Vietnam, Iraq, and now … Venezuela?

When it comes to armed conflict, this nation has sometimes used its own faulty intelligence to enter into ill-advised and disastrous wars.

And it appears about to happen again.

To refresh our collective memories, let’s look at two infamous incidents of fictitious intelligence that led directly to Americans (and many others) dying needlessly.

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident

In 1964, the U.S. was active in the Vietnam conflict, but primarily in a support role. Part of that support role involved the Navy running patrols off the coast of North Vietnam, in a part of the ocean known as the Gulf of Tonkin.

On August 2, while the destroyer USS Maddox was doing signals intelligence work off a North Vietnamese island, it was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Shots were exchanged, with most of the damage happening on the North Vietnamese side.

On August 4, the destroyer USS Turner joined the Maddox on patrol. Seeing radar returns that they thought indicated an attack, both ships fired where the radar indicated there were enemy boats. It turned out that there was no North Vietnamese attack, and the U.S. commanders and crew had been mistaken. The commander of the U.S. task force then expressed his doubts about the supposed attack — but the Johnson administration ignored his doubts and reported that the U.S. ships had been attacked by the North Vietnamese.

The result? Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson the authority to “assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by communist aggression.” This led to Johnson sending U.S. ground troops to South Vietnam to attack North Vietnam in early 1965.

Eighteen years and tens of thousands of deaths later, the U.S. left Vietnam. The scars of that conflict are with us still today.

And it started with faulty — possibly intentionally faulty — intelligence.

The Iraq War

We all know the faulty intelligence that led to the Iraq War. Supposedly, Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” that he might use at any moment against any of his neighbors, including Israel. George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, told President Bush that the info was so solid it was a “slam dunk.” General Colin Powell told the United Nations that “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

Of course, it was not solid. In fact, it was completely untrue.

Did the Bush Administration intentionally misled the American people? There is debate about that. But there is no debate about this: the intelligence community committed “one of the most public — the most damaging — intelligence failures in recent American history.” From that same analysis, published by the Air Force University:

There were three interrelated waypoints along the analytical pathway that led to this intelligence failure. First, intelligence analysts failed to place their assessment of Iraq’s alleged WMD program in a strategic and political context and try to understand the motivations, intentions, and interests of Iraq’s government. Second, and perhaps central to our intelligence failure, intelligence community analysts assumed that Iraq was hiding WMD. Hence, trapped by this mindset they narrowly pursued only one working hypothesis. Finally, analysts failed to convey explicitly to policy makers the ambiguity of their evidence and the reality that their conclusions were far from an analytical “slam dunk.”

Based on this supposed “slam dunk,” the Bush administration took this nation to war. I don’t need to tell you the destruction that war caused; many of you are more familiar with it than I am.

And once again, our troops and our nation suffered because of both a massive intelligence failure and our leaders being all too willing to believe it.

And now, Venezuela

The impetus for this Bruce’s Take was something I read earlier today: that a right-wing Venezuelan expatriate with powerful friends in Washington have “spent the past year feeding info to Trump and his team that’s been refuted by Trump’s own intelligence agencies but still drove the U.S. toward war with Venezuela.”

From Jonathan Larsen, reporting on a new court filing:

The two men are former CIA Senior Operations Officer Gary Berntsen and Martin Rodil, who moved from Venezuela to the U.S. more than a quarter century ago and built a network in U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and politics.

They’re the ones who told Trump that Tren de Aragua is a paramilitary force sent by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to destabilize the United States. They also claim that Maduro heads a global drug cartel and leads an international conspiracy that’s stolen elections in 72 countries.

If Larsen’s reporting is accurate, Trump and his advisors are using information from an ex-Venezuelan right winger with an ax to grind against the current Venezuela government to justify attacking shipping boats on the open water and killing those aboard. And soon, they may use this same “information” to justify taking this nation to war against Venezuela itself.

Note that this intel has been refuted by Trump’s own intelligence agencies. And yet, it fits into his own desire to be seen as “tough” and “strong,” so he believes it and acts on it.

Let me ask you this: Do you believe that other nations in South America would stand to the side while we invaded a country on their continent? Do you think it would be “over in six days,” as Donald Rumsfeld famously said of the Iraq War?

It is time for the Congress to find its spine and tell Trump and his would-be warmongers that there will be no war with Venezuela. And if Trump ignores them, they should move on to impeachment.

We cannot, once again, commit American troops and American lives for a lie.

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Originally published at Forward Kentucky.