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Incident in the Strait: Remember the Maine!
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Counterpunch - Jan 8, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/irelan01082008.html
I ncident in the Strait
Remember the Maine!
By PATRICK IRELAN
The New York Times reported on January 07, 2008, that "five armed
Iranian fast boats took aggressive actions on Sunday around three
United States Navy warships." The American ships-including a destroyer,
a frigate, and a cruiser-were sailing into the Persian Gulf. Despite
the trepidations expressed by the Times, the U.S. vessels were in no
real danger. Three warships of this size and firepower could blow away
all the fast boats in the Northern Hemisphere.
A Pentagon sycophant said the Iranian actions were "reckless and
dangerous." He didn't say if the U.S. was looking for an excuse to
attack Iran.
The Iranians said the whole matter was a mistake and that it ended when
the people on the various boats recognized each other.
Why do I not believe the Pentagon?
As any high-school history teacher could tell you, the United States
has long used fabricated incidents involving naval or commercial ships
to initiate all-out wars. In February 1898, for example, as the U.S.
battleship Maine sat in the harbor at Havana, Cuba, the ship exploded,
killing 260 sailors. Investigators later concluded that a defective
boiler had caused the explosion, but by then President McKinley and the
Congress had already declared war on Spain. The United States wanted
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, three of Spain's remaining
colonies, and it got them. Spain had habitually treated the former
slaves and indigenous peoples of its colonies with great brutality, and
the U.S. quickly treated them the same way, crushing a Philippine
independence movement at the cost of 200,000 Filipino lives.
World War I, one of the most costly and senseless wars in Western
history, broke out in 1914. At first, the United States remained
officially neutral, although its trading habits and financial ties with
England created anti-German sentiment among America's ruling elite. For
the U.S. working class, none of the countries at war offered any
genuine incentives to climb out of the trenches and die from machinegun
fire and poison gas, although thousands of Americans would soon do
exactly that.
Because its fleet controlled the Atlantic Ocean, the British could
easily import food, clothing, and weapons from the United States. Faced
with British navel power, Germany could import relatively little. For
this reason, it subsequently resorted to the use of U-boats, which
could be constructed more quickly and inexpensively than conventional
warships. Germany announced that its U-Boats would attack any British
ship transporting arms, which would have normally excluded passenger
ships.
But in 1915, a German U-boat sank the Lusitania, a British passenger
liner, killing 1198 people, including 128 Americans. The Germans
claimed that the Lusitania had carried both passengers and armaments, a
charge later proven to be true. Nonetheless, the heroes in Washington,
D.C., used this and other incidents to lead America into war against
Germany and its allies. World War I harvested 112,000 American lives
and those of millions of Europeans.
All this may seem like a tedious American history lesson, but I make no
excuse for it or for reminding anyone who is still reading of an event
that occurred in August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, just off the coast
of North Vietnam. The Maddox, a U.S. spy ship sailing in stormy seas,
reported that it had received a torpedo attack. Shortly afterwards, the
captain of the Maddox sent a radio message in which he said that there
might not have been an attack after all and that no response should be
initiated until he could determine the real facts of the matter. The
real facts of the matter later showed that nothing but bad weather had
attacked the Maddox, but by then the truth was too late and didn't
matter anyway.
President Lyndon Johnson was not a man to let facts get in the way of
his foreign-policy objectives. He quickly rammed his Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution through Congress, thereby giving himself the authority to
initiate "all necessary measures to repel armed attack." These
measures, as it turned out, included the use of napalm, carpet bombing,
Agent Orange, the bombing of Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, and other
horrors I still cannot forget.
Why do our rulers repeatedly use fabricated events at sea to justify
their wars, crimes, and brutalities? The most obvious answer is that
unbiased observers rarely float here and there on vast bodies of water
on the outside chance that they might see something that would
embarrass the Commander in Chief. But it may also be true that once the
lie has been reported as truth in the New York Times, the reader may
never see the retraction printed on page B52.
[Patrick Irelan is a retired high-school teacher. He is the author of A
Firefly in the Night (Ice Cube Press) and Central Standard: A Time, a
Place, a Family (University of Iowa Press). You can contact him at
pwirelan43@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*
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