Tonkin Gulf 2008?

ON AUG. 5, 1964, a

Washington Post

headline announced that

"American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression."

The headline referred to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which torpedoes were fired at two U.S. destroyers off the coast of North Vietnam on Aug. 2 and 4. Later that month, President Johnson signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, assuring vast escalation in our involvement in Vietnam. It wasn't a formal declaration of war by Congress, but an authorization for the use of force, like the one used in Korea.

The resolution began a more intense escalation of our presence in Southeast Asia, started by President Eisenhower, supported by President Kennedy, inherited by LBJ. Thus began the Vietnam War.

But the attack that provoked the escalation never happened. It took four years for the sonarman on the destroyer USS Maddox to say, in Time magazine, that a "Review of actions makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful."

It took 47 years for a Johnson tape recording to surface, admitting the attack never happened. And in 2004, LBJ Defense Secretary Robert McNamara appeared in the move about his life, "The Fog of War" and said of the incident: "It didn't happen."

I wasn't alive back then, but I can't imagine why it wouldn't seem unlikely to the average citizen that any such attack would occur. Why would North Vietnam, a country smaller than California, want to provoke the world's largest superpower into a war they knew the United States wanted?

Again, history seems to be repeating itself with the weekend report of Iranian boats attempting to provoke a scuffle with U.S. naval vessels as they headed into the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz, what the Navy called "a routine passage inside international waters."

I'm not saying this incident didn't happen. But we have to ask: What did Iran hope to gain by provoking U.S. warships? Things haven't gone well for us in Iraq, but it's obvious that they have gone much worse for the former Iraqi regime, and especially for the Iraqi people.

President Bush has no credibility when it comes to our Middle Eastern foreign policy. He lied us into Iraq, he tried to stop the 9/11 Commission from being formed, and he tried to lie us into Iran, which was put on hold with the now-infamous NIE report that said Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program back in 2003.

Still, Ayatollah Khamenei recently said he would like to restore diplomatic relations with the United States in the future.

Iran is not a threat. In spite of its being labeled part of the Axis of Evil, Halliburton was signing contracts with them as late as 2003. The supposed Iranian threat has been made time and again by the Bush administration because they're in a struggle to shore up their disastrous legacy - certainly as the worst post-war president, possibly as the worst president of all time.

But if I were Iran, I'd be scrounging for all the nuclear weapons I could get, considering that the Bush doctrine boils down to "attack them before they can attack you, even if they have no intention of attacking you," which was the case with Iraq.

EVEN LBJ knew he had to make up an attack before launching his illegal war. But this president has found support in Congress even without one. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed 88-2. Last summer, the Senate voted 97-0 to censure Iran for complicity in killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, which has never been proved. The Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, passed this fall by a vote of 76-22.

And phony outrage was stirred up against Iranian President Ahmadinejad when he wished to pay his respects at Ground Zero. A state department spokesman called Ahmadinejad's request "the height of hypocrisy," failing to mention that his visa had been OK'd by President Bush.

Bush also hasn't been shy about using the Iraq War to attempt to form what Karl Rove once called "the permanent Republican majority." Back in 2004, terror alerts were escalated when Democratic candidate John Kerry was up in the polls, and key votes on war legislation was put before Congress in time for midterm elections.

Who says they can't do the same with Iran, now that the Republicans seem desperate to not lose as badly in 2008 as they did in the 2006 elections?

Again, I'm not saying the naval incident didn't happen. Both the United States and Iran acknowledge that something took place. But there is too much history to understand what it was - and how it began - without solid evidence. *

Randy LoBasso is a Philadelphia writer. E-mail: Randylo2003@yahoo.com.