Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 4
January 23 – The U.S. military establishment is definitely orienting in the direction of a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident, one that is manufactured for the purpose of carrying out a so-called defensive military assault, but is in reality a major provocation.
The military has been clamoring for action for some time. The Carter administration, having embarked upon a dangerous confrontation with the USSR, has been preparing the groundwork diplomatically, politically, and psychologically for such an incident.
The attempt at an Olympic boycott, the cancellation of the grain contracts with the USSR, the reduction of consular staffs with the USSR, and many other measures attest to this only too clearly. The capitalist media for its part has saturated the public with nearly hysterical anti-Soviet propaganda.
The impatience of the military is intensified by the failure of the Carter administration to club the imperialist allies – France, West Germany, Japan, and others – into line on the questions of sanctions against Iran and measures directed against the USSR. Moreover, while there will be wild applause for the new Carter doctrine of anti-Soviet confrontational struggle, it is likely to fall far short of the outright blank check to Carter and the Pentagon on the question of outright military action.
It should be remembered that capitalist governments for many decades now have not found it convenient to commence a war by first making a public declaration, although this is a distinct legal requirement according to the U.S. Constitution. Imperialist wars must be begun nowadays under the mask of “defensive” military actions.
One doesn’t have to go back to the sinking of the Lusitania for an example of a phony, manufactured cause for launching an imperialist war. The Tonkin Gulf incident, although more than a decade old, has not dimmed the memory of those who conspired and carried it out.
It will be remembered that it was Lyndon Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff who prepared the alleged attack by the Vietnamese against U.S. naval aircraft in the vicinity of the Gulf of Tonkin. It was on the basis of this phony incident, which has now been exposed to the whole world as a fraud, that Johnson rammed through a joint resolution in both houses which gave him the green light to go ahead with a military response, one which cost the American people in the long run hundreds of billions of dollars and 50,000 dead GIs.
The then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright, was skeptical of the veracity concerning the Gulf of Tonkin incident but later said he took Johnson’s word for it. Only two senators out of 100 had the guts to stand up to the frameup – Senators Gruening and Morse. Both are gone now.
The immediate locale for a rerun of the Gulf of Tonkin incident is in the Arabian Sea. By now the whole world knows that the U.S. has amassed virtually its entire aircraft carrier fleet in that area. What it the purpose of having assembled this death-dealing nuclear armada?
According to the Carter administration it is directed first against Iran and Gulf states which may sympathize or show signs of solidarity with Iran. Secondly, it is supposed to deter “Soviet aggression.”
A front-page story in the New York Times of Jan. 23, which runs for almost two columns with maps, purports to sound the alarm of the “Soviet naval threat.” A careful reading of the story, which is datelined Muscat, Oman, adds up to the single, solitary fact that a Soviet naval ship has been anchored in the middle of the main shipping lane at the eastern end of the Strait of Hormuz and that this ship, the Taman, a 6,450-ton converted timber carrier, can monitor the movement of ships in the Persian Gulf.
One may ask, so what? The U.S. has literally dozens of these ships all over the seven seas monitoring worldwide traffic and carrying all the sophisticated spying equipment that the U.S. is capable of. How can the Times make such a fuss about a six-and-a-half-thousand ton converted timber carrier, even if it is monitoring the Persian Gulf traffic? Doesn’t the U.S. do the same? And doesn’t the U.S. have its entire fleet of carriers right around there? What’s behind the alarm?
One can read this alarming article back and forth and find no clue to the reason for the alarm. There is cause for alarm all right, but the alarm should be directed at the brazenness of Carter and the Pentagon.
A very small item appearing in the Washington Post and tucked away in a corner of page nine in the New York Times of Jan. 22, makes it clear that President Carter authorized the Pentagon to deliberately dispatch B-52 long-range bombers over Soviet ships in the Arabian sea. The purpose of the bombers is to harass and threaten Soviet ships in that vicinity.
The Assistant Secretary of Defense, Thomas B. Ross, said that the purpose of the flights was to show “the significant U.S. ability to project force worldwide.” It should be noted that this wasn’t a single flight but a continuing process of harassment of Soviet naval craft. The bombers, Ross stated, were performing sea surveillance with elements of the American naval taskforce in the Arabian sea.
Anyone who is in the slightest degree acquainted with these sea surveillance trips of B-52 bombers knows that it is by and large not merely harassment but a provocation, if it is carried out over foreign ships. If these aggressive naval maneuvers are carried out over a period of time, an incident of the Gulf of Tonkin type is almost certain to develop. One should note that Assistant Secretary of Defense Ross, while denying that the bombers are armed with nuclear weapons, didn’t say whether they were otherwise armed.
By Carter giving the okay to the Pentagon to buzz the Soviet ships he was more than trying to demonstrate U.S. naval muscle in the Arabian Sea. He was conspiring with the Pentagon to create one of those incidents which his friend Lyndon Johnson knew so well.
It should be noticed that the U.S. military establishment, particularly the Navy, is now engaged in exercises, with allied warships participating in some of them, in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the eastern Pacific. Elements of the U.S. rapid-deployment force, including airborne army troops and tactical air units, are also engaged in provocative maneuvers ostensibly testing the Panama Canal’s defenses. But in reality, it is a warning to the Caribbean countries that the U.S. is on the road to war.
At the other end of the Pacific the U.S. is carrying out military exercises near Panmunjom on the border with south Korea. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (north Korea) has attacked these exercises as war preparations by the U.S. against the DPRK.
(The U.S. was emboldened to carry out these exercises after the Brown visit to China where the Chinese leaders for the first time deliberately left out any mention of their former pro forma request for the U.S. to remove U.S. troops from south Korea. This is part of China’s new anti-Soviet partnership with the U.S.)
It is in the area of the Arabian Sea that the U.S. military establishment is most anxious to demonstrate its military prowess. It is there that the danger of a military provocation by the Pentagon is the greatest. The assembling of such a vast armada is not for mere show.
If a military provocation occurs by the Pentagon it will not be because of trigger-happy individual admirals or their subordinates acting irresponsibly or outside of the chain of command. It will be carefully prepared having in mind that the cover stories of the past, especially during the Viet Nam war, were easily uncovered once anti-war sentiment became strong.
Nevertheless, for the idle ships and idle hands of the military, the devil has plenty of work. The devil, in this case, is the entire array within the military-industrial complex.
They have been preparing for this and in conjunction with the basic civilian sector, and none other than the former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the U.S. during the Ford administration, Fred Charles Ikle, have long been at work expounding on the necessity of getting a full industrial mobilization of the country on the scale of World War II.
As early as Dec. 26, 1979, Ikle argued in the Wall Street Journal for immediate preparations for an industrial mobilization and a five-fold increase of defense production to prepare the masses psychologically for this. In other words, to dupe and deceive the masses for such a vast and utterly unprecedented venture. Only extraordinary measures of “awakening” the country, as the militarists put it, will suffice. Hence a major war provocation to stimulate the consciousness, that is, to corrupt the masses with jingoism and chauvinism is most urgently needed. And that can only be manufactured by a Gulf of Tonkin-type frameup.
More than anything else, this is what has to be brought to the attention of the mass of the workers and the oppressed.
Last updated: 11 May 2026