Before a state can launch a war it needs a causus bellum. The Bulgarian-Austrian writer Elias Canetti wrote about this in his 1960 masterpiece on mass pyschology, Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power):
Der erste Tote ist es der alle mit dem Gefühl der Bedrohtheit ansteckt. Die Bedeutung dieses ersten Toten für die Entfachung von Kriegen kann gar nicht überschätzt werden. Machthaber, die einen Krieg entfesseln wollen, wissen sehr wohl, daß sie einen ersten Toten entweder herbeischaffen oder erfinden müssen … Es kommt auf seinen Tod an und auf sonst nichts; man muß glauben, daß der Feind die Verantwortung dafür trägt. Alle Gründe, die zu seiner Tötung geführt haben könnten, werden unterschlagen, bis auf den einen: er ist als Angehöriger der Gruppe, der man sich selbst zurechnet, umgekommen … alles hängt sich an, das sich aus demselben Grunde bedroht fühlt. Ihre Gesinnung schlägt um in die einer Kriegsmeute.
(trans. It is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of being threatened. It is impossible to overrate the the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a victim. It need not be anyone of particular importance and it can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death, and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of a group to which one belongs oneself.)
But what if there is no First Death? That was the dilemma that confronted the planners for the Vietnam War in 1964. There was no First Death, so an attack on US Navy vessels had to be fabricated. This was the genesis of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that led to the resolution authorizing President Lyndon Johnson to increase troop deployments to the region. It was the "unequivocable proof" of an "unprovoked" attack by the North Vietnamese that eventually led to the war debacle.
Now, more than 40 years after the non-event, the National Security Agency has released hundreds of pages of top-secret documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. They were posted on the Web last week and can be accessed here. The material – which is fascinating to read – includes top-secret eavesdropping material called signal intelligence – or SIGINT – which is the most secret information that the government has. It is not easy for a non-expert to make sense of all the material; fortunately, the historian Robert J. Hanyok from the Center for Cryptologic History has analyzed all of the material and published his findings in a must-read article: Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964" Cryptologic Quarterly, Winter 2000/Spring 2001 (pdf File)
The entire article by Hanyok should be read, but he concludes that "at least 90% of the information was withheld" from Johnson administration officials, while "the handful of SIGINT reports which suggested that an attack had occurred contained severe analytical errors, unexplained translation changes, and the conjunction of two unrelated messages into one translation. This latter product would become the Johnson administration’s main proof of the Aug. 4 attack."
The parallels to the hyped and distorted intelligence used by the Bush/Cheney administration to justify the Iraq invasion are uncanny. The only question is: will we have to wait 40 years before the truth is revealed?
Tags: vietnam
