator Morse,” the overall effect was “to demonstrate before the world the unity of the American people in resisting Communist aggression.”
Really no surprise anymore.
The Boston Globe likewise framed the issue in terms of justifiable defense. “Like a blackmailer, an aggressor will keep seeking more if he finds his crime brings benefits,” a Globe editorial observed. “Only when aggression is challenged can it be leashed, and, in future, deterred.” As the Globe saw it, ever since World War II the United States had been “painfully trying to indoctrinate the world with these elementary facts.” The Tonkin Gulf Resolution reaffirmed this ongoing American effort to educate the obdurate.
For shame, Globe -- and why did Wall Street bankers and Israel just cross my mind.
The New York Times shared this assessment. According to a Times editorial, President Johnson had “demonstrated his own capacity for toughness. And the Communists have been left in no doubt about American determination.” Toughness and determination, the Times believed, positioned the United States to bring peace to Vietnam.
I gave up on them long ago, and it is no surprise to see that they were again among the cheerleaders for war.
Given the horrors that ensued, how can we explain this misplaced docility? On the Senate floor, Morse declared — accurately — that “we have been making covert war in Southeast Asia for some time instead of seeking to keep the peace.” Yet most members of Congress and newspaper editorial boards alike accepted at face value the Johnson administration’s version of what had happened in the Tonkin Gulf.
Reading this and the lesson learned is nothing has changed in 50 years, and it in fact has gotten much, much worse when you consider the incestuous collusion between media and government.
Similarly, they lazily concurred in the reflexive tendency to see events in Vietnam as the product of a monolithic Communist conspiracy.
Now it is "Islamist!" You know, the groups the CIA helped create!
In fact, the monolith — if it ever existed — had already succumbed to the Sino-Soviet dispute. Yet acknowledging the existence of that dispute would have made it necessary to rethink the entire Cold War.
And we can't revisit conventional and mythical narratives that will expose those who gained from such events and who control the curriculums and media outlets that form the collective searing of the memory with occasional stimuli to conjure up terrible imagery if needed to advance the agenda once again.
It takes gumption to question truths that everyone “knows” to be true.
(Blog editor gets water-eyed again. It's been eight long, long years and it is nothing if not worse when it comes to the propaganda pre$$. Hopelessly incorrigible, and why wouldn't they be? They aren't going to commit suicide; they will just destroy themselves)
In the summer of 1964, gumption was in short supply. As a direct consequence, 58,000 Americans died, along with a vastly larger number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.
It was MILLIONS of those "folks," to the shame of us all. I'm not responsible personally, but I'm part of this planet.
After 9/11, similar mistakes — deference to the official line and to the conventional wisdom (“terrorism” standing in for communism) — recurred, this time with even less justification. The misbegotten Iraq war was one result. Yet even today, events in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere elicit an urge to “do something,” accompanied by the conviction that unless troops are moving or bombs dropping the United States is somehow evading its assigned responsibilities. The question must be asked: Are Americans incapable of learning?
It's leaders and political cla$$ are. The people turned around long ago.
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If they would only have listened to us:
"When domestic upheaval erupts, listen to it" by James Carroll | August 03, 2014
Unless it is Occupy. Then bash 'em in the face!
If the 1960s can be said to have ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon in August of 1974, then that defining American epoch essentially began a decade earlier, almost to the day, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Throughout 1964, elements of a distinctive culture of “youth” had been falling into place. The Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Berkeley-based Free Speech Movement, the music-transforming invention of the cassette tape, the Civil Rights Act, the Beatles’ world tour, the War on Poverty, the Warren Commission Report, the Second Vatican Council, the pill-based rise of feminism, a “riot” in Philadelphia’s inner city — such were the trend-setting events that gave rise just then to a new counter-establishment that stamps American style, ideology, and politics to this day. But no echo of the ’60s still resounds more than Tonkin, because of what it eventually came to justify: the nation’s soul-destroying skepticism toward its own government.
At the time, few Americans had reason to disbelieve Lyndon Johnson when he told us that innocent US naval vessels had been attacked in the high seas, a Communist provocation that could not go unmet. Only weeks before, the supremely hawkish Barry Goldwater had been nominated as the Republican candidate for president. Compared with him, Lyndon Johnson was a man of peace. If he said the United States had been attacked by North Vietnam, an unsuspecting nation could be grateful that the necessary reply would be prudent and measured.
Little more than six months later, Johnson had launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive air war against North Vietnam, and hundreds of thousands of young Americans were being forced into the line of fire in Southeast Asia. That the peace candidate turned out to be a warmonger was shocking, but that the inciting incident in the Gulf of Tonkin turned out to have been falsely characterized was transforming. Had they not felt betrayed, the young Americans of the ’60s might have exhausted their eccentric impulses in apolitical matters of style and personal behavior — LSD, bell-bottoms, folk-rock, long hair on men, short skirts on women. But all of that abruptly took on a political meaning when government justifications for the uncorked violence in Vietnam were taken to be lies. The young were the first to know that almost nothing of what Johnson had said about the Tonkin Gulf was true. The “credibility gap” was born.
The sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll — the ’60s — became a way of saying no. That’s all. Vietnam changed the character of what might, without the war, have been a passing set of fads, with little or no deeper meaning. With the war, though, the flower children became radicals, a mundane rite of passage became a social revolution, the ideal of the citizen soldier was permanently trashed, and a proper contempt for government deceit became a generational habit of civic cynicism. If an enemy had sought to do all this to the United States, it would indeed have been mortal. But as it was, in Tonkin Gulf that August, our own desire for such an enemy was the only real enemy we had.
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That's coming from the "left-liberal-hippie" of the Globe's op-ed page.
This next guy has a point regarding American culture:
"Anti-Asian stereotypes helped dubious incident lead to war" by John Kuo Wei Tchen | August 03, 2014
It is true that America, nay AmeriKa, has always treated the "yellow man" as subhuman, from the building of the railroads to the concentration camps for Japanese during WWII -- and beyond, to the most horrible thing that has yet happened on this planet.
(Waterworks again. This old man is losing it)
Frank Sinatra was having violent recurring nightmares. His sergeant, with icy brutality, strangles a fellow soldier in front of amused Oriental officers. Sinatra feels he’s going crazy until he finds another platoon member also having these sleep terrors. Sinatra realizes they’ve all been the subject of some insidious brainwashing in a commie plot to have the now Medal of Honor-decorated sergeant (Laurence Harvey) become an unwitting assassin of a presidential candidate.
Film buffs know this is a scene from the brilliant, paranoid 1962 John Frankenheimer film “The Manchurian Candidate.” Released at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, less than a year before President Kennedy was assassinated, the successful film play-acted a recurrent script of US political culture: A yellow peril, in one variant or another, was out to get Americans and America.
Manchurian candidates, JFK assassination, is this guy ever getting close to the nerves of truth in this world!
How could Americans believe Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, about the Gulf of Tonkin “incident”? This was before Watergate; the word of the president was still sacrosanct. But just as important, American culture was saturated with Orientalphobia, a variant of what historian Richard Hofstader, in a famous 1964 essay providing a deep context for McCarthyism, called the “paranoid style of American politics.” The evil “yellow genius” had long been a fixture of Anglo-American commercial culture. The fabulous Boris Karloff in “The Mask of Fu Manchu” (1932), with the delightful Myrna Loy as the evil one’s sexually depraved daughter,
still played as television reruns. Yellow-face actors with hokey
accents and odd demeanors regularly populated print and electronic
media, as they do today.
Such depictions were not limited to fictional characters. In 1902,
Samuel Gompers, the British-born Jewish immigrant who founded the
American Federation of Labor, argued for the permanent extension of the
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act with the pamphlet
“Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood
against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?” And the eugenics-driven
National Origins Act of 1924 still constituted US immigration law.
Now I know why Gompers makes my history books (and he was a rabid anti-Asianist racist?)!
In short, the larger racial culture predisposed voters to believe a yellow-peril war script.
Current incarnation: China
And the same culture had true believers imagining that the virile Marines would quickly prevail over short, heathen “gooks.” In hindsight, we know none of this was true at that time. We should also know that this paranoid style has not served our nation well in the half century since (WMDs, anyone?). Putting the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” into this larger historical arc helps us understand why, when stereotypes pervade the public imagination, a democratic society can be vulnerable to systemic misinformation.
It doesn't help when newspapers are giving it a shove.
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That is one of them, yup.
One more lecture to learn:
"Learn, but don’t overlearn, Vietnam’s lessons" by Nicholas Burns | Globe Columnist August 03, 2014
A half century after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution catapulted the United States head first into the tragedy of Vietnam, three lessons stand out.
First, the memory of over 58,000 American soldiers lost in that long, tortuous war compels our presidents to set the bar very high when contemplating the use of force. Vietnam tore a gaping hole in every American city and town over the sacrifice of young men sent to fight Communism in Indochina.
Second, presidents can too often see the military as a quick fix for complex international problems. Vietnam should remind us there is always the alternative of diplomacy. While negotiating with enemies to prevent war is not always possible, presidents should think diplomacy first and resort to war only when there is truly no other choice.
But, third, we can also misinterpret or overlearn the lessons of bitter wars such as Vietnam and Iraq. We become so convinced by the error of the last war that we are incapable of confronting new threats when they inevitably arise. The “Vietnam syndrome” cast a pall over American foreign policy for two decades. It made us an uncertain and hesitant power, robbing us of the self-confidence needed by the most powerful country in the world.
We may be suffering something similar today, following the bloody and divisive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we pulling back too much on the throttle of global leadership and succumbing to a new isolation from the world’s ills? The Gulf of Tonkin disaster reminds us to be wary of rushing to war. But, the world also needs a strong and purposeful America, ready to meet new challenges 50 years later.
The world fears such a thing, but arrogance can be blinding so give him a break.
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Related: The Middle East is Burnsing
Yeah, he's the former Bush administration official who wanted to invade Syria and clean up the mess. A lesson in what not to do. I suppose he will be calling for reentry into Iraq in his next column.
