For Pacifica Radio, January 12th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, and sign up for the podcast feed at scotthorton.org.
Introducing Gareth Porter the Great, author of Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare, and the brand new forthcoming, at the beginning of next month, the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, From the CIA Coup to the Brink of War, and that is co-authored with John Kiriakou.
Gareth Porter ain't no CIA.
Come on.
Anyway, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, my friend?
Hi, Scott.
I'm fine.
Glad to be back.
Great to have you back on the show here, man.
You have a very important piece in the American Conservative Magazine, Pompeo's Gulf of Tonkin incident.
And you know what, before we get too far into that, let's just talk about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for a second.
I think probably by now, anybody who's ever heard of it at all knows that it was an overblown attack, and in fact, one kind of imagined attack on an American destroyer that served as the Causus Belli for the real escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964.
But you know a little something about that, that a lot of people don't.
And there's a really important story there.
So why don't you tell us about it?
Oh, I should mention, you wrote the book, Perils of Dominance, all about the war in Vietnam, because you're a historian too.
Right.
And you are absolutely right that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, quote unquote, is absolutely crucial to understanding the more general dynamics, political dynamics within the United States government that led to the ultimate decisions for war in Vietnam by the United States.
And the key thing here, which I really went into in great detail in my book, is that Lyndon Johnson, as well as John F. Kennedy before him, were both subject to intense pressure from what might be called the national security state or the war state, as some would like to call it, and I'm one of them, meaning the Pentagon, the uniformed military, and the CIA, essentially.
It's those characters, those roles and powers that were actively pushing for both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to begin to go to war initially, in the case of JFK, in South Vietnam, to send troops to South Vietnam as early as 1961.
And then, more crucially for understanding Gulf of Tonkin, in 1964, or really late 63, as soon as Lyndon Johnson became president, the entire crew of national security advisors began to put pressure on him to begin the bombing of North Vietnam, because at that point, they began to feel that that was really the only way that they could put pressure on North Vietnam necessary to force them to call off the war in the South.
Otherwise, they were going to be in trouble.
So really, the story about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in August of 1964 is a crucial part of this broader tale of how the Pentagon and the uniformed military, as well as the National Security Council advisor at that point, were pushing Lyndon Johnson to begin the bombing of the North.
And what they were trying to do was to use what they would hope would be Johnson's belief that there was a second incident of North Vietnamese patrol boats shooting at and firing small arms, not a major, a big weapon, but a small arms attack on a US ship in the Gulf of Tonkin.
In fact, on August 4, there was no second attack.
There had been one a couple of days earlier.
But Lyndon Johnson had decided not to retaliate, thinking that the North Vietnamese believed that that US ship was part of a broader effort to attack North Vietnam, including CIA-sponsored raids against the North Vietnamese coast.
And so the second alleged attack, which apparently the skipper of a US ship in the Gulf at first believed had taken place, he was convinced later in the day, in fact, not too long after that, that in fact, he had been mistaken that it was a weird result of the sonar system, the radar system, picking up false signals that there had been an attack.
And that was relayed to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara very quickly by early afternoon of August 4, Washington DC time.
And so McNamara knew that there had not been a second attack.
There was no evidence of that.
And he was being asked to wait on any US response until they could have reconnaissance by daylight.
McNamara refused to do that, and instead went ahead with the order to carry out this first air raid, air strike against North Vietnamese targets.
But he never told LBJ what he knew, that there had not been a second attack.
And so LBJ went along with that.
And as a result, you have the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in Congress, which overwhelmingly approved language which said the United States will use force if necessary, essentially, to respond to defend our interest against attacks and so on and so forth, and really was regarded as a kind of unofficial declaration of war.
But LBJ never really wanted to get involved in that war.
He was really pressured into it.
And this was part of that process.
Now, if people want to know more about that, Chapter One of the book Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg is really remarkable.
It's about his first day on the job as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for killing people or whatever it was.
