The Gulf of Tonkin hoax: or was it?
I’ve noticed quite a few recent references to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that occurred during the Vietnam era. The Gulf of Tonkin is treated as though we all know the story: the government lied to get us into a war.
But did you ever wonder why you believe that was a hoax, besides the fact that it’s something “everybody knows” was a hoax? It’s based on the Pentagon Papers, right?
Did you ever read the Pentagon Papers? The actual Pentagon Papers? I discussed that topic long ago (in 2006), but I think it’s time for a repeat of some of it (unfortunately, the first link in the quote is dead):
A fascinating piece on the subject of war coverage by the MSM–both then and now–was written by James Q. Wilson and appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. Take a look at this, on the Papers:
“Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.
“In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.”
In writing this post, I went back and read a few of the comments to my earlier Vietnam essays. I happened across this one, that deals with the very subject at hand: media coverage of the Pentagon Papers:
“The NYT and WaPo reporters (Neil Sheehan, et al) who provided a highly abridged (paraphrased and quoted) version [of the Pentagon Papers] to the public of that era (’71) distorted the originals in sundry and fundamental ways in order to imply or more directly state that Pres. Johnson and others employed deceptions at critical junctures in the conflict when in fact (as stated in the original document as well as the scaled down version) they did not. A specific example (and a critical one in that era) taken from Michael Lind’s Vietnam: The Necessary War:
“The June 14, ’71 NYT edition of their edited version of the Pentagon Papers indicates Pres. Johnson had virtually concluded his decision to initiate a bombing campaign against the North by Nov. 3, 1964. (If true this would have made Johnson out to be deceitful toward the American public at an early and critical stage in the conflict.) However the Pentagon Papers itself states: “… the President was not ready to approve a program of air strikes against North Vietnam, at least until the available alternatives could be carefully and thoroughly re-examined.” That quote, reflecting November, 1964 circumstances, can be located via a search in this section of the Pentagon Papers.
“This single distortion may not appear to be dramatic in and of itself, but there were other overt and more subtle distortions in the NYT’s and WaPo’s paraphrased versions of this document. In sum they always and consistently distorted the picture in a manner which eroded Pres. Johnson’s (and others) reputation, broadly characterizing him as being willfully deceitful; that general mischaracterization is what proved to be critical at the time rather than any single aspect of the paraphrased report.”
Some of what we think we know, or are even sure we know, are things that are false – or at least have a good chance of being false. It’s pretty easy to ascertain what the Pentagon Papers actually said – just read them. Problem is, they’re long, and most people haven’t read them (and that includes me). Most people base their point of view on the summaries provided by the MSM.
You mean Neil Sheehan lied with the connivance of his editors? Wouldn’t surprise me.
Note, the chief editor of The Times at the time was A.M. Rosenthal. The paper’s slide into the gutter began when Rosenthal retired in 1986. The paper wasn’t impeccable even when he was in charge of it.
Sometimes the news media lies. Sometimes the government lies. Sometimes one tells the truth while the other lies. Sometimes both the govenment and news media lie in the same direction. But is it harder to find the truth today than it was 60 years ago? Does having easy access to far more information than in any other time in human history (whether that information is bad, good, lies or truth) make it more or less difficult to suss out the actual truth today than in the past?
neo:
I believe I found an alternate source for the James Q. Wilson quote:
–James Q. Wilson, “The Press at War: What Ever Happened to Patriotic Reporters?”
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-press-at-war/
Best wishes on the operation!
As we always find out, the deception usually is found in the press.
So it’s like the presidential daily briefing which is even now reported as proof that Bush knew the 9/11 strike was coming.(Effectively a monster to let it happen with obvious knowledge of the attacks) However if you read the actual text it pretty much reveals that the opposite was true, our intelligence services were clueless and knew nothing beyond what we knew since 98/99. (IE stuff you could have learned watching network news.)
What I’ve heard is that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident is one of those things where no one is entirely sure what happened. There’s always a question mark over what exactly happened.
And then iirc the follow-up is always that the second Tonkin incident involved an American ship that incorrectly believed itself to be under attack.
I have never heard the argument that the US provoked the response. I have read that the US Military presented an unverified incident in order to get Congressional approval. From what I have read of the Pentagon Papers, that much seems borne out…it just leaves one in a fool or knave dilemma. While I typically come down “fool” on these sorts of things, learning more about the Church Committee leads me to lean more knave than fool. A fool can hurt you through stupidity, but a knave will do it on purpose. I leave it to you to decide which assumption protects you better.
And everyone “KNOWS” that Saddam had no WMDs and the government knew it.
Oops, except for the chemical weapons and biological weapons found in Iraq (old and unstable as they were) and the nuke program that Saddam was paying for in Libya.
How much coverage did the news media give the story when Gaddafi notified us he wanted to give up the nuke program the moment that Saddam was pulled out of his hole?
Oops, except for the chemical weapons and biological weapons found in Iraq (old and unstable as they were) and the nuke program that Saddam was paying for in Libya.
stan:
I recall the NYT had the gall later to print an article criticizing the Bush administraiton for pollution resulting from destroying Iraqi chemical WMD.
