A LIE THAT COST 58,000 AMERICAN AND OVER 1.4 MILLION VIETNAMESE LIVES

AUGUST 1964 THE GULF OF TONKIN INCIDENTS: REAL AND BOGUS

HOW “DEEP STATE” OF THE 1960s DECEIVED AND FORCED LBJ INTO BOMBING NORTH VIETNAM AND ESCALATING THE WAR

And has just done it again with Donald Trump and Russia

By the time the American president Lyndon B. Johnson declared he would not seek the second term in 1968, he had become a poster boy for Vietnam warmongers. Antiwar protesters had even written songs vilifying him for entering and expanding the war. Like this one:

Lyrics:

Johnson had a button nose, when first he went to congress
Now it's long and crooked like a politicians promise. 
Hey, hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today? 
We're gonna take your toys away and bring our soldiers home now.

But as history has shown 50 years later, LBJ was unfairly blamed for the Vietnam war escalation. The real “deep state” dark horse and warmonger who pushed for it an deceived the president was Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara.

And it all started on this day – Aug 2, 1964 – in the Gulf of Tonkin.

HOW MCNAMARA DECEIVED THE PRESIDENT

The destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, was pursued by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron. Maddox fired three warning shots and the North Vietnamese boats then attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire. Maddox called in air support.

One U.S. aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, with six more wounded. There were no U.S. casualties. Maddox“was unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round”.

Get this? One bullet hole (!) in a US ship. That’s all it took to start a war that cost at least 1.3 million lives, 58,000 of the American.

Well, it actually took more than that. It took deception. The Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a key player in the “deep state” of the 1960s, a man picked appointed to that post by JFK, withheld vital information from LBJ while urging the president to start bombing North Vietnam.

LBJ resisted. He did not want to escalate the war.

Then McNamara literally invented a second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug 4, 1964. That incident never happened, as McNamara admitted 30 years later in a “mea culpa” book. Nevertheless, McNamara used a bogus intelligence report to urge LBJ to order the bombing of North Vietnam. This time, LBJ acquiesced.

The outcome of these two “incidents” was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by “communist aggression”. The resolution served as Johnson’s legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

And that’s how the Vietnam war started in earnest for the United States of America. Based on a deception and a fabrication by Robert McNamara, the real poster boy of the Vietnam warmongers.

STILL, LBJ HAD SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT ESCALATING THE WAR

Six weeks after the Tonkin Gulf bombing, on September 18, 1964, McNamara and Dean Rusk (secretary of state) claimed yet another North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. destroyer in Gulf and tried to get LBJ to approve another retaliatory strike.  But a skeptical LBJ told McNamara, “You just came in a few weeks ago and said they’re launching an attack on us – they’re firing at us, and we got through with the firing and concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.”

After LBJ was elected in November 1964, the president continued to resist a unanimous formal policy recommendation of his advisers that he should begin the systematic bombing of North Vietnam.  He stubbornly argued for three more months that there was no point in bombing the North as long as the South was divided and unstable.

Johnson also refused to oppose the demoralized South Vietnamese government negotiating a neutralist agreement with the Communists, much to his advisers’ chagrin. McGeorge Bundy later recalled in an oral history interview that he concluded that Johnson was “coming to a decision…to lose” in South Vietnam.

LBJ only capitulated to the pressure from his advisers after McNamara and Bundy wrote a joint letter to him in late January 1965 making it clear that responsibility for U.S. “humiliation” in South Vietnam would rest squarely on his shoulders if he continued his policy of “passivity”.  Fearing, with good reason, that his own top national security advisers would turn on him and blame him for the loss of South Vietnam, LBJ eventually began the bombing of North Vietnam.

He was then sucked into the maelstrom of the Vietnam War, which he defended publicly and privately, leading to the logical but mistaken conclusion that he had been the main force behind the push for war all along (for more see The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception by GARETH PORTER –  https://goo.gl/yuR7D2).

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT TODAY?

So it is sad and tragic that the US warmongers and “death merchants” prevailed in a tug of war with a sitting president. And it is good to reflect upon that on this Aug 2, 53 years after the first Gulf of Tonkin incident.

But there is another reason why we should be reminded of that. The same dark forces of the US “death merchants” and “deep state” warmongers are at work today, trying to force Donald Trump to gin up another war. This time with Russia, a war nobody can win.

And they also did that with Ronald Reagan in 1983, as this writer pointed out in this Oct 23, 2016 post, wandering if the same would happen with Trump, if he is elected (see LIKE RONALD, LIKE DONALD… – BEIRUT EMBASSY BOMBING: REAGAN’S BAPTISM BY FIRE AND HUMILIATION BY NEW WORLD ORDER’S FIFTH COLUMN IN HIS CABINET – Will the Same Happen with Trump When He Is Elected? – https://is.gd/mMcRHn).

DJURDJEVIC (Oct 23, 2016): Ronald Reagan was the only US president in the last half a century who was not a card-carrying member of the globalist New World Order organizations, such as the Council for Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group, for example. Like Donald Trump, he was elected because he was an outspoken critic of such establishment “elites.”

What happened in the aftermath of the Beirut embassy bombing was a perfect example of how these New World Order globalists deal with a popular outsider. They muzzle him by surrounding him with loyal members of their societies which would advance their agendas and interests no matter what a sitting president may think.

And it is happening again. Fifty three years after the Gulf of Tonkin incident new generations of US warmongers are trying to turn another president. Just as they did with LBJ and Reagan.

Will they succeed?

TRUMP: A SAD SURRENDER

Trump signs the sanctions bill

We now have a lame duck president walking with a tail between his legs

Yes. Just minutes ago (11:20 AM PDT), I read a dispatch from Washington that indeed, Donald Trump signed this morning the new Russia sanctions legislation into law (see https://on.rt.com/8jcz). And like every lame duck president with a tail between his legs, he added a lament naively that the American people would not notice his betrayal, and how he buckled under to the pressure of the New World Order warmongers:

“Today, I have signed into law HR 3364, the ‘Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.’ While I favor tough measures to punish and deter aggressive and destabilizing behavior by Iran, North Korea, and Russia, this legislation is significantly flawed,” Trump said in a statement released by the White House.

In its haste to pass the legislation, Congress “included a number of clearly unconstitutional provisions,” Trump said.

The biggest problem with the bill is that it “encroaches on the executive branch’s authority to negotiate,” which will make it harder for the US to strike good deals and will “drive China, Russia, and North Korea much closer together,” according to the president.

Well, whoopie-doo. If Trump really believes the sanctions are unconstitutional (as the Truth in Media also said last week), why did he sign them.

See Trump signs Russia sanctions bill into law

WHY WE DON’T LEARN FROM HISTORY

One reason we don’t learn from history is that we are not given a chance. Look at the story the History Channel published today about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Not a word about the McNamara deception or the fact the LBJ’s national security team hoodwinked him into starting the war.

So they are still propagating the 50-year old lies of the “New World Order” of the 1960s.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/north-vietnamese-torpedo-boats-attack-u-s-destroyer