Gulf of Tonkin Incident (1964)

Sun Aug 02, 1964

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Image: Official U.S. Navy photo taken from USS Maddox (DD-731) during her engagement with three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, August 2nd, 1964. The view shows all three of the boats speeding towards the Maddox [Wikipedia]

On this day in 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred when the American destroyer Maddox was damaged in North Vietnamese waters, an event the U.S. government lied about in order to justify military action against Vietnam.

The incident began when three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were surveilling the American destroyer USS Maddox as it performed intelligence operations in North Vietnamese waters. The Maddox initiated the incident by opening fire, shooting off three “warning” shots; the North Vietnamese boats replied with torpedoes and machine gun fire.

The exchange caused ten North Vietnamese casualties and damaged one U.S. helicopter; there were no American casualties.

In response, the U.S. Congress passed a “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”, which granted U.S. 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.

On television, President Johnson made misleading statements about the incident and portrayed U.S. military escalation as an act of defense. Since then, the Pentagon Papers, the memoirs of Robert McNamara, and NSA publications from 2005 have proven that the U.S. government lied about the nature of the incident to justify a war against Vietnam.

  • Evil_Shrubbery
    3·
    3 months ago

    War profit enjoyers can’t rely on wars to just “happen naturally” - it waaay better to plan ahead & first shift the publics opinion towards pro-war, that way the budget is truly unlimited + you can use force against anyone anti-war.

    And what better way to achieve that than fabricate or force an attack.

    Who can’t remember the time they almost failed but at the end they finally went with the ol’ reliable “lets put all the eggs in one basket, advertise it, advertise it some more, advertise specific vulnerabilities, then wait for as long as it takes for the enemy to get there, even send people home bcs it was taking too long, and finally fire the all out preprepared propaganda the second something happens & keep it up for years until it enters pop culture”.