Stan – “How much coverage did the news media give the story when Gaddafi notified us he wanted to give up the nuke program the moment that Saddam was pulled out of his hole?”
A lot of coverage….it was hailed as evidence that the Iraq war was bearing positive fruit because it was causing bad dictators everywhere to shake in their booties and turn to the narrow path.
I remember being positive when the Bush admin got inspectors back in, but being taken back when about a week later, the same people pushing for inspections were arguing that inspections would be useless, we needed to invade. It seemed a sudden shift, with fantastic claims far more than just “old sarin and mustard gas”…that was the fall back.
At the time I thought the WMD claims were far too weak on the merits (and found the reports of pale senators gasping at chairs in horror at the closed door hearing far too theatrical), and believed more in the “bring democracy and they will thrive”…but I was a late teen then, so experience had not knocked the stupid out of me on that topic.
The Pentagon Papers as presented by our National Archive, which means with an asterisk…
https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers
So many instances of things like this occurring. A media narrative, a bit of laziness, and a story that just sounds right combine to create truths that get imbedded in our consciousness and our culture. Everyone knows, for example, that the Bhopal tragedy was a classic case of a corporation (Union Carbide) cutting corners, and endangering the lives of thousands, all in pursuit of profit.
Or was it?
https://www.stephenhicks.org/2016/11/12/the-bhopal-chemical-spill-disaster-who-is-to-blame/
Help me here. I was of the opinion that it is regarded as established fact that there were never any WMDs in Iraq. I read a conservative pundit say so just the other day. I’ve seen it repeated ad nauseum. Or so I thought. Am I wrong?
Yes, there’s a split between those (usually Dems) who claim that Bush knew and was lying and those who claim that Bush was relying in good faith on the reports from US and European intelligence services which were wrong (perhaps even that Saddam himself thought he had more than he did because his yes men wouldn’t/couldn’t tell him the truth).
But the “fact” that Iraq had no WMDs seems to be a very common assertion.
I read Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie” back in the ’90s and it really seemed like he was over-egging the pudding, especially since I was already aware of a lot of alternate views on Vietnam. Now that I know he was one of the reporters on the Pentagon Papers and lied about them, I guess I know why.
Well I can say what the Duelfer report said happen, that’s about as definitive as anything.(Since it was an investigation done once the US took over Iraq) Basically what it said happened was that Iraq had WMDs. However once sanctions were in place Saddam wanted to get out of them. So to do that he got rid of the WMD but kept the knowledge on how to make them. His plan was be able to get out of sanctions since they’ll never find anything since it’s not there. However keep everyone guessing since if his enemies ever find out he currently doesn’t have them they’ll attack. Then once out of sanctions restart his program and quickly rebuild them since they’d have the knowledge and ability to do just that. So pretty much gaming the system and Saddam never had the intent of ever disarming his WMD program. (He just wanted enough cover to get out of sanctions.)
I’m shocked! Shocked!
I was in Israel when the WMD thing was happening. In Israel, it was taken for granted that Saddam was developing WMD, had some stockpiled, and was shipping them elsewhere to be taken care of. The general assumption was that some wound up on Jordan — there were truck convoys that headed there.
Speaking of reporting crap:
Remember the “red line” in Syria? Assad gassing people? I remember thinking at the time that it did not make sense that he would do that. He is indeed a cruel b*****d, but he’s not a stupid one, and doing what he was accused of did not make any sense. But we’re were assured he was behind it!
I recently read that it’s been established that he was not.
Stan – there was no verifiable WMD aside from old stuff. But, Iraq was in verifiable violation for keeping WMD programs in place. The issue was the course of action. The result is we went in and effed things up to our detriment on many levels.
Verifiable is key. Saddam kicked out inspectors claiming spying. He also removed the remote sensors/cameras.
Think of it this way … you got a known drug user stopped. He’s been arrested before on possession. Today, though, all you have is evidence of possible drug use, paraphernalia, but that’s it. Do you make stuff up or just give a ticket even though he’s good for it and have evidence prior?
I recall during the Vietnam war some reporter quoted an American military officer as saying, ” we had to burn down that village to save it.”
This remark was widely reported in the media.
Turns out that it was THE reporter – Peter Arnett – who literally invented the phrase.
“Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
–“Looking Back on the Spanish War,” 1943. George Orwell
Terrific quote.
There’s no reason to believe anything they write, broadcast or say.
None.
And they know it.
And they don’t care if anyone believes them or not.
Because they are preparing the ground for THAT jackboot to stamp on THAT face forever.
And they are totally confident that they will succeed.
As the COVID debacle reminds us (along with everything else):
https://basedunderground.com/2022/04/03/faucis-united-front-is-collapsing/
Stan – I have not followed pundits more recently. It was a canard of the left there were no WMD’s. The right typically touted the old stuff as a verification (though from what I remember was far below what was billed as his having). I have seen it said there were no WMD’s, but that was in discussing the full extent of what was alleged (active, new “big stuff” weapons programs) vs what was found (A few caches of 20 year old weapons that were potentially not even viable….weeping, rusty shells).
