Well, none of my history teachers would even talk about Vietnam, so I can't blame him. However, most of what I know about Vietnam has been picked up from movies and talking to people who were alive and conscious during the era or were even there. I guess the idea was to fight Communism, but it turns out that the main reason for an escalation of US involvement in Vietnam in 1964 never happened.
Seems the NSA released some documents on the Gulf of Tonkin that provide no evidence of an attack on US ships. Here's a clip from [http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-tonkin02.html|an article] at SunTimes.com from AP.org:
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.
The mishandling of intercepted communications 41 years earlier is blamed in the National Security Agency paper for giving President Johnson carte blanche in the conflict.
...
Among the documents is an article written by one of the agency's historians for its classified publication, Cryptologic Quarterly, declaring that his review of the complete intelligence shows beyond doubt ''no attack happened that night.''
Imagine how different the world would have been if, America hadn't sent more troops to Vietnam in '64 and beyond. Imagine how many more Americans would be alive and how many of them would have gone on to have families.
I'm not saying being President is easy. I'm saying the opposite. Be careful when you go to war because you go to war with the intelligence you have, not the intelligence you'd like.
What this also points out to me is how incredibly flawed the US Government really is. If they screwed up so royally on Iraq and before it Vietnam, I wonder what else they've royally fucked up on. When it comes to killing our enemies and our own, there should be no wishful thinking--no filling in the intelligence-blanks. If it means Americans die because we don't assume the worst, then so be it.
We cannot live our lives with the attitude of "thank God it's them and not us."
On a side note, the article I quote above has been removed from SunTimes.com. The article is dated December 2, 2005. I couldn't even find it using their search engine. Isn't it great when our news sources have a memory of no more than three weeks? Sheesh. Good thing I pulled up the article a couple days ago before they erased it from existence (good thing my Mac hardly ever crashes, too).
From AP.org and Suntimes.com:
2nd attack in Gulf of Tonkin never occurred, analysis says
December 2, 2005
BY CALVIN WOODWARD
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.
The mishandling of intercepted communications 41 years earlier is blamed in the National Security Agency paper for giving President Johnson carte blanche in the conflict.
The agency put out more than 140 long-secret documents in response to requests from researchers trying to get to the bottom of an episode that unfolded in the South China Sea on Aug. 4, 1964, and has been disputed since.
Researcher compares it to Iraq
Among the documents is an article written by one of the agency's historians for its classified publication, Cryptologic Quarterly, declaring that his review of the complete intelligence shows beyond doubt ''no attack happened that night.''
Claims that North Vietnamese boats attacked two warships that Aug. 4 -- just two days after an initial assault on one of those ships -- rallied Congress behind Johnson's buildup of the war. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed three days later empowered him to take ''all necessary steps'' in the region and opened the way for large-scale commitment of U.S. forces.
''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.
AP
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