He was an assistant to the Deputy Secretary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's like a third or fourth rank, I think, civilian at that time at the Pentagon.
And he signs in, clocks in, sits down and hear all this stuff, starts coming across the teletype, describing what all is going on.
And as you say, the captain himself notifying that actually looks like false alarm here.
We had the new guy was listening to our own propeller.
You know, we woke up the senior sonar man and he set us straight.
Everything's okay.
And but then so it just kind of feels like, hey, if Daniel Ellsberg knew all that in real time, then they must have known all that in the Oval Office at the White House.
But you're saying that the Secretary of Defense McNamara knew, but the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, was not informed that, don't worry about it, false alarm.
And then the next day, went out and gave this big press conference and pushed for Congress to pass him this blank check war authorization.
And how do you know that for sure?
Well, I've read and listened to all of the telephone conversations between Lyndon Johnson and Robert S. McNamara that day.
And although there was one conversation, which was not recorded, if you follow the thread of their back and forth between the two of them, you can see that the missing conversation certainly did not pass on that kind of information, because the next phone call made absolutely no allusion to any of that whatsoever.
It was as if Lyndon Johnson had not been told anything more than that things were exactly what he thought before.
And secondly, we know that Robert S. McNamara told Lyndon Johnson that night, at the NSC meeting that officially approved the order to go ahead with the strike, that indeed, US ships had been under attack, and that they were waiting to get the final evidence of that until morning.
But of course, they weren't going to wait.
And that was, they didn't say until morning, they were talking about some intelligence that had to do with intercepts.
But they were satisfied that the evidence was sufficient to go ahead with the strike.
Now, I had two phone conversations with McNamara at two different times during the time I was working on my book, and I confronted him with what I had found out.
And he denied it, but his denial was very equivocal.
He told me that, well, I could have told him that night at the NSC meeting.
It didn't necessarily require that I tell him during the day by telephone, which is in effect admitting that he didn't tell him by telephone.
And so it was crucially, the crucial evidence was the notes of the NSC meeting, which were written up and have not been published, long since published, that show, in fact, that McNamara did, in fact, claim that the US ship had been attacked again in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Man, that's really something else now.
So let's talk about Mike Pompeo, our current Secretary of State, and his role in what you're calling the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, kind of parallel breaking out in Iraq here, which luckily, at the time of this recording, has not resulted in any real war with Iran yet.
And in fact, not even a real proxy war with them in Iraq yet.
But it sure could.
Yes, indeed.
You want to go back?
Okay, go ahead.
Go back to whenever you want to go back and tell this story here.
The point I'm making in my article is that there is a very interesting parallel here between that story of Robert S. McNamara and not informing President Johnson that there had not been a second attack, and that therefore, they shouldn't go ahead with the attack on North Vietnamese targets.
And Pompeo's obvious role in sort of leading the charge here in convincing Donald Trump that he should go ahead and kill General Soleimani, the most important Iranian military figure, and indeed, considered second only in Iranian political life to the Supreme Leader himself.
And I'm quite convinced here that Pompeo was indeed the one who got both Secretary of Defense Esper and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, to go along with this scheme, thinking that Pompeo was going to convince the President that they should go ahead with the idea of attacking and killing Soleimani.
And what he did here was to use an attack on an Iraqi base near Kirkuk, which was carried out on December 27, to get the President to agree to go along with this.
And sorry, but that was the beginning of it.
It wasn't the end of it.
I'm taking a longer story.
But on the 27th, there was this attack on the base.
And the idea that was conveyed to Trump was that we know for certain that this was done by pro-Iranian militias, Iraqi militias that are supported by Iran.
Now, in this case, it happens that the base is in the midst of a very significant concentration of ISIS troops, ISIS militants in that part of Iraq.
They have been growing now since 2017, very steadily, and are becoming much more of a serious security problem in that part of Iraq.
And it's reported by the New York Times that they did not know who had fired the rockets at the base.
