Military Power

On August 2, 1964, the Maddox was conducting a "DeSoto patrol", referring to an espionage mission. The purpose of this mission was to collect intelligence on radar and coastal defenses of North Vietnam. It was this day that the North Vietnamese torpedo patrol boats attacked the Maddox. The U.S.S. Ticonderoga sent aircraft to repel the North Vietnamese attackers and sunk one boat while damaging other enemy vessels.

In an attempt to possibly lure the North Vietnamese into an engagement, both the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were in the gulf on August 4. The captain of the Maddox had read his ship’s instruments as saying that the ship was under attack or had been attacked and began an immediate retaliatory strike into the night. The two ships began firing into the night rapidly with American warplanes supporting the showcasing of the American firepower. However, the odd thing was that the captain had concluded hours later that there might not have been an actual attack. James B. Stockdale, who was a pilot of a Crusader jet, undertook a reconnaissance flight over the waters that evening and when asked if he witnessed any North Vietnamese attack vessels, Stockdale replied: "Not a one. No boats, no wakes, no ricochets [sic] off boats, no boat impacts, no torpedo wakes-nothing but black sea and American firepower."

The entire event was purposely misconstrued when presented to Congress and the public by President Johnson and his administration, and on August 7, the "Tonkin Gulf Resolution" passed, 416 to 0 by the House and 88 to 2 by the Senate. The resolution stipulated that the President of the United States could "take all necessary measures to repel armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."

This was what led to the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and became the point where the U.S. made a large commitment. By July of 1965, the U.S. would have 80,000 troops mobilized and operating in South Vietnam. This opened the door to the eventual peak of some 543,000 troops by early 1969, including the dropping of 400 tons of bombs and ordnance per day. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a significant event in the fact that it opened the door to one of the most vivid and memorable wars in modern day history.



U.S.S.Maddox

Published on Friday, December 2, 2005 by the New York Times:

WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency has released hundreds of pages of long-secret documents on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which played a critical role in significantly expanding the American commitment to the Vietnam War.

The material, posted on the Internet overnight Wednesday, included one of the largest collections of secret intercepted communications ever made available. The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian argued that the agency's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the evidence passed on to policy makers and the public to falsely suggest that North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.

Based on the assertion that such an attack had occurred, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered airstrikes on North Vietnam and Congress passed a broad resolution authorizing military action.

Read the whole story here.

And from a 2001 NY Times release:

A new book examining secret tapes President Lyndon B. Johnson made in the early days of the Vietnam War show that only weeks after Congress gave him the authority to pursue the war in 1964, he privately acknowledged that the incident that inspired the resolution probably never happened.

"When we got through with all the firing," Johnson said ruefully to his secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara, "we concluded maybe they hadn't fired at all."

Johnson was referring to the purorted attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on two United States destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In fact, the judgment of history is that the attack ‹ which through the subsequent Gulf of Tonkin resolution provided the basis for American escalation of the war throughout the rest of Johnson's presidency ‹ was a false alarm.

The conversation came from the latest batch of secret tape recordings Johnson made in the White House, which form the centerpiece of a new book, "Reaching for Glory," edited by the presidential historian Michael Beschloss, and to be published on Tuesday by Simon & Schuster.

You can read the rest of this story here.

Another account of the tapes can be found here.

And yet another site is quoted:

It was later revealed that the federal government had drafted the Tonkin Gulf Resolution fully six months before the attacks on the U.S. vessels occurred. It was also revealed that the United States provoked the attack by assisting the South Vietnamese in mounting clandestine military attacks against the North Vietnamese. Although the two U.S. vessels attacked were actually on intelligence-gathering missions, the North Vietnamese could not distinguish them from the South Vietnamese raiding ships. Johnson had also exaggerated the gravity of the attack itself, which did not harm either of the ships.

For some reason I don't recall the media giving the release of these documents and finding much coverage. Many compare the WMD excuse anf bad intell used to justify the conflict in Iraq with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. There is now questions as to whether the events of August 4, 1964 ever happened. We may never really know the truth. But it did leave th the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam. Militarily, we won the war. In almost all accounts, we were victorious in all major battles (including the Tet Offensive), however, politically it was a devastating defeat. Americans have lost the will to fight for freedom and can no longer stomach war. If we are not careful our efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terrorism could result in a disastrous defeat leaving every American everywhere at risk.

As you mentioned, this sounds a whole lot like what people are claiming Bush did to get us into Iraq.

Goliath wrote:As you mentioned, this sounds a whole lot like what people are claiming Bush did to get us into Iraq.

You mean claiming Iraq had WMDs when there weren't any and Fabricating information like Johnson did?