I have have some fellow conservatives claim that all the weapons we were told about were secretly walked out of Iraq during the invasion…but they never have anything to back that up except asserting that since the “big stuff” existed, it had to go somewhere.
It looks like our enemy has been the press all along. They didn’t like the crude LBJ, they liked the crease in Obama’s pants, and they sure didn’t like the crude, but popular celebrity of Trump, so they took care of him. They tried using the old man doesn’t know what he is doing routine of Regan, some of that on the elder Bush, and the term derangement syndrome came along with George W., if I am remembering correctly, because they were so dead set against his every word.
I didn’t like LBJ because I am a Texan and I know about his fraudulent entry into federal office, but I had not realized the press disliked him so much as to take him down, much like they took down Trump.
I remember when many cities had Democratic and Republican leaning papers and everyone knew their biases. Now we have very few with a Republican or conservative bias. Most are owned by major media or newspaper conglomerates and all news is the same from city to city.
Jefferson had a number of things to say about newspapers, one of which was–
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.”
In other words, unless you are there, on the ground, and see it with your own eyes, you can’t ever really trust something that is reported to you by the MSM as being true.
How many of us can be there, on the ground, to see things about some major event or thing for ourselves?
Thus, to get any information at all on a wide variety of subjects we have to put some trust plus do a lot of scrutinizing, comparison with other sources, and analysis of a lot of what we see and hear from the MSM or other news sources or, we get no news at all.
But, and as we’ve seen, some news sources that at first seemed more truthful than the MSM have–over time–done what May West once proclaimed she did, “I used to be good, but I drifted,” see, for example, DRUDGE.
I’ve been reading Geoff Shepard’s books about Nixon. Eye-opening. I also read the Kennedy book about Fauci. That was interesting because he had active links to sources. (I read it on Kindle.)
And let’s not forget how the Tet Offensive was portrayed in the media as a humiliating defeat for South Vietnam.
“I used to be good, but I drifted,” see, for example, DRUDGE.
Drudge was a link aggregator. Its a reasonable inference that he was a man who managed to monetize an enjoyment of gossip, not a purveyor of a particular social ideology. I think it’s also a reasonable inference that he sold the site and retired to his condo in south Florida. My wager would be the buyers have no interest in a viable commercial enterprise and they just wanted to take a piece off the board.
It has always been thus.
Anyone interested in a book that shows the mendacity of the New York Times over the decades ought to click on neo’s Amazon link and buy a copy of, “The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History” by Ashley Rindsberg.
So the NYT knowingly lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Walter Cronkite knowingly lied about the Tet Offensive.
They knowingly lied about Kyle Rittenhouse.
We have an ‘independent’ corporate media… because?
Turns out there is an Empire of Lies.
What would Jim Morrison say?
Sometimes the current and future political landscape of this country seem so grim one can lose hope, but we do have A LOT of information today, and some of it is produced by bright, courageous lights who are willing to dig for the truth and circulate it at personal risk. Glenn Greenwald, Barry Weiss, Matt Taibbi… Podcasters. Blog’gers. Neo!
Look at the current discussion about Ukraine. The administration’s viewpoint is obvious, and many media outlets report a similar narrative, but we do have access to a lot of differing opinions and reporting; including direct reports from civilians and soldiers involved with the conflict. I don’t know if it makes it easier to uncover the truth, it still takes effort, but I think the vast abundance of nearly free distribution tools (mobile phones, the Internet…) make it much more difficult to conceal the truth.
For those who want to read James Q. Wilson’s original editorial in the “Wall Street Journal,” please don’t forget about the “Internet Archive.” For dead links, it’s a treasure.
Here’s the link: https://tinyurl.com/3fzvc7rm
I think LBJ got the unfortunate blame for Vietnam because nobody wanted to criticize St John.
However one thing LBJ , RMN and Ho Chi Mihn agreed upon was that our biggest mistake in the Vietnam war was the killing of Diem , who was the only viable leader in South Vietnam and he was having secret peace talks at the time through the Poles/DeGaulle with Ho.
Also forgetting my contempt for W, the mistake was not thinking or lying about WMD’s but the disbanding of the Iraqi Army . Our plan was to go in under forced ( remember as Rummy said the Army you have not the one you wanted) and to rely on the Iraqi Army to provide security and allow us to leave quickly.
And yet everybody believes the Ukraine stories hook, line and sinker. Oh, the irony.
I recall a quote from Churchill, though I can’t find it online. Something like:
Reporter: Mr. Churchill, do you read the newspapers?
Churchill: Yes, I enjoy reading works of fiction.
“Some of what we think we know, or are even sure we know, are things that are false – or at least have a good chance of being false.”
The objective is and has been to get a lie to “conventional wisdom” status. Then even your political enemies will argue from the false premises you have strewn about.
Firesign Theater were mostly correct, “Everything You Know Is Wrong.” And so many have their livelihood dependent on the continued belief in at least one lie or another that untangling it will never happen.
