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CounterPunch
October
16, 2002
A New Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution:
The Demon War
by PIERRE TRISTAM
It's been about 40 years since a president's speeches
didn't sound like infomercials. So George W. Bush's prime time
sales pitch last week on slapping a "New Ownership"
sign on Iraq was not surprising for sweating the manipulative
bullets of sales pitches -- exaggerations, inflated sincerity,
half-truths, outright lies. This isn't a Bush family specialty.
Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson
were terrific salesmen, each more or less made for television's
blind spot for hucksters. But for sheer breadth of deception
and implications to thousands of human lives, the Bush performance
for a resolution authorizing Gulf War II can only be compared
with Johnson's fabrication 38 years ago that uselessly condemned
57,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese -- the Gulf
of Tonkin resolution.
The Iraq war resolution Congress approved
with a mob-like majority last week is the Tonkin of our day.Like
Bush with Iraq today, Johnson back then didn't have the facts
to back up his demand for war on North Vietnam. So he invented
them.
In August 1964, an American destroyer
encountered North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin.
But nothing happened. Johnson not only invented an exchange of
fire. He called it an unprovoked attack by the North Vietnamese.
Then he submitted his war resolution to Congress, which the White
House had drafted months before Tonkin. Within days, the House
was voting 414-0 and the Senate 82-2 to give Johnson his mandate
for war.
Last year historian Michael Beschloss
published an edition of the secret tapes Johnson made in the
White House around that time. The tapes make clear that Johnson
had fabricated the incident. "When we got through with all
the firing," Johnson tells his secretary of defense, Robert
S. McNamara, "we concluded maybe they hadn't fired at all."
And despite his public declarations to the contrary, he did not
have a "plan for victory -- militarily or diplomatically."
No matter. The momentum of his early and frequent lies about
Vietnam had picked up the speed of a demon, and the rest is --
well, a memorial on the Washington Mall.
Same plot today, same public declarations
of untenable enmity, of imminent danger and certain victory,
with one difference: The private doubts and inconsistencies have
not been suppressed so well as in Johnson's day. President Bush's
fabrications have been less crafty, more transparent, but they
are of the same order of magnitude that powered Tonkin. No one
really believes that Iraq poses an imminent danger to the United
States or to its neighbors. If Saddam so much as throws a firecracker
at Saudi Arabia or Israel, Baghdad is dust.
Saddam's menace of meanness and mysterious
palaces doesn't have the ballast of the 1960s' ideological scares,
of red tides washing up to the Golden Gate Bridge and Stalinist
infiltrations of Boy Scout troops and conjugal beds ("I
Married an Iraqi" just doesn't have the same ring as "I
Married a Communist."). And Bush's own junta of conjurers
has had an impossible time strapping a smoking nuke to Saddam's
arsenal.
Bush has been using the language of liberation
to galvanize support for his scheme, but Iraq in 2002 isn't France
or Germany in 1945. It has never been a democracy, and it isn't
about to become one under America's neo-colonial rule. There
is nothing to "liberate" but oil fields and pipelines,
no democracy to build but an American garrison in the heart of
the Arab world, and at Iran's flank. Call it pay-back, provocation,
opportunism. Don't call it liberation.
Meanwhile al-Qaida bounces from bombing
to bombing, from Yemen to Bali to guess-where-next, celebrating
the Iraqi sideshow as a gift wrapped in American hubris.
Yet Bush sold Americans his bill of goods
by playing his trump card: 9/11, a shameless use of the memory
of 3,000 Americans to justify the coming deaths of untold others.
He wants his double header -- to finish his father's war and
to give the Republican Party, for the first time since the end
of the Cold War, something brawny to run on -- and now he has
it. He has his war as certainly as his hawks had their war resolution
drawn up years ago, as a strategy patiently waiting for its opportunity.
Sept. 11 was it, the sort of atrocity that can cloud a thousand
judgments and make a fraud sound licit: "I'm not willing
to stake one American life on trusting Saddam Hussein,"
Bush told the nation last week. The words sound right. They sound
righteous, in light of 9/11. They are also the president's most
incriminating wrong, because he is getting ready to stake those
very lives on the possibility, not the certainty, that Saddam
can't be contained. Americans and Iraqis are going to die to
prevent something that may never happen, which is very different
from Americans dying in defensive retaliation for an actual attack.
One is a just cause. The other is a wager whose losing outcome
is the sacrifice of thousands of lives. The crime, yet uncommitted,
is that Congress is willing to stake those lives on trusting
Bush.
Pierre Tristam
is a editorial writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal. He can
be reached at ptristam@att.net
Yesterday's
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Anthony Gancarski
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Jeffrey St. Clair
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as Prison State
Uri Avnery
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Richard Thieme
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Letelier, Torture, Chile and the CIA
Ben Tripp
A Bird Lover's Guide to the Chickenhawks
Brian Willson
An Open Letter to Sen. John Kerry on Iraq
Aaron Michael Love
Israel and White Supremacy
Sani Rifati
The Roma
and Humanitarian Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo
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October 9,
2002
Hesham Hassaballa
Here
We Go Again:
Rev. Falwell's Slurs
Ann Pettifer
Brainwashing
in America
Anita Ramasatry
Airline Security Run Amok
Josh Frank
Iraq: It's
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Rep. Cynthia
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Iraq:
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Robert Jensen
Bush's
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David Vest
Dylan in
Eugene
October 4,
2002
Ahmad Faruqui
The Anvil
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Norman Madarasz
The
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William Hughes
Political
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Marwan Barghouti
Ron Jacobs
The Struggle
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Sen. Robert
Byrd
Bush War
Plan:
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Michael Schwalbe
The
Costs of American Privilege
Ralph Nader
Holding
Politicians' Feet to the Fire on Corporate Crime
Robert Buzzanco
Pacifica
Caves in to Zionist Smear Campaign
October 3,
2002
Gary Leupp
Talking
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Will Youmans
The New
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Deb Reich
Report from a Mad World
Todd Chretien & Sue Sandlin
"It's All About Power on the
Docks"
Kurt Nimmo
Poetry
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Amiri Baraka
Somebody
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Alexander
Cockburn
October Surprises
October 2,
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Carol Wolman,
MD
Is the
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Diagnosing Dubya
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Something
Rotten in Klamath
Resources:
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Five
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Seattle and Beyond
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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by Alexander
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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