Legal memoranda - many of them secret - were later subjected to severe criticism after they were made public.1 In many respects, the Bush administration's claims of power followed a pattern set by other administrations that decided to elevate presidential power over legal and democratic constraints: the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964 (based on a reported second attack that we now know did not occur2); the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up; the abuses within the intelligence community exposed by the Church Committee investigations in the 1970s; assistance to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s, leading to the Iran-Contra Affair; and the unauthorized war against Serbia in 1999. The ascendancy of Richard Nixon to the presidency exacerbated the penchant for tightly ...
Douglas Turner's Dec. 3 speculation that U.S. militarism began in 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, brings me to deep reflection. That resolution, authorizing wide-scale war against North Vietnam, as we know, was based upon a false claim that a U.S. ship in the gulf was targeted by torpedoes. I remember listening to President Lyndon Johnson's speech, from my Arlington, Va., living room, announcing our bombing of North Vietnam. I felt dread at that moment, which I still feel.
Last time, we considered the dishonesty of President Lyndon Johnson in claiming that North Vietnam had attacked U.S. warships on Aug. 4, 1964, and in denying that he would use as a declaration of war the Tonkin Gulf Resolution he sought, supposedly in consequence of the alleged attack. Appalling though this was, LBJ was merely partaking in an unholy tradition of presidential dishonesty about matters of war and peace. It is a tradition with two sides, only one of which is the war lies the presidents tell us. The other side is the complementary lies we tell ourselves. They work well together.
Cooper supports a full pullout of troops, saying that the congressional authorization of the war in Iraq was the nation's largest foreign policy blunder since the U.S. signed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964.
Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert C. Byrd voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on Aug. 7, 1964. Passing the Senate, 98-2, it became a key factor allowing Lyndon B. Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War. Both Kennedy and Byrd came to regret their votes. Both became eloquent voices opposing George W. Bush's efforts to invade Iraq 38 years later.
If Senate Democrats decide to "sunset" the use of force resolution adopted prior to the invasion of Iraq, they will again invite a comparison with those Democrats who pulled the plug on South Vietnam a generation ago. Rescinding the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was the first step Democrats took in 1971 on the path leading eventually to a ban on all military operations in Indochina, the cutting of aid to Saigon and the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. But Vietnam was not the end of the story. The year after the communist victory in Indochina, Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president in the wake of the Watergate scandal. His brief tenure is now remembered by such terms as malaise, stagflation and the misery index. Another term was "hollow army." Combat divisions only had half the equipm...
The escalation of the Vietnam War began on a premise, later proven false, and ratified in the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution," that an American warship had been fired upon, and the nation was now at war. It was built on a false theory, the "Domino Theory," that once Vietnam fell to communists, the entire Southeast Asia region would also fall. We have spent several hundred billion dollars and almost 4,000 American lives - and growing - on a war that we created, based on premise (remember "weapons of mass destruction"?) now proven false, and a philosophy - "if we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them here" - that is also being demonstrated to be false.
Editor, the Tribune: Once again, our mighty Navy says that small boats have harassed and taunted them. This allegedly took place in waters near a country President George W. Bush wants to attack. This should sound very familiar to history buffs and anyone older than 60. President Lyndon Johnson used a similar scenario in 1964 to pressure Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which served to escalate our involvement in the Vietnam War. Like thousands of other patriotic men and women, I was on my way to basic training within the month. We know now that the Tonkin incident was provoked by the USS Maddox and that a second attack on the Maddox never happened. Are we doomed to go to war with Iran because of flawed intelligence and misguided zeal, or have we learned from history that...
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