It depends on what is meant by the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident.’ There was an altercation on 2 Aug 1964 where a US destroyer shot up some North Vietnamese torpedo boats, and two days later where 2 US destroyers were supposedly attacked by more torpedo boats.
The first attack probably happened; there’s North Vietnamese corroboration including casualty lists (four dead, six wounded.)
The second attack probably didn’t; Robert McNamara knew that before the end of the day, LBJ found out sometime over the next six weeks, despite McNamara trying to keep that from him. This information is from transcripts stored in LBJ’s presidential library.
Its not just those who have a duty to honestly, fully, and truthfully report things twisting them, its also deliberate attempts to keep us ignorant of things we should be informed about–it’s also withholding information, not reporting things at all.
Such a situation is outlined in the recent linked article by former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon, in which he discusses how the Air Force is trying to keep Congress and us in the dark, is stonewalling Congressional requests for information about what the Air Force knows about UAPs/UFOs. *
As part of his discussion about the dangerous game that the Air Force is playing, Mellon gives a very interesting and informative unclassified list–with brief descriptions–of just a few of the different types of the many sensor systems our military has access to, in essence a net of sensors that have been and are sensing and identifying everything from ground level up to outer space.
He argues that–given the coverage and capabilities of this array of sensor systems–the Air Force must have an enormous store of data on/observations of UAPs/UFOs which it is withholding, which it is not disclosing to members of Congress and the American people.
* See https://thedebrief.org/why-is-the-air-force-awol-on-the-uap-issue/
I think LBJ got the unfortunate blame for Vietnam because nobody wanted to criticize St John.
IIRC, Arthur Schlesinger and others were promoting the idea ca. 1971 that the VietNam War was Johnson’s doing and that Kennedy was planning something else. I don’t recall that ‘no one’ wanted to criticize Kennedy; the Democratic Party’s cognoscenti were groping for a way to avoid their party being stuck with the blame.
Henry Kissinger was very much of the opinion that the overthrow of Diem and Nhu was a catastrophe. In his view the consequent purge of the civil service put military officers in formerly civil service positions, distracting the military from its main duties and leaving the military riven by political factionalism. Frederick Nolting, who had been U.S. Ambassador up until shortly before Diem’s overthrow, thought Diem an admirable figure and excoriated his successor (Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr) for his involvement in the coup.
That having been said, please recall that when Kennedy died, the number of American troops deployed to VietNam was about 15,000. They were attached to South VietNamese units as trainers and leaders. By the end of 1965, about 185,000 American troops were in VietNam. By mid 1969, 630,000.
Our plan was to go in under forced ( remember as Rummy said the Army you have not the one you wanted) and to rely on the Iraqi Army to provide security and allow us to leave quickly.
Don’t think so. The complaint about Paul Bremer disbanding the army was that the former army then provided the nucleus of various Sunni insurgent groups. The army was the bulwark of the Tikriti-Sunni regime, so in and of itself would have been inappropriate as an armed for for a revised Iraq (absent extensive personnel changes). It might have worked better had you confined them to barracks and then pensioned off most of the officer corps while leavening the force with new recruits. Might have.
Art. That which was not done must, inevitably, have worked to gold-standard perfection and those who do not believe are to be condemned.
Reading these comments about Vietnam and Iraq is just a further reminder that the USA needs to better mind its own business.
The cultural norms of nation states will determine to a great degree the type of govt they will have; not all cultures are consistent with representative democracy.
Even in the USA our “representative democracy” appears not to be so aligned with the tenets of our US Constitution, especially as Congress over the last 100 years has foisted off many of its responsibilities onto unaccountable, invisible bureaucrats who, for all intents and purposes, make the laws, rules and regulations the citizenry are COMPELLED to follow.
Further, Congress has allowed the SCOTUS to make laws that Congress itself should be enacting.
And if cultural norms determine to a great degree which sort of govt the people will accept and/or tolerate, it stands to reason that as societal culture changes, so will the type and form of govt the people will accept or tolerate.
John Tyler
The idea that the US invades to make people do Norman Rockwell seems to have been oversold. IMO, it’s a way to sweeten the picture of us invading for our own strategic ends.
While we don’t like child rape–certain entertainment companies excepted–US soldiers in Astan were ordered not to interfere with the culturally relatively authentically local customs and to do so non-judgmentally, just as if they were anthro undergrads.
We built roads to facilitate our positions there, not to make it easier for the locals to haul whatever.
The people at Kabul Consolidated offering majors in grievance studies were a minor part of the effort. Not even sure who funded such nonsense.
Best that can be said is that a stable environment makes a position in a tough neighborhood easier to sustain, so maybe you try to professionalize the cops or something.
And yet everybody believes the Ukraine stories hook, line and sinker. Oh, the irony.
Which Ukraine stories?
May have said it elsewhere; you don’t win a war when the other guy has a sanctuary. Allowing sanctuaries is relatively new. “allow” meaning we have the capacity to desanctuary the place but choose not to. Does not mean we lack the means.
