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« Kadima Platform Emerges | Main | American Jews & Israel: A Vicious Circle »

The Time Warp Continues

For the AP, there's never a lost opportunity to turn Iraq into Vietnam. Now, Saddam's WMDs are the same thing as the Gulf of Tonkin, only worse:

WASHINGTON - A spy-agency analysis released Thursday contends a second attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin never happened, casting further doubt on the leading rationale for escalation of the Vietnam War.

Much as faulty U.S. intelligence preceded the invasion of Iraq, the mishandling of intercepted communications 40 years earlier is blamed in the National Security Agency paper for giving President Johnson carte blanche in the conflict.

There's more than one parallel here, and it goes to the blinders the AP is wearing when it reports on either war. The idea that America was going to go to war over the Gulf of Tonkin alone is absurd. Unless there was a much more serious threat, like the notion that Communists were going to overrun southeast Asia (which they did), a couple of bullet holes in the side of a ship weren't going to goad this country into a 10-year, 500,000-man commitment half a world away.

Lkewise, the AP assumes that the sole rationale for invading Iraq was WMDs. In fact, the administration made a much broader case for war, including known cooperation with al Qaeda (although not on September 11), known support of terrorism, plotting to subvert and eventually repeal sanctions, and that little matter of shooting at our planes.

In fact, this is part of a deliberate leftist strategy to turn Iraq into Vietnam, winning the war on the ground while undermining it at home.

"The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq war make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new evidence," said researcher John Prados.

Prados is a specialist on the Gulf of Tonkin at George Washington University's National Security Archive, which is not affiliated with the National Security Agency, and which pressed for release of the documents through Freedom of Information requests and other means.

Prados has done a fair amount of historical research on Vietnam, which I'm certainly not qualified to judge. I will, however, point to this article in which he claims that the Winter Soldier Dog & Pony Show hasn't been discredited.

More importantly, Prados has been peddling the "manipulated intelligence" line for some time now, with several articles and a book out on the subject. He obviously believes that focusing attention of the Gulf of Tonkin right now is a good way to further embed the Iraq=Vietnam meme in the public mind.

At the same time, Prados isn't completely nuts. He does have some useful questions about the nature of the Iraqi resistance - he believes, plausible enough, that the insurgency is really a diverse set of guerilla groups with the common goal of defeating us.

Still, when a guy has a vested interest in pushing historical parallels to his current conspiracy theory, which just also happens to be the subject of his not-so-bestselling book, you'd expect the reporter to point those out.

Unless he's antiwar. And unless it's the AP.

Comments

Well said Joshua. Hope you have a great Sabbath with your family.
The Vietnamization of this war really really bothers me. Especially if its by some professor who still believes the "winter soldier investigation" still might be factual!
The WMD argument was the only one the left seems to have heard. There were lots of reasons, one of the main ones to me was the little matter of the Hussein family financing suicide bombers in Israel.
The two wars have little in common, but the one difference that sticks out most to me is our boys are volunteering to go back to Iraq! I wonder how many did that in Vietnam.

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  booklist

Power, Faith, and Fantasy


Six Days of War


An Army of Davids


Learning to Read Midrash


Size Matters


Deals From Hell


A War Like No Other


Winning


A Civil War


Supreme Command


The (Mis)Behavior of Markets


The Wisdom of Crowds


Inventing Money


When Genius Failed


Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking


Back in Action : An American Soldier's Story of Courage, Faith and Fortitude


How Would You Move Mt. Fuji?


Good to Great


Built to Last


Financial Fine Print


The Day the Universe Changed


Blog


The Multiple Identities of the Middle-East


The Case for Democracy


A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam


The Italians


Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory


Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures


Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud