War, war, war – and more war?

In 1971, nearly 50 years ago, The New York Times published a series of articles based on a study classified as “top secret” by the federal government. The study, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, commonly referred to as the Pentagon Papers, is a history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam 1945 to 1967. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned the Vietnam Study Task Force in June 1967 for the purpose of writing an "encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War.” He neglected to inform President Lyndon Johnson about the study.

On August 2, 1964, a U.S. Navy destroyer, the Maddox, was patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam when it reported being attacked by North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats; the Maddox fired shells and launched torpedoes in response. Two days later, on August 4, both the Maddox and the destroyer Turner Joy reported being under attack, again by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The U.S. Naval Communication Center in the Philippine questioned whether any second attack had actually occurred. In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2, but that there may not have been any North Vietnamese Naval vessels present August 4. The report stated, “It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. ... In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of their boats damaged on August 2.” (In 1965, Johnson commented privately, "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.")

Nevertheless, in a televised address to the American public August 4, Johnson stated that U.S. naval forces had been attacked, and requested approval of a resolution "expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and in protecting peace in Southeast Asia." He asked that the resolution express support "for all necessary action to protect our Armed Forces," and repeated his previous assurances that "the United States ...seeks no wider war". After fewer than nine hours of committee consideration and floor debate, Congress voted, on August 10, 1964, for a joint resolution authorizing the president "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force.” And the Vietnam War began.

The Pentagon Papers document how five administrations – Truman’s to Nixon’s – misled the public about the degree of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the futility of the fight. Johnson’s administration systematically lied, not only to the public, but also to Congress. The U.S. finally left in defeat following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, after a decade of hopeless war.

McNamara claimed he wanted to leave a written record for historians, to prevent policy errors in future administrations. But that hasn’t happened.

Fast forward to September 11, 2001, and the terrorist attack that killed 2,977 Americans. On September 20, President George W. Bush went before Congress and declared a “war on terror” against the Taliban government in Afghanistan because the Taliban offered refuge and protection to bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network. So on October 7, U.S.-led forces invaded Afghanistan. Recently disclosed documents from a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history – the Afghanistan Papers – reveal that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year (and counting) campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false, and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan; we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

The same may be said about the Iraq war. A memo by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dated November 27, 2001, contemplates a U.S. invasion of Iraq. One section of the memo asks "How [to] start?" listing possible justifications for a U.S.-Iraq War, one being "Dispute over WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] inspections—Start thinking now about inspection demands.” In late 2002, after international pressure and U.N. Resolutions, Iraq allowed U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission teams to return. But in 2003, the U.N. ordered the inspectors to leave after the U.S. threatened to start a war, which President George W. Bush did, ordering an invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. There was no credible evidence of WMD production, and no WMD have yet been found. Bush has since admitted that "much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong.” And yet, we’re still fighting in Iraq, capturing territory, abandoning it, retaking it, ad infinitum. The Iraqis asked us to leave, but we have no plans to go.

Now we’re supposed to believe a war in Iran may be necessary. Who said those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it?

Mark Berg is a community activist in Adams County and a proud Liberal. His email address is MABerg175@Comcast.net.