The Not so Subtle Moral Decay of the US Military

You should make that clear to your elected representatives.

 

The U.S. military had nothing to do with manufacturing either of those.

I guess you didn't know there were actually TWO Gulf of Tonkin incidents.

The famous one was at night August 4th, 1964. This is the one where the two destroyers reported possible torpedo attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. It was later found to be false. Simple misreading of sonar readings. LBJ even doubted it.
Yet this was the one that the Johnson Admin. sought the Gulf of Tonkin resolution over.

The lesser known one was August 2nd, 1964 and it was an attack on the U.S.S. Maddox (IIRC) in broad daylight. We know it occurred because the North Vietnamese openly admitted it and complained that the return fire from the destroyer killed the commander of one of their torpedo boats.

 

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the elected representatives work for the people. They work for whomever writes them the biggest checks.

 

huh?

 

The August 2 attack was the US attacking N Vietnam torpedo boats, not the other way around. The Maddox fired first, and was in N Vietnamese waters.
As you said the Aug 4 incident never even happened and yet was used to justify an undeclared war, undermining the US Constitution.
Both the military and the Pentagon were complicit in supplying false information to LBJ, Congress, and the American people as the Pentagon Papers clearly revealed.

 

LOL.. As if, this is the method of the NDP and liberals. You can't run away from it.

 

You have actual proof of that from an unbiased source?

 

You have evidence of that beyond what you claim the Pentagon Papers reveal?

 

What more proof do you want? The Pentagon papers were the military's own documents proving they lied and purposely misled Congress and the American people.

 

In an organization as large as the U.S. military there will always be dissenting voices.

 

I was just reading some more background on the incident. You have characterized it well except that sources in the Pentagon Papers and released documents from the NSA along with McNamara's admitted statements all have shown that the US misrepresented the August 4th incident purposely to justify ramping up the war.

The US instigated the August 2nd attack by firing warning shots at perusing VK vessels to which they responded with torpedo and missiles of their own.

I fully agree that the trap Johnson fell into was not wanting to appear "soft" on communism and have another country (domino) fall on his watch. I think he though that if he let Vietnam fall it would be political suicide - and it may have been from within his own administration but the tide of the American people would have backed him for not dragging the country in deeper. This would be the ruin of his presidency and the end of any "great society" aspirations which were not actually bad ideas on the face of it.

This is the trap that so much of American foreign policy has been sucked into since the end of WWII, namely, elevating the threat of "communism" to an existential one with a zero sum outcome even when there were great opportunities for cooperation and negotiation between the two sides. So many intelligence reports were painting the Soviets as so far ahead of America in nuclear delivery tech and a dire when in fact the exact opposite was true where the communist world knew it was in many ways a paper tiger and looking for accommodation with the US. The military/industrial dudes needed an enemy and would not let that one get away.

And the rest is history, so they say...............

 

What are you talking about? This is not dissenting voices, it is proof positive that the US Government and the US Military lied and pursued a war under false pretense and illegally in 4 countries. When the military and the government act illegally and violate the trust and control of the American people then the government is out of control and you no longer have a free country. When all this was exposed they had no choice but to admit defeat and withdraw idiotically claiming victory while leaving 3 million murdered people as a result of their actions.

 

But, people with intelligence and maturity have proven that 9/11 was an inside job!
Here...

 

Who assured you that? Empires rise and fall......that is the nature of empire, they overextend themselves economically and militarily while bankrupting their people to do it..........just keep watching.

I can't think of any libs who would have gladly done that. With UN security council approval, intervention was a legal will of the international community.

There may have been pacifists who thought that South Korea was not ours to give or take and that S. Korea's gov should take care of itself but that is another topic entirely.

 

This graph is actually misleading when one takes into account defense contractors like Halliburton or Carlyle and all the private merc forces and foreign governments it supports but still, at very least the US spends more than the next 7 nations combined on outright military funding.



Think what all that money could do for the education and healthcare for the American people if it were used to uplift rather than kill people

 

NSA, Pentagon Papers and McNamara himself have all stated that the incident on the 4th was contrived to justify US intervention.

The incident on the 2nd, the US fired warning shots first which were interpreted as attack prompting a direct response from the VK

 

Once again. Wrong forum. and nothing of the sort has been even indicated. Much less proven.

 

McNamara was not a member of the U.S. military.

 

They were there to provoke an incident, and to use that incident as a false flag to justify direct intervention.

 

Completely meaningless statistic

1) The U.S. actually has no real idea what nations like China and Russia spend on their militaries.
2) The statistic is meaningless because it does not tied spending to U.S. commitments.
3) If that money of the U.S. was NOT spent on the military what makes you think it would be spent on education or healthcare? Remember U.S. education spending is already the highest in the world per student. And U.S. healthcare spending is already among the highest in the world.

 

You're a 9-11 Truther. So nothing you claim has any credibility.

 

I have never said a damn thing concerning 9*11 so it is you who have no credibility.

 

Sorry. I was referring to Jazz. All of you types run together when I'm reading your posts.

 

And just what kind of "type" is that?

 

unreasonable anti U.S. military zealots.