Same old song and dance

After watching the PBS special on Watergate the other night, I've been doing a bit more research into Watergate and the events leading up to it. The Washington Post (natch) has a very nice section that include copies of articles written during that time, so you can see how the stories were intially reported. Typically, we either read or hear about how the stories came about described to us by someone who now has the benfit of hindsight to place the story itself into the overall context. Being able to read the stories as they were written, before the larger context was even known, however, is a real treat.

In addition to the Watergate information, they also have a few stories that sort of help "set the scene" for the scandal. One of them is an article on the Pentagon Papers and the revelation that months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the US had already been planning for a war against North Vietnam. President Johnson, however, was able to take the Tonkin incident and use it as a leverage to gain public and Congressional support for the Vietnam War - and once he got authorization from Congress for attacking North Vietnam, he used that resolution to help him be able to take the war even further than initially intended.

It's stunning to sit here, having seen the aftermath of the Vietnam war, and watch as it begins to look like history repeating itself. The 9/11 attacks were used to help gain popular and Congressional support for the war in Iraq (along with the WMD, of course), even though we now know that this war was taked about and planned from long before the attacks ever took place. Bush now has his authorization from Congress, and we keep hearing talk (and thanfully, that's all it's been thus far) of targeting Syria or Iran or who knows who else, which would seem to be an expansion of what Congress said he could do.

Granted, the two situations do have some differences. While the losses in Iraq are unacceptable, they are not nearly as high as they were in Vietnam - something we can all be grateful for. There is also possible reason to hope that the war in Iraq won't last as long as the Vietnam war. And, thankfully, this time, our soldiers have the support of most Americans - both those who are in favour of the war and those who are against it. And, obviously, once you start getting into the finer details, there will be even more differences.

The point, though, is that in both cases, you have a President who's got a serious jones for war with a particular country, and has even made plans about going to war, if he can find a way to get the people and Congress to agree. Both Presidents make questionable claims about an incident deemed sufficiently aggressive as to justify war - but in neither case is the justification what it really appears to be. The Gulf of Tonkin incident may not have happened the way it was described, and worse, it may have been provoked by us in order to create a situation where President Johnson could get the authorization he wanted. With 9/11, there's no question that the attacks took place, or that they were severe enough to warrant a military retaliation. The problem here is that the country we retaliated against - Iraq - wasn't involved in the attacks (at least not that anyone's been able to demonstrate in any meaningful way at all).

Read the following excerpt, and see if there isn't something strangly familiar about it:

The Johnson administration planned for major American military action against North Vietnam nearly five months before the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, according to secret government documents made public yesterday by the New York Times.

These plans were made, the documents, show, at a time when the United States already was directing clandestine sabotage operations in the North.

Two months before the attack on two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 2 and 4, 1964, the administration sent a Canadian diplomat, J. Blair Seaborn, on a secret mission to Hanoi where he is quoted as telling Premier Pham Van Dong that "in the event of escalation (of the war) the greatest devastation would result for the D.R.V. (North Vietnam) itself."

It was the Tonkin incident - called totally unprovoked by the administration - which led Congress on Aug. 7, 1964 to pass a resolution declaring that the United States was "prepares, as the President directs, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force," to assist South Vietnam. It was on this resolution that President Johnson subsequently leaned heavily to widen the war.