Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 5
January 28 – The working-class movement must face up to the danger of a Gulf of Tonkin-type of incident. We showed in our earlier installment how the U.S. military establishment is oriented precisely in that direction.
Carter’s orders to the military to fly armed B-52 bombers, presumably for reconnaissance purposes, but in reality to buzz Soviet ships in the region of the Arabian Sea, is a perilous development. The fact that there has been no outcry against it from any segment of the bourgeois media merely underlines the gravity of the situation.
The fact that the New York Times of January 23 could make a front-page scare story about a Soviet navy ship anchored in the Strait of Hormuz, as though this was a threatening development, shows how public opinion is being carefully manipulated and directed towards some military provocation.
The ship that the Times alluded to, and which allegedly was monitoring shipping traffic in the Arabian Sea, is the Taman, a 6,450-ton converted timber carrier. The U.S. has many such monitoring ships which virtually cover the seven seas. One is at a total loss as to why this should be a front-page story, except as a medium to scare and psychologically prepare the public for a provocation.
Yet when the Taman left the Arabian Sea, the Times printed and four-and-a-half line paragraph, tucked away in the next day’s paper, without mentioning that the “great danger” has presumably passed. Nevertheless, the buzzing by B-52 bombers of Soviet naval craft continues. Such harassment has all the makings of a provocation.
The Arabian Sea is again and again referred to in the capitalist press as the “jugular vein” of the U.S., its lifeline. And the need to protect and defend it by all means, including force, has become standard rhetoric by all the capitalist politicians. All of this is in the context of Carter’s blatant war call and his assertion that the U.S. will use force to “repel an assault on the Persian Gulf region.”
The naval armada that the U.S. has assembled in the Persian Gulf, composed of unprecedented numbers of ships as well as aircraft carriers, makes it abundantly clear that it is calculated to be more than a mere naval exercise in political intimidation.
What gives substance to this potentially explosive situation are political developments of enormous significance on the home front. For instance, the Carter administration has sanctioned the dissemination of official deception of the public by the State Department in its daily releases as part and parcel of the daily briefing for the press by the State Department. Hodding Carter, the State Department spokesman, now reels off a spate of so-called unconfirmed reports along with the daily briefing that run, for instance, from the alleged use of nerve or poison gas by the Soviet Union to the wild exaggerations of Soviet casualties in Afghanistan.
Now, it is one thing for the gutter press of the “free world,” such as the New York Post, to allege with impunity that 10,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. It is an entirely different matter when the government makes it official policy to disseminate these deceptions and when the capitalist media and press dutifully report them and never allude to the fact that these unconfirmed reports have been proven false, some of them patently so.
The fact that the U.S. government let it be known that it was deliberately switching policy on public information, and the fact that some of the press, including the New York Times of January 26, reported this, is not evidence of the freedom of the press. It is merely a measure of the brazenness and cynicism in the collusion between the government and the media.
This, however, is only one facet in the preparation of the masses for the “acceptance” of a war provocation by the Pentagon camarilla in the guise of a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident.
Carter’s demand in his State of the Union address last Wednesday that Congress take off the restraints on covert operations by the CIA is a clear signal that the preparation for a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident is on the way. Covert operations is another name for a secret war against the socialist countries, the liberation movement, and just about anybody who falls afoul of the interests of the military-industrial complex.
After all the thousands and thousands of pages from the hearing on the CIA, the drastic changes in personnel, the disgrace of some in high office, including two of its principal chiefs, the CIA’s covert operations are back in business as though nothing had ever happened – just a mere house cleaning in order to take this paramilitary arm of the U.S. terrorist apparatus more efficient.
No Gulf of Tonkin-type incident can really be prepared without giving full rein to the CIA. Since the current chief of the CIA, Stansfield Turner, is an admiral, the link to coordinate such an operation with the Navy in the Arabian Sea is much more easily manageable than otherwise. Removing the restraints on CIA “covert operations,” assuming that in recent years there have been restraints, means, particularly in the current crisis, that the theater for the CIA’s paramilitary operations will be enormously increased.
These operations, let it be remembered, range from individual assassinations, such as Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, and many, many others, all the way to the overthrow of progressive governments such as the Allende government of Chile. They also include secret wars, as when the U.S. used far-off Thailand as one big airbase from which B-52 bombers dealt death and destruction upon the Laotian, Vietnamese and Kampuchean people.
It goes without saying that in the current conditions submarine attacks by U.S. naval craft against Soviet shipping, particularly around the Arabian Sea, should not be excluded, given the fact that Admiral Turner is now in charge of the CIA and its covert operations.
A Gulf of Tonkin-type war provocation could take many different forms. It is not necessarily contingent on any particular region given the geopolitical mania of the Brzezinski hardliners who are now clearly in the ascendancy. Suffice it to say that it will be geared to confrontational struggle with the USSR.
The deepest and most profound indication that the U.S. is on the road to a Gulf of Tonkin-type of provocation is the sudden proclamation by the big business press, especially such organs of high finance and industry as Business Week and the Wall Street Journal, of the need to mobilize the entire industrial machinery of the U.S. and rapidly gear itself up to combat readiness.
The clamor to rearm and really militarize the country did not begin with Business Week. As we pointed out in our previous article, the agitation for it began in the select circles of the summits of the ruling class and was filtered through to the big business press in the Wall Street Journal of December 26 where a clear call was made for an “industrial mobilization” comparable to what took place during the Second World War and for a five-fold increase of defense production.
What do such calls indicate? They indicate that the bourgeoisie has made a choice for war.
The February 4 issue of Business Week carries several pages of material presumably demonstrating the incapacity of U.S. defense production to rearm quickly. In reality, it is a disguised plea for speedy rearmament on a most monstrous scale.
To speed up the entire military-industrial complex and virtually mobilize all of U.S industry, more is required of the U.S. government than merely allocating billions and billions of dollars for defense. That is already taken fully for granted.
It is hardly any more a question as to whether the U.S. defense budget will be upped. The sky is now the limit. But that is not enough.
“With overnight expansion of the [defense] industry out of the question,” laments Business Week, “there is a growing consensus [in the military-industrial complex] that a substantial surge in defense production can occur only if there is a political decision within the White House that a state of emergency exists.” (Our emphasis.)
That is what they are waiting for. To declare a national emergency one needs not just a rhetorical reiteration of all the old lies and so-called threats of aggression. One needs something new, some frightening development.
Indeed, that is what the military camarilla in the Pentagon is working hard and fast for with the Carter administration. And this is what has to be understood, first and foremost among the advanced elements in the working-class movement, who need to bring it boldly and clearly to the mass of the people.
Last updated: 11 May 2026