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Paul Merrell

How LBJ Was Deceived on Gulf of Tonkin. War Pretext Incident to Justify Vietnam War | G... - 0 views

  • For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam on Aug. 4, 1964, in retaliation for an alleged naval attack that never happened — and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that followed was not a move by LBJ to get the American people to support a U.S. war in Vietnam. The real deception on that day was that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s misled LBJ by withholding from him the information that the U.S. commander in the Gulf — who had initially reported an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on U.S. warships — had later expressed serious doubts about the initial report and was calling for a full investigation by daylight. That withholding of information from LBJ represented a brazen move to usurp the President’s constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.
  • McNamara’s deception is documented in the declassified files on the Tonkin Gulf episode in the Lyndon Johnson library, which this writer used to piece together the untold story of the Tonkin Gulf episode in a 2005 book on the U.S. entry into war in Vietnam. It is a key element of a wider story of how the national security state, including both military and civilian officials, tried repeatedly to pressure LBJ to commit the United States to a wider  war in Vietnam.
  • The deeper lesson of the Tonkin Gulf episode is how a group of senior national security officials can seek determinedly through hardball – and even illicit – tactics to advance a war agenda, even knowing that the President of the United States is resisting it.
Paul Merrell

Lessons from Tonkin « LobeLog.com - 0 views

  • Exactly 50 years ago today, I was working in the Lyndon Johnson White House, on the domestic side — mostly on education and other aspects of the Great Society, as deputy to Douglass Cater, one of the giants of the trade. I was 24, though with two years of foreign policy under my belt, as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics. I cite my tyro status only as partial exculpation for not foretelling the tragedy that was about to ensue for the United States as it became more deeply embroiled in a conflict, to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, “in a far-away country between peoples of whom we know nothing.” A half-century ago, I read in my White House office the press release just put out by the White House that spoke of an attack by North Vietnam on two US destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, in a place called the Tonkin Gulf. From that point on, to use a common but in retrospect bitter phrase, “we were off to the races.” The Tonkin Gulf Resolution — technically the Southeast Asia Resolution — followed, and the US became mired in a conflict the purposes of which are still being debated. But as a White House staff person with top-secret security clearance, I had an advantage over the average American. Rummaging through the files after I joined the staff in July 1964, I came across a draft that had been sitting there for some time which, with emendations, became — you guessed it — the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Ready to be used, just waiting for an “incident” to set it in motion.
  • It is now generally understood that the “attack” on the two US destroyers was likely a radar blip and the “fog-of-not-quite-war,” and that, in any event, the US had been engaged in provocative naval actions against North Vietnam.
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    Adds to the historical record the new fact that what became the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been drafted long before the incident. 
Paul Merrell

After almost 13 years, it's time to end Congress' blanket authorization of force | Wash... - 0 views

  • t may sound hard to believe, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., isn't always wrong -- at least when he states the obvious: “9/11 is a long time ago,” he said Wednesday, “and it's something that needs to be looked at again.” The “it” is the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution, or AUMF, adopted three days after the terror attacks, and now going on its lucky 13th year. It's been in effect nearly twice as long as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing Vietnam, what was “America's Longest War” -- until the 21st century, that is.
  • On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress authorized the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and those who “harbored” them. Two successive administrations have since turned the 60 words of the AUMF's operative clause into what journalist Gregory Johnsen calls “the most dangerous sentence in U.S. history” -- a writ for a war without temporal or spatial limits. The last time the Senate held hearings on the AUMF, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked the Pentagon's civilian special operations chief, Michael Sheehan, “does [the president] have the authority to put boots on the ground in the Congo?” Answer: “Yes, sir, he does.” Predictably, the hawkish Graham was totally okay with that. “The battlefield is wherever the enemy chooses to make it,” right? Right, said Sheehan: “from Boston to the [Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan]."
  • Asked how much longer the war on terrorism will last, Sheehan replied, “at least 10 to 20 years.” So presumably the AUMF can serve as the basis for Chelsea Clinton's “kill list” in 2033, after she trounces George P. Bush. Lyndon Johnson once compared the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to “Grandma’s nightshirt” because “it covers everything.” Even LBJ might have marveled at how the last two administrations have stretched the post-9/11 AUMF. Under the theory that “the United States is a battlefield in the war on terror,” the Bush administration invoked it to justify warrantless wiretapping and military detention of American citizens on American soil. The Obama administration cites it as legal authority for the extrajudicial killing of Americans via remote-control.
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  • The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be taking another look at the AUMF this week. The hearing's title, “Authorization For Use Of Military Force After Iraq And Afghanistan,” hints at a preordained conclusion: that an updated authorization is needed. Ranking Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee wants to be sure the executive branch has “all the tools and capabilities” it needs to address “threats that did not exist in 2001.” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the sole member of Congress to vote “no” on the original AUMF, has a better idea: end it, don't mend it. Joined by libertarian-leaning, antiwar Republicans like Reps. Justin Amash and Walter Jones, she's introduced legislation to repeal the AUMF. Two imperial presidents in a row have treated that authorization like a permanent delegation of congressional war power to the president. Their successors would no doubt do the same with any new “tools and capabilities” they’re given.
  • Without the AUMF, presidents still retain the constitutional power to “repel sudden attacks,” as James Madison put it. And if they think groups like al-Shabaab or Boko Haram demand a more sustained military response, they'll be free to make that case to Congress. But delegating new authorities in advance might permanently change our constitutional default setting from peace to war. Madison also said that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” We're now into our second decade running that experiment; how much longer do we want to risk proving him right?
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    I looked at Barbara Lee's bill. It requires a report from the Executive on all actions currently undertaken pursuant to the AUMF and requires that each action identified be terminated 60 days after the report unless Congress reauthorizes the action. It also repeals the AUMF. It's a good approach, but should require a sunset provision for each re-authorization so the Executive is blocked from maintaining us in a perpetual state of war as it has done with the AUMF itself. We're a long way from 9/11 and we are now fighting multiple wars in multiple nations against organizations that had nothing to do with 9/112, ostensibly to retaliate against those responsible for 9/11. No more open ended authorizations for war. 
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