The means issue was illustrated in the two world wars. In the second, we had the means to put the Axis countries under the war in all its horror and did so. That was a solid win. In the first one, the Allies couldn’t, thus didn’t, and the Armistice was a mutual agreement as to exhaustion and the prospect of five million doughboys in camps in the US ready for the 1919 fighting season. The result was we let the Germans run their own affairs and….
Israel is fighting its enemies’ interest and not making them expend principle. This can go on forever. Except for the occasional air strike or sabotage, Israel’s enemies have/are sanctuaries.
In Viet Nam we were, effectively, restricted to punching our opponents’ forearms when they struck.
IMO, whether there were attacks or not, we were, under laws of war and common sense, entitled to desanctuary North Viet Nam. See “Thud Ridge” and, worse, “Going Downtown; The Air War Against Washington and Hanoi” by Broughton, a wing commander in SEA. All that bombing you heard about…..
Making the case without the attack would have been better.
Art Deco the usual Mae West quote, attributed to her by Ed Sullivan, is, “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”
I never had an opinion on the reality of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. What scared me was Congress nearly unanimously granting LBJ the right to use any force he deemed necessary. He almost immediately upped our troops from 15,000 advisors to 160,000 fighting troops, making it our war. I was always dubious about that. I was even more dubious about the thoughtless, knee-jerk anti-war activism. That same instinct makes me leery of the “We are all Ukranians,” crowd. When EVERYBODY agrees on something, it raises my hackles.
As to destroying the WMD stockpiles, is that the “burn pit” stuff that the Facade In Chief of the US (FICUS) keeps going on about, saying they killed his son?
Someone above believes they found a duplicate source via AEI, but, there’s always the WAYBACK machine (well, ALMOST always, anyway, and yes for this case):
https://web.archive.org/web/20070204085553/http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203
😛
}}} Sometimes the news media lies. Sometimes the government lies. Sometimes one tells the truth while the other lies. Sometimes both the govenment and news media lie in the same direction. But is it harder to find the truth today than it was 60 years ago? Does having easy access to far more information than in any other time in human history (whether that information is bad, good, lies or truth) make it more or less difficult to suss out the actual truth today than in the past?
Actually, a casual survey of important journo threads since at least the 1930s shows the government probably lies a LOT LESS than the Presstitutes. They’ve been pushing a largely leftist agenda since at least that time, given their repeated hiding of Stalin’s pogroms and his blatant spying on the Truman admin (aka, “The McCarthy Smear Campaign”). The subsequent decades have had the lies about the Tet Offensive, the conflation of McCarthy with HUAC, lies about Reagan and Bush I, lies about Clinton, lies about Bush II, lies about Teh One… Right up to lies about Trump and lies about Brandon.
Neo: In a thread subsequent to this, you note about the Left’s takeover of Academia, but their takeover of the media was not just earlier, but far more pernicious and much more problematic.
They pretty much fucked over the entire Vietnamese and SE Asian peoples — many millions — in addition to all the other things they’ve hidden about the USSR and China with nontrivial ramifications.
There’s a great “demotivator” meme:
A picture of an old style tube TV and a couch in front of it —
“That having been said, please recall that when Kennedy died, the number of American troops deployed to VietNam was about 15,000. They were attached to South VietNamese units as trainers and leaders. By the end of 1965, about 185,000 American troops were in VietNam. By mid 1969, 630,000.”
True , but St John created the havoc that caused his former admin to take over the conflict. He broke it and he bought it.
One thing that has always haunted me: If Nixon had won in 1960 — and maybe he really did — he would have continued Eisenhower’s Viet Nam strategy, kept Diem in place, and negotiated some sort of peace with the North, and there never would have been a Viet Nam war.
Frank —
When EVERYBODY agrees on something, it raises my hackles.
I hear this a lot from commenters on the right. I counter with:
a) Not everybody is agreeing
b) Those who are agreeing are doing so for different reasons
The US Deep State may be beating the up-to-but-not-quite-including-war drums for their own distract-the-masses propaganda reasons including giving Biden and thus the Democrats a boost in the midterms. That doesn’t make my reasoning invalid that Russia is a bully nation that needs a good punch in the nose before they get tempted to attack NATO.
What I find interesting is how support for Ukraine seems to be cross-cutting both the right and the left, where some traditional lefties are calling for an immediate cease-fire because they think that any fighting is evil, but some other traditional lefties are backing Ukraine because “Russia” is an abstraction they can use as a stick to beat Republicans, and other lefties want to make Biden look like a wartime President, and so on. Some righties are old cold warriors who want to see Russia beaten, some believe that backing Russia strikes a blow against globalism, some are rooting for Biden and the woke US military to screw up and embarrass themselves, and so on.
It’s just weird to see internet places that are usually nigh-on echo chambers suddenly filled with acrimony and name-calling.
@ Richard Aubrey On the whole you make a bunch o very valid points and I largely agree with them, particularly the “non-judgemental” nature of local customs and the difference between means and will
However, I do have a few major issues
This is not quite true. In particular while there was remarkably little fighting and ravaging of the core of the Central Powers, the blockade had brought occupied Europe to famine, hence the “Turnip Winters” that could only be alleviated by the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Turks engaging in wholesale looting of what territory they did occupy, especially in Eastern Europe, which essentially was exporting famine. That and some fortunate technological breakthroughs like the Haber Process.