And there was a very weird addendum to that story that they had discovered a rocket in an abandoned vehicle, an abandoned truck near the base, which means that this was not that big of a deal.
It was something that could have been pulled off by people without that much technological backing.
So the real point here is that it's not an exact parallel by any means, but there's an interesting parallel here that there was a very ambiguous situation.
They didn't know who had carried out this attack.
And the logical thing to do would be to wait until they could ascertain the reality, the fact about it.
Of course, just as McNamara chose not to wait until daylight, until they could carry out reconnaissance by daylight, Pompeo decided to go ahead and push the idea of an attack right now.
As McNamara did, in fact, try to deceive and succeeded in deceiving LBJ, I think you can make a very strong case here that Pompeo was really pulling Trump into a decision that he should have been to basically defend the true interests of the American people.
He should have been warning him that we don't really know who did this and not use it as a bludgeon, essentially, to push Trump in the direction of this decision.
Well, look, if you want to make the parallel to Vietnam, there was no chance that the South Vietnamese had fired some torpedoes to make it look like the North did it.
But here, ISIS has every reason in the world to try to pick a fight between America and the Shia they wish they hadn't fought for for the last 17 years.
Of course, that's true.
And that makes it even, in some ways, more of a leap toward war than the case was in 1964.
And then, of course...
And the New York Times, you quote the New York Times here saying, actually, ISIS had threatened this base before.
They had.
That's right.
And they were a threat to Iraqi security forces.
They had been for many months.
And just to be clear for the listeners who may not understand this, America's forces are in Iraq, only something like 5,000 of them, in alliance with these very same Shiite militias in the Iraqi army fighting ISIS.
And so...
Well, that, of course, is that's the part of the reality of the present conflict in the Middle East that this administration, and particularly Mike Pompeo, are eager to try to avoid having be discussed because it, in fact, totally undermines the essence of their argument about Iran at this point.
Think about this, Gareth.
What if this really had turned into, you know, the other day, Trump calling out the B-52s in response to that missile attack from Iran and let this thing continue to escalate?
And it still might continue to escalate.
And maybe it's ISIS jerking our chain all along.
Bin Ladenites trying to give the Americans an excuse to lash out at the Shia for them.
This is a thought that I've had, actually, that it's not inconceivable that there was a well-timed attack by ISIS, thinking that this could help to promote or provoke, I should say, a war between the United States and Iran.
This has been one of the al-Qaeda jihadist aims for many years now.
That's right.
I mean, you think about Ayman al-Zawahiri hiding out in Pakistan somewhere or whatever the story is there.
Other than being named the pharaoh of Egypt himself, what would he like to see in the world?
America kill the Ayatollah, that's what.
Turn Persia to sectarian war for a good 20 years or so.
It's a good time to him.
I agree.
I agree.
So basically, what we're seeing here is the use of an incident that really, they had no business, they had no legitimate reason to use that as an excuse to assassinate the number two figure in Iran.
There should have been, at the very least, a pause to be sure what they were talking about.
But of course, we know that that was nothing more than an excuse.
It was not really a substantive reason for carrying that out.
The real reason was that Pompeo wanted to have a military confrontation between the United States and Iran because, A, his political ambitions are dependent on the political interests in this country and in Israel, or supporting Israel, who are in favor of a war between the United States and Iran.
Are you sure that you're convinced that he's to the right of Trump on this?
Oh, yes, I am.
That he was trying to get Trump to do worse than he did?
I think so, yes, of course.
I think that he believes in the rapture and he's aligned with those right-wing extremist Christian Zionists who believe in the rapture and believes that that is his political future, that that's going to be the horse that he would ride into national office.
There's a lot of evidence to support that, and particularly the timing of his latching on to the issue of U.S. policy toward Iran in 2015.
Before that, he didn't really have much interest at all.
I like that Pompeo is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse there.
