From the Gulf of Tonkin to the Strait of Hormuz
Matt Sullivan
To anyone old enough to remember the Vietnam War, the similarities between the recent Iranian speedboat encounter and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident are hard to miss. The Navy claimed, in August 1964, that the destroyer Maddox had come under attack by small North Vietnamese gunboats. This “confrontation” was seized upon by war hawks in the Johnson administration and used as the justification for “The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”, a dramatic escalation of hostilities in southeast Asia. There’s only one problem with the Tonkin incident—it never happened.
It’s been suspected for many years that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a fraud, but official acknowledgement has been a long time coming. In October 2005, the New York Times reported that Robert J. Hanyok, a historian for the U.S. National Security Agency, had concluded that the NSA deliberately distorted the intelligence reports that it had passed on to policy-makers regarding the incident. A full report was released in January 2008 by the National Security Agency and published by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
“It’s a dramatic reversal of the historical record” FAS said in a statement; “[The report] demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was ‘unimpeachable,’ but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that no attack happened that night.”
In the recent Iranian gunboat encounter we are presented with a very similar set of alleged circumstances. We have huge American warships encountering much smaller enemy watercraft on international waters. And we have an administration looking for any provocation to justify an attack. But this time there are differences.
There is a lot more skepticism among the American public of administration intentions as a result of the WMD fiasco and other deceptions. While FOX News and CNN tried to play up the event, complete with video mash-up containing ominous voice-over; “I’m coming at you and you will blow up in a couple of minutes.” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the Iranian boats were operating at “distances and speeds that showed reckless and dangerous intent – reckless, dangerous and potentially hostile intent.”
But the American public just wasn’t buying it.
Also different this time; Iran was able to counter with their own videos of the event released on YouTube and Al Jazeera. By week’s end, the administration and the networks were seriously backpedaling. The Navy has now distanced itself from any claims that the warships were ever threatened. The mysterious ominous voice is now being blamed on someone playing pranks over the marine radio channel.
Apparently the American public learned the lesson from the Gulf of Tonkin incident after all.