And even that wasn’t enough by the end, with the assorted partners in crime ultimately falling out over the spoils and starting to struggle for a share of the looted gods (hence Vienna stopping foot transports headed for Germany n order to feed itself threatened to bring Red-on-Red fighting).
Moreover, even as a proud American I’ll be the first to admit that the US direct involvement (though VERY significant) is often overblown; the Central Powers were suffering badly even before the US entered the war and indeed the revocation of the Sussex Pledge that prompted US entry was part of an all-or-nothing gamble to win the war within the next two years by trying to stop the lifelines to Western Europe at the cost of thoroughly angering the remaining neutrals. The depths to which that did not work is underlined not only by the US’s entry into the war but the ability of the ALlies to maintan a blockade over Germany well after peacetime started in order to avoid takesy-backsies.
Moreover, while the US was probably the fourth largest/most important Western Allied combatant (after Britain, France, and Italy) the spearheads that shattered the CP Lines were usually British or French (with the US engaging in smaller breakthroughs like St. Mihel and the Meuse-Argonne being the first attempt to spearhead on a large scale US forces in the war just as it ended). And it is telling that even Erich Ludendorff- the ultra war hawk of the Reich and sort of a testing run for Hitler and Stalin- bluntly told the Kaiser in a moment o weakness that the front would not hold for another 48 hours and that Germany had to seek peace at any terms.
And the ability of the Allies to break into Germany’s “sanctuaries” can be seen by the rather extensive occupation zones in the former Central Powers to keep an eye on things
Really, I think the problem with WWI was not the inability to penetrate the Central Powers’ “sanctuaries” (which the Allies successfully did) but a lack of will to enforce the terms of the peace, as well as warring about what the terms were. While the Allies were squabbling about how many German ships should be parceled out to who or where the boundaries between Southern Slav annexations and Italian claims were, their shared front broke apart in the face of a genocidal Turkey rebounding, the Bolsheviks threatening world war, an unholy Communist-Nationalist alliance in Hungary nearly reconstituted half the Habsburg Empire, the German military and Bureaucratic establishment that had helped push the world into war and then made it so nightmarish remained substantially intact and able to do things like consider illegal rearmament and a tactical alliance with their old frenemies the Bolsheviks towards that ends.
So the key weakness I think was will. The Allies actually did try to monitor and limit the abilities of the Central Powers to operate after the war, but they just fell well short with things like the armaments inspection regiment collapsing badly.
Not help by things like heavy subversion, propaganda from the likes of the Germans and Kemal, and useful idiots like Keynes (the man who largely inspired our modern financial system, whose magnum pus on Versailles supposedly being too much for Germany to repay- still cited ad infinitum to this day- was the product of Keynes falling for intentional disinformation by the German government about its own finances and assets).
I think this reinforces your point but also touches on another one: that sanctuary penetration or destruction is limited by will and the ability to see things through. In particular by committing to destroy and remake the “problematic” elements of one’s enemy’s societies.
@avi Largely agreed re: JFK, LBJ, and so on, however…
Firstly: To the extent W “lied” about WMDs, it was a matter of magnitude rather than essence since Saddam did have them.
Secondly: I cannot agree that disbanding the Saddam era Iraqi Military was a mistake, though I do think the method was. One reason why the decision was made was because very early on we learned the extent of the corruption and incompatibility of the military and its leadership with a constitutional government, since it was basically a totalitarian organization meant to promote Sunni Arab supremacy under the Great Leader while crushing the opposition, and could not be trusted to NOT go over en masse to the enemy like Baathists or Sunni Islamists.
One of the classic problems we saw in previous peace settlements or occupations such as WWI was the failure to dismantle the kind of profoundly undemocratic “Deep State” military-bureaucratic complex or local cliques, and Afghanistan shows some example of the problems of keeping too much, and it’s REALLY hard to understate how tainted and bad the memory of the Iraqi military was by this point.
The issue is that a more or less uncontrolled discharge of Saddam era troops meant the very authoritarian-minded, Sunni-supremacist trained killers out onto the countryside (regularly with their own guns), where they could be easy recruitment fodder for AQII and Baathist holdouts and the like. Oh yeah, and also likely to fight turf wars with their hereditary Shiite opponents.
Something like confining them to barracks pace Art Deco or POW camps strikes me as probably being a better idea in the long run, even if it would have made the situation more difficult in the immediate term.
Eh. Even the left leaning Wikipedia doesn’t claim this was a hoax of malicious origin. There was only one such “attack”, then the following day there was intelligence claiming there a second “attack” was planned or imminent. Because of the lack of communications available at the time, somehow the intelligence about a coming attack was conflated into another attack.
Whether or not politicians in DC cynically seized on the “attack” to exaggerate it into needing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution may be an open question. But outside the media distortion, there is no evidence that it was planned ahead of time, or instigated by the US.
turtler
Thanks for the comment. However, I would say the volume, the length, of the explanations makes my case.