Hey, y'all may have heard that me, Tom Woods, Dave Smith, and a bunch of others are trying to do everything we can to recruit all our friends and audience members to join the Libertarian Party this year in order to support the candidacy of the great Jacob Hornberger.
We believe Hornberger is far and away the best candidate to bring our message of peace and liberty to the American people in this crucial and controversial election year, but we need your help.
Step one, go to scotthorton.org to sign up for the National Libertarian Party.
Step two, find the Mises Caucus on Facebook or at lpmisescaucus.com to find out how to join your state party and make sure that you get a spot as a delegate to the National Convention here in Austin in May.
Bring your wives, father-in-law's, best friend Jimmy's, and whoever you can as force multipliers.
Please make sure we win this thing so we can take hardcore anti-imperialist libertarianism to the general election.
Who's with me?
All right, let's do this. scotthorton.org lp and thanks.
Listen, so I had an interpretation of Trump's killing of Soleimani, which was a huge escalation over this tit-for-tat, which by the way, even if Khatib Hezbollah had done that rocket attack, who says that Iran told him to do it?
Nobody's even asking this stuff at all, much less proving their case in any real way.
But after Trump's huge escalation here, it still seemed to me, and I'm not trying to give the guy credit, but it's still just, the reality is he's got to know he can't have a real war.
All our troops in Iraq would be forfeit right there, man.
He's, the army's got to be telling him, you know, we like picking on Iran, but we don't really want to fight them.
He must know that, so it seemed to me like killing Soleimani was meant to be the last word, right, of Donald Trump saying, listen, don't test me.
I'm worse than the last guy.
I really mean it.
I'll do crazy things like this, so don't you dare, because essentially, as he even put it, he was trying to stop a war, not start one.
He's still blaming, you know, all of the escalation and everything on them, but you're saying you think that Pompeo had a whole different motive here, assuming that, I mean, you agree with me about that, that Pompeo was trying to get the Ayatollah to do something crazy back and try to goad Trump into going ahead and really escalating after that.
Well, look, don't forget that there were, there was the case of the two cases in 2019 in which Pompeo was urging Trump to respond to the shootdown of an American drone with a strike against Iranian military targets.
Now, you know, that is an extremely high risk of getting into a tit-for-tat exchange with Iran, which is what I'm talking about.
And then, of course, there was the incident, the case of the Iranian strike against the Saudi oil facility, in which, again, Pompeo was leading the charge along with, well, Bolton was gone by that time.
You're talking about the Houthi attack that they blamed on Iran?
That's right.
The Iranian technology, let's put it that way, that was the cause of the damage to this Saudi oil facility.
And again, Pompeo was really pushing Trump to respond with military force.
And, you know, he was part of a much broader notion that the United States cannot refuse to go ahead and respond to anything Iran does that we don't like and we feel is a challenge to US power by using force against them.
Now, you could argue that he believes that Iran is too scared to really do anything serious.
But I would just point out that the US military leadership, generally speaking, believes that any US targeting of Iranian military facilities will bring about an Iranian response against US military targets.
And that is what I think has to be part of the calculus here for Pompeo.
So it is, to my mind, a much more serious position that he's taking, taking a very high risk of tit for tat situation militarily between the United States and Iran, which, you know, you can argue that there's still a good chance of preventing the ultimate war, you know, sort of uncontrollable war.
But nevertheless, I think that is what he's after.
Well, so when we first met, it was 13 years ago, January 2007.
And everybody was really worried that they were blaming everything that was going wrong in Iraq on Iran now, even though we've been fighting for him for the last few years.
Now it's all their fault.
And they even forgot to accuse him of making nuclear bombs for a little while because they were so busy accusing them of making EFP bombs and killing Americans in Iraq, and using that as an excuse to strike our IRGC bases inside Iran.
And yet the history goes, that the military told Bush, we don't want to do this, we can't do this, we'll lose way too many guys.
And essentially, sir, no, sir, we're not going after Iran, it's too big.
And they just have too much to lose.
