Vietnam Kickoff

I've got something to share tonight. I'm at a part in my current book that I have wondered about for some time. I have been meaning to research the origin of the Vietnam conflict – I wanted to know how we got involved and what we wanted to get done over there. Part of my line of questions was answered this evening as I was reading. I don't care how long this gets or whether I violate copyrights; I want people to read this.

I might need to establish that Robert S. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Just before the U.S. got involved in the Vietnam bloodbath, we were spying on them, according to the book I'm reading. Apparently we had a destroyer (the USS Maddox) with a listening device on it in the Gulf of Tonkin that intercepted messages transmitted by the Vietnamese. They were chased away on August 2, 1964 by PT boats armed with torpedoes. They were fired upon at that time, but the Maddox was too fast for the chasers.

On August 4, “...an analyst at NSA received intercepts indicating that another attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin was imminent.” This message was sent to the Maddox. Later, there were “...reports of automatic weapons fire, torpedo attacks, and other hostile action” from three unidentified vessels. It was dark. “'Freak radar echoes,' McNamara was told, were misinterpreted by 'young fellows' manning the sonar, who are apt to say any noise is a torpedo.'” I could understand that. One sees what he wants to see, like Percival Lowell who “saw” canals on Mars and swore they were artificial, built by the inhabitants of the planet. His telescope was shitty. Back to the point: they thought they heard torpedoes. They really didn't. From page 299:

Nevertheless, regardless of the doubts raised by talk of 'radar ghosts' and 'nervousness,' in testimony before Congress McNamara spoke of 'unequivocal proof' of the new attack. That 'unequivocal proof' consisted of the highly secret NSA intercept reports sent to the Maddox on August 4 as a warning. Based largely on McNamara's claims of certainty, both houses of Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, thus plunging the United States officially into the open-ended quagmire known as the Vietnam War.

But it turned out that that 'unequivocal proof' was the result of a major blunder by NSA, and the 'hard evidence' on which many people based their votes for the war never really existed. Years later Louis Tordella quietly admitted that the intercepts NSA used as the basis for its August 4 warning messages to the Maddox actually referred to the first attack, on August 2. There never were any intercepts indicating an impending second attack on August 4. The phony NSA warning led to McNamara's convincing testimony, which then led to the congressional vote authorizing the Vietnam War.

'What in effect happened,' said Ray S. Cline, who was CIA's deputy director for intelligence at the time, 'is that somebody from the Pentagon, I suppose it was McNamara, had taken over raw Sigint and [had] shown the President what they thought was evidence of a second attack on a [U.S.] naval vessel. And it was just what Johnson was looking for.' Cline added, 'Everybody was demanding the Sigint; they wanted it quick, they didn't want anybody to take any time to analyze it.' Finally , he said, 'I became very sure that that attack [on August 4] did not take place.'

According to this text, this is how and why we got involved in Vietnam. Does it sound vaguely familiar to anything related to the current situation and how we got there? After reading what they tried to get on in Cuba (mentioned in this post), I'm starting to believe that at any given time, at least one person in the President's cabinet is a crook, and the rest are full of shit.

It looks like every war is started by hatred. A hatred of some culture or belief brews in someone with power until that person finds a good reason to act upon it, even if they have to make shit up.

I take that back. Some wars have been sparked on greed. In that case, more garbage is made up and we all (soldiers, I mean, not politicians or their kids) go to fight for something, whatever it happens to be.

Sorry, I don't know where I was going with that. More from pages 299-300:

“A quarter of a century earlier, confusion in Washington over Sigint warning messages resulted in calm at Pearl Harbor when there should have been action. Now, confusion over Sigint warning messages in Washington led to action in the Gulf of Tonkin when there should have been calm. In both cases a long, difficult pass was successfully intercepted, only for the players in Washington to fumble a few feet from the goal line.

I'm only going off what this book says. Feel free to comment if you know more or can provide some context. This book is fairly narrow-minded since it only covers every event from the NSA perspective. The politics and history behind the Vietnam conflict are not discussed.