In addition to the various restrictions on trade, in WW II an inconceivable amount of explosive was dropped on the various Axis as far as our bombers’ combat radius would reach. Day and night. Infrastructure shattered.
It seems WW I was going to end as the European Usual–my term but you may use it without attribution. Armies go around, tearing up the countryside, a bunch of guys die young who should have died old, the borders get shoved around a bit, the big shots don’t miss a meal.
See Franco-Prussian War. War(s) of League of Augsburg, Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession, Seven Years War. Napoleonic Wars.
There are still Hohenzollerns–the Kaiser took the family plate to Holland for a comfortable retirement–princeing and duking around Europe, making the society pages, marrying the wealthy and not, apparently, needing a nine-to-five to put bread on the table. Ditto for the Hapsburgs. I recall one of the latter sued the government of Austria for the return of one of their palaces. Not sure how that went.
Liddell-Hart, like all veterans of the First World War, is excused for asking what the hell happened. In his history of it, he uses the term “infanticide” twice, referring to the Brits’ failure to take charge of the government and…do something.
And then, some of bigs retained their influence and Germany was cheating on the military side of Versailles Treaty within about five years. See the diff after WW II. For an idea of the thinking, see this: https://vimeo.com/491670510
The latter gave the Yurps the longest period of peace since the Battle of Tollense. Must be some fundamental difference. Some hundreds of thousands of US troops sitting ON the sanctuary. It was a comfortable “long tour”. “Accompanied tour”. Bring your family. Schools K-12 complete with football teams, cheerleaders. Ran into a couple of guys at Ft Jackson in 70 who were trying to recall where they’d met. Played ball against each other in one or another athletic conference in Germany/Northern Italy. Or possibly Belgium.
In college, I knew guys whose growing up was half overseas with their fathers.
Might be the difference.
Oh, yeah. Instead of abdicating, Hitler shot his face off. Not the usual.
WRT keeping the Iraqui army in being:
Talked to a couple of MP who did POW work during Gulf 1. They had to separate Shia troops from Sunni troops or there would be bloody, killing riots.
And this sudden, delicate concern for “corruption” in Ukraine as if it’s….all of a sudden an Important Thing–would have applied in spades to any Iraqui institution especially including their military due to all the fun stuff they had to sell to others. So, faking the vapors over corruption in the Iraqui case probably wouldn’t have seemed politically useful with which to slag the Bush admin, the efficiency of the force would have been close to zero. Separate issue.
“…Not the usual.”
The “Day in the Life”-like poetry of it is to be admired…but wasn’t it—“just”—um, cyanide?
@Richard Aubrey
“Thanks for the comment. However, I would say the volume, the length, of the explanations makes my case.”
Fair.
“In addition to the various restrictions on trade, in WW II an inconceivable amount of explosive was dropped on the various Axis as far as our bombers’ combat radius would reach. Day and night. Infrastructure shattered.”
Agreed. Ironically the main strategic bombers in WWI were the Germans (who sort of inaugurated aerial terror bombing with things like the Gotha Blitz against Britain). The ravages of famine could be at least as damaging, but considering how in WWII the Axis got both famine and bombings…
“It seems WW I was going to end as the European Usual–my term but you may use it without attribution. Armies go around, tearing up the countryside, a bunch of guys die young who should have died old, the borders get shoved around a bit, the big shots don’t miss a meal.
See Franco-Prussian War. War(s) of League of Augsburg, Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession, Seven Years War. Napoleonic Wars.”
I can’t agree on that for a few reasons, starting with the fact that the “Big Shots” in the Seven Years’ War (at least in Central Europe; Fred the Great spent a LOT of hungry nights on the move), the Napoleonic Wars (sort of Ditto, with Napoleon having lavish meals but still facing the ongoing blockade), and the Franco-Prussian War (with the Emperor becoming a prisoner and the Republican French government that replaced him having to deal with it). Obviously this wasn’t true for everyone (like the British Monarch rarely missed meals during all of this), but it the stakes were often higher than people liked to admit in hindsight.
But the big thing is that in WWI, the prospects for that kind of a “European Usual” were more or less limited to the first year or so, had one side managed to defeat the other, and even that might be generous. But the Austro-Hungarians had went to war from the onset with the plan of utterly annihilating an independent Serbia and possibly even the Serbian people, and while the Germans had the Septemberprogramme.
So almost from the start for various reasons the Central Powers REALLY quickly expanded the scope of their demands, and for various reasons were utterly uninterested in a compromise peace like the “European Usual” because of their decaying economic situation and (as it turned out somewhat exaggerated) fears of Russian industrialization and American influence. So they basically committed their all in an attempt to basically either gain European dominance and a bunch of other objectives, or to lose it. Which is one reason why they broke the laws of war so rapidly.
“There are still Hohenzollerns–the Kaiser took the family plate to Holland for a comfortable retirement–princeing and duking around Europe, making the society pages, marrying the wealthy and not, apparently, needing a nine-to-five to put bread on the table.”
This is true, but that’s largely because A: there are so many Hohenzollerns, B: relatively few needed to be concerned about being indicted for war crimes, and C: Those that did made a quick escape to the Netherlands precisely in order to find a place that wouldn’t extradite them.
In any case, the Imperial Cabinet system they headed up and the dynasty-as-royal house were undermined by the creeping totalitarianism in the Military and utterly shattered by the one-two-punch of the Western Allied victories on the front and the revolution within.
“Ditto for the Hapsburgs. ”
Indeed, and somewhat similar in terms of results; it helped that Austria immediately after the war took such a rather harsh view of the Habsburgs, not helped by a bunch of abortive Habsburg attempts to retake power in Hungary that were thwarted. But when they returned from exile in places like Portugal they were socialites there.
Meanwhile the main engines behind the war were either dead (in the case of people like Franz Josef), in disreputable retirement (von Hoetzendorff and Ludendorff), in exile (Wilhelm II), or sort of clinging to the shadows of their parallel states in the military (like Groener).
“I recall one of the latter sued the government of Austria for the return of one of their palaces. Not sure how that went.”
IIRC the lawsuit was against the Czechs regarding Konopiste Castle.
I don’t think it has been decided yet but I’d need to check.
“And then, some of bigs retained their influence and Germany was cheating on the military side of Versailles Treaty within about five years. See the diff after WW II. For an idea of the thinking, see this: https://vimeo.com/491670510 ”
Agreed, and a classic video.
“The latter gave the Yurps the longest period of peace since the Battle of Tollense. Must be some fundamental difference. Some hundreds of thousands of US troops sitting ON the sanctuary. It was a comfortable “long tour”. “Accompanied tour”. Bring your family. Schools K-12 complete with football teams, cheerleaders. Ran into a couple of guys at Ft Jackson in 70 who were trying to recall where they’d met. Played ball against each other in one or another athletic conference in Germany/Northern Italy. Or possibly Belgium.”
Very true, though I imagine the “comfort” was somewhat undermined by the threat of WWIII breaking out at seeming any moment and the Soviets going there.
“In college, I knew guys whose growing up was half overseas with their fathers.
Might be the difference.”
I still know some of them even though I am much younger (most likely at least), in part due to the long tours of duty abroad. WWII certainly widened that, but I don’t think it entirely created it given things like the Hawaiian station.
“Oh, yeah. Instead of abdicating, Hitler shot his face off. Not the usual.”
It also helped that he was not a royal head of state and in any case he had personally tainted his case and committed such atrocities there would be little question of his fate. To be honest the fate of the House of Yamato isn’t that different from what we saw with the Central European Autocrats. I think the bigger difference is that (at least as far as non-royals went) the Allies instituted a much more thorough procedure for trying war criminals after the shambolic and mostly stillborn ones following WWI, which along with the occupation helped clear out a lot of the trash.
Not all of it course, as the parade of war criminals that went on to government office or other public life in Germany, Italy, and Japan shows, but enough that there was no longer a coherent “deep state” like what plagued post-WWI Germany.
“WRT keeping the Iraqui army in being:
Talked to a couple of MP who did POW work during Gulf 1. They had to separate Shia troops from Sunni troops or there would be bloody, killing riots.”
Indeed; I wish I were surprised. Doesn’t help that the latter often knew their job and position was at least as much about keeping the Shia in line and had happily lorded over them before. The Iraqi Military under Saddam was at least as much about crushing internal dissent or separatism as it was expanding to form a “New Babylon”, and if anything I’d argue it was even more important given things like the post-Desert Storm war.
Another reason I do figure the entire system and military had to be disbanded and something made to replace it, even if I do think the methodology sucked.
“And this sudden, delicate concern for “corruption” in Ukraine as if it’s….all of a sudden an Important Thing–would have applied in spades to any Iraqui institution especially including their military due to all the fun stuff they had to sell to others. So, faking the vapors over corruption in the Iraqui case probably wouldn’t have seemed politically useful with which to slag the Bush admin, the efficiency of the force would have been close to zero. Separate issue.”
Agreed there. And to be fair I think the bigger issue with people opposing the disbandment is less about the effectiveness of the force (which as we had demonstrated was DECIDEDLY less than ideal) so much as how it turned so many trained killers onto the street without prospects or a career but with their talents and possibly even their weapons. That definitely helped fuel the recruitment for terrorists in the war.
Though I don’t think that changes the fact that the Saddam era military had to go, though how it was done would’ve been more important and frankly looking at the forced demob of Germany and Japan would’ve probably helped.
Turtler
Nap III went back to London and lived on his “investments”. Not such a bad way to end up losing a war.
When I was in, Infantry, we were always looking over our shoulders at the IGB, but the training involved swamps, as did the short tours.
He almost immediately upped our troops from 15,000 advisors to 160,000
There were 15,000 advisers at the end of 1963. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed in August of 1964. There were 25,000 advisors at the end of 1964. The Marines began entering en masse in March 1965, arrayed quite differently than the advisory force. There were 185,000 troops at the end of 1965. Not quite ‘immediately’.
Public opinion began to part company with the Administration in the summer of 1967.