Those portions of the American public who weren't asleep back in 80s and 90s, when the truth about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin was briefed to Congress and reported in the media, already knew the books were cooked to get us deeper into Vietnam.  The recently declassified NSA material just places a period at the end of the sentence which reads "LBJ got his war on."  As a subsequent participant in the festivities in Southeast Asia and knowing more than a few people whose names are etched on that wall in Washington, I hold the memory of LBJ, Westmoreland, McNamara, Nixon & Kissinger with a special level of loathing.

History is a bitch and a bitch that comes back to bite those who think they can shade things and fool everyone.  History has also taught us that virtually everything we thought we knew about Vietnam was a fabrication aimed at setting Southeast Asia up as a hotter proxy for the Cold War.  We could have arrived at meaningful terms with Ho Chi Minh after WWII; he wasn't necessarily in thrall to the Soviets.  But we opted instead to locate our kind of Vietnamese, Ngo Dihn Diem, and install him as president of South Vietnam.  We stuck by him and his dictatorial ways until he outlived his usefulness.  Then we blinked and members of his military saw too it he was assassinated and replaced by another of our kind of Vietnamese.

We could have fought the war in Vietnam, keeping it within its borders but we said bombing the supply routes of the Ho Chi Minh trail wasn't enough, so we invaded Cambodia with US forces and the South Vietnamese military and we overthrew Norodom Sihanouk and replaced him with our kind of Cambodian.  What this did was tip the political scales in that country and make it possible for the Khmer Rouge to ultimately rise triumphant after we unassed Vietnam.  The ultimate result -- the genocide of the Killing Fields and decades of warfare and unrest in Cambodia, one of the most peaceful of nations before we started mucking it up.

We were supposedly fighting for democracy and freedom in South Vietnam, opposing the Communist dictatorship in Hanoi.  No argument that, once we flipped Ho Chi Minh the bird after WWII that the North became a Communist ally of the Soviet Union.  However, down in the South we were actively supporting a non-democratic succession of coup-driven governments.  We were also operating a nasty little war of assassination against people we linked to Viet Cong or North Vietnamese connections with Operation Phoenix.  This is not to say the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese didn't engage in atrocities and the like.  It is to say, we did it too, so we don't really have any right to say we were any more morally pure than anyone else there.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

Thanks for declassifying something that has been forehead-slappingly obvious since 1970.  Good going, NSA.  Thanks for the update.

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