Tonkin resolution
The Tonkin Resolution (also Tongking Resolution ; English Gulf of Tonkin Resolution ; officially The Southeast Asia Resolution, Public Law 88-408) was passed on August 7, 1964 by the Congress of the United States . This resolution authorized the then American President Lyndon B. Johnson to officially enter the war between the United States and communist North Vietnam . The Tonkin incident a few days earlier was cited by the government as legitimizing the resolution. The House of Representatives followed Johnson's presentation and unanimously adopted the resolution. In the Senate , only Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening opposed 88 votes in favor; the resolution was thus passed, clearing the political path to the Vietnam War .
Occasion and circumstances
The Tonkin Resolution was preceded by two attacks by North Vietnamese speedboats on the two American destroyers "Maddox" and "C. Turner Joy" on August 2 and 4, 1964 in international waters. The first incident on August 2nd was only responded to with a protest note, after the one on August 4th the resolution was launched, with the second incident on the fourth day of the month turning out to be a false report to the president. At this point in time, the USA had already been stationed in South Vietnam with over 15,000 military advisors in order to protect it from the impending communist takeover. North Vietnam sought to take over the South, which the United States interpreted as a threat to its interests.
In 1971, the Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg gave the " Pentagon Papers " he had co-authored to the US media and through them uncovered the official presentation of the incident as deliberate misinformation. He thereby contributed to the withdrawal of the Tonkin resolution in the US Congress, but also triggered the illegal surveillance of representatives of the Democratic Party and, as a result, the Watergate affair .
Documents released by the US secret service NSA on November 30, 2005 once again confirmed that the attack on North Vietnam reported to US President Johnson on August 4, 1964 had been suggested, i.e. deliberately faked, through a one-sided selection of radio messages.
The North-South Conflict in Vietnam
In South Vietnam until November 1963 the anti-communist , authoritarian ruling Ngô Đình Diệm had ruled, who had turned away from the democratically oriented revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh after the August Revolution in 1945 and went into exile in the USA. During his time in exile in the United States, Diệm met several influential US politicians (including Lyndon B. Johnson), to whom he presented himself as a nationalist and anti-communist. They later persuaded the US Secretary of State Dulles to install Diệm as Prime Minister of South Vietnam after the end of the Indochina War and to use it there for their own anti-communist purposes. In the elections held after 1955, Diệm became Prime Minister as planned and during his tenure continued to receive massive financial contributions from the USA, which added up to around 80% of his total national budget. During his power phase, Diệm also ensured that the resolutions of the Indochina Conference , at which u. a. China, France, Great Britain, the USSR and the USA as well as the former French colonies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia had participated, were not implemented. These resolutions of the Indochina Conference in particular provided for general elections in North and South Vietnam, which should lead to a reunification and pacification of the Viet Minh in the north and the French colonial soldiers in the south of Vietnam and to end the military conflicts. Ngô Đình Diệm thwarted the implementation of these all-Vietnamese elections (with American help), so that it came to the final division of Vietnam into the northern, communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the southern, capitalist Republic of Vietnam . Despite these successes, Diệm was not able to sufficiently meet the expectations of the USA in the fight against communism. Diem was ousted by a coup, and in quick succession two more generals were installed as presidents one after the other, but they also failed to stop the influx and encouragement of the population in southern Vietnam for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam - the Viet Cong. There were violent conflicts between the Viet Cong and the French colonial rulers of South Vietnam, who were militarily patronized by the USA on site, and under the newly installed ruler in Saigon, General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu , the loss of South Vietnam to the communists threatened. The Viet Cong practiced the guerrilla tactics of small wars against the French, Americans and Diệm's regimes, which the USA hardly knew how to counter and which had already led to over 15,000 US operators in long before the Tonkin resolution South Vietnam had been deployed to destroy the Viet Cong and its structures.
The Tonkin Incident
In July and August 1964, the American military crossed the Gulf of Tonkin off the Vietnamese coast with two destroyers. On August 2, the American destroyer USS Maddox reported that it was being attacked with torpedoes and machine guns by a North Vietnamese patrol ship. At the instigation of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the US sent experts to the destroyer to assess the damage. However, there was no damage, only parts of cartridge cases, which were classified as 'North Vietnamese' in origin, but were rejected as insufficiently conclusive to justify retaliatory strikes because the associated bullets could not be found. On August 4, the Maddox and this time also the Turner Joy reported attacks again, but this time with "at least nine torpedoes of unknown origin". Admittedly, neither of the two ships suffered damage or projectile contact this time, as the attacks were only diagnosed by sonar bearings. However, the interpretations of the measurements were made very differently. The incident, which was initially reported as a “definite attack”, was later revised by the ship's commander and then confirmed as a “safe attack”. Admiral Moore assessed the incidents as “premature speculations by an overzealous sonar team” and “consequence of weather influences”, which are therefore only “imaginations of the sonar people in such a stressful situation”, because “in such a situation they keep everything they hear , for a torpedo ”(ibid.). McNamara nevertheless passed the reports on to President Johnson, who, unlike the incident on August 2, then decided to expand the military operation and drafted the Tonkin resolution for submission to Congress. However, recent research has concluded that the second incident on August 4th was a hoax to the president.
As a result of the military operation covered by the resolution, around 550,000 US soldiers were deployed in Vietnam. Around 3 million Vietnamese died in the intense war, including 2 million civilians. Around 58,000 people were killed on the side of the US Army.
In 1970, Congress overturned the Tonkin resolution. The United States had been gradually withdrawing its troops since 1969, before the last US combat units left the country in 1973. The ongoing conflict between communist North Vietnam and anti-communist South Vietnam ended in 1975 with a victory for the north and soon afterwards resulted in the reunification of the country.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tim Weiner, 2008, page 330. Weiner quotes a number of lines from the NSA's “admission” that an attack by North Vietnam did not take place and that it was faked.
- ↑ Tim Weiner: CIA: The whole story, 2007, German edition Frankfurt / Main 2008, page 326-330
- ↑ Spiegel.de Vietnam War: The Torpedo Attack That Never Was