And, you know, people are familiar with the funny meme of, oh, yeah, well, if Iran doesn't mean us harm, how come they put their country so close to all our military bases, and it has all those bases?
Well, but those all represent 1000s of American troops that are essentially hostage to Iran's missiles.
And they don't have a very powerful military force, but they can deliver missiles.
My real point is, this is what's kept the peace is mutually assured destruction.
Of course, America could absolutely destroy Iran even without nuclear weapons, but not without them causing major pain and damage to America and its allies in our interests over there at the same time.
And so that's what's kept the peace so far.
And there's nothing new to fight about.
It's not like they started making nuclear bombs, or it's not like they started really trying to kill American soldiers in Iraq or any new excuse for war.
So it seems unthinkable.
And that doesn't mean it's impossible.
But there's so much incentive against it.
And so little to really fight about Gareth, right?
Or what am I missing here, man?
You're not missing very much.
And I would just add a couple of things.
One is, of course, that the really big war would come with an exchange between Hezbollah and Israel.
That's when it would become terribly destructive and with tens of thousands of deaths.
And that has been a key, I would say it is the most important part of the Iranian deterrent to either Israeli or US attack on Iran has been for years and years.
So it's not simply the newest technology that you've alluded to, which is an important addition to that deterrent.
But the basic strategy that Iran has followed for many years, that it has depended on its allies, non-state allies, particularly Hezbollah, to be ready and willing to respond to an attack on Iran by lashing out at Israel.
And that has clearly deterred Israel since 2006, since it tried the last time to go into to Lebanon.
So that's one point.
The other thing is that the Iranians are not interested in starting a direct military conflict with the United States, if they can help it.
But I think what they may be forced to do, even if the end of the crisis is stabilized, that they will be forced to do something about the Strait of Hormuz.
And that's where they have the greatest leverage, the greatest military dominance, is right there in the Strait of Hormuz itself.
And so I suspect that that would be ultimately the way that they would respond if this present crisis continues for the next several months.
And I'm assuming, by the way, that Trump is reelected and they would have to deal with that.
Of course, I hope that's not the case, because I think Trump's policy toward Iran is simply too fraught with danger of war.
That's all there is to it.
Well, and you know, the Iranians so far, they fired their missiles and seemingly kind of deliberately missed, at least one of those missiles didn't even have any explosives in it.
And the Iranians announced that they were withdrawing from the restrictions in the deal, but still they're not withdrawing from the JCPOA itself.
So apparently holding out for that same change of regime here in America later this year, in the hopes that they can get back to that nuclear deal.
The bottom line is that the Iranians are very prudent decision makers and policymakers and that they are going to have a very carefully considered and rational approach to whatever it is that they're doing.
Yeah, we're so lucky that the Ayatollah, the supreme leader of this, you know, virtual dictatorship over there is such a cool and dispassionate character and we can count on him to not do anything crazy like our side would.
Hopefully, maybe.
Although, you know, I read that he said, you know, the missile strike was a good slap in the face, but it's not enough.
So hopefully it just means leaning on the Iraqis to kick us out, this kind of thing.
But I don't know.
You know what?
Are you predicting new violence by the Iranians anywhere against American interests here soon?
You know what?
If I were David Petraeus, I don't think I would be planning any trips to the danger zone in the Middle East in the near future.
Yeah.
Well, you know, speaking of him, he said this guy, Soleimani, why he was the bin Laden of Iran.
Right, right.
Which is a nice turn of phrase to conflate the one side with the other there in case you weren't paying attention, you know, the topic of my next, my next piece, definitely.
Yeah.
All right.
Great.
All right.
Well, you guys, that's why he's Gareth Porter, the great this time writing for the American conservative magazine Pompeo's Gulf of Tonkin incident and his brand new book all about America's Iran policy co-authored with John Kiriakou, the CIA insider's guide to the Iran crisis from the CIA coup to the brink of war.
Thank you again, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
And that has been anti-war radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
