Did the government lie to the people in order to go for full scale war in Vietnam?
I’m pretty much with Paul though I think we should nev er underestimate the ability of people for self-deception. So my take on Tonkin is that people wanted to believe it so they did, just as they wanted to believe Saddam had the WMD (and to be fair, that was a pretty good bet based on past behavior). What did not happen was for people to take a thoughtful careful look at the situation, instead of inciting responses. And on the other hand, if you really read the Pentagon Papers you know that the lies were many and deliberate; tapes show Johnson knew well there was no path to victory in Vietnam; the light did not exist at the end of the tunnel, the body counts were wildly exaggerated and the wrong metric to use anyway…all in all it was a thoroughly human and a thoroughly dishonest war. And it was here, to be quickly followed by Watergate that America lost the ability to believe its leaders. And now we refuse to believe anything they say. Not sure it’s an improvement.
