History

There is a secret history of the Vietnam War that has been under lock and key for the last three years. The information has been carefully researched and compiled by an official historian working in the archives of the National Security Agency (NSA). Word has leaked out because the historian, Robert Hanyok, knows that truth is vital to democracy. Or maybe he just wants to see his name in the New York Times.

Before we go on, I'll get this out of the way: the secret is that mid-level NSA analysts screwed up the intel around the reported attacks on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and deliberately fixed the intel to cover what was most likely an honest mistake. The attacks led to an escalation of the war and the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" which congress passed soon after. The Resolution gave Johnson a blank check to do whatever he wanted to fight the North Vietnamese commies.

And he ran with it, to the tune of 500,000 troops, billions of dollars, and eventually 58,000 American dead and more than a million Vietnamese.

Would all this have happened without this bad intel? Probably yes. LBJ had his blood up, and there are indications that the White House doubted the reports about the attacked destroyers to begin with. But then again- who knows? Maybe without these reports, Johnson would have had more limits to his conduct of the war. Maybe Nixon and Kissinger would have been more restrained in their bloody bombing campaigns.

Okay, there's the secret. But why is it secret? What national security interests are harmed by these revelations?

Well, no legitimate security interests, but lots of political interests. See, the modern White House had this research squelched because it might remind people of how they cooked up their Iraq war.

There are several layers of irony here. You might think that a backward conservative administration would want to kick dirt on the legacy of a progressive Democratic president. Why would Bush protect Johnson?

Perhaps because Bush sees himself as the champion of executive privilege. Perhaps he'll cover LBJ and Jimmy Carter and yes, even Bubba, because he needs that favour returned in spades. If some zealous historian starts digging the Bush dirt in a few years, it's going to mean really big trouble - even decades from now.

Of course, he needn't worry about that. As soon as American retake their government, the investigations will start and the filth will be brought to laundry.

Motives

Vietnam was a tragically misguided adventure in the projection of American military and political power. Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon were each increasingly drawn into the fight until Nixon cut and ran in 1973. Actually, I'm not sure whether he really cut, but he definitely ran.

The vital distinction to make between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War is this: while misguided, the architects of the Vietnam War thought they were battling communism in a world struggle for dominance. They thought they were fighting for democracy and Western freedom against a communist ideology that was oppressive and denied basic freedoms to millions of people.

North Vietnam was a real bad guy. As was China and the USSR. With the fall of the Soviet Union, we're more used to communism lite,' with their cheap exports and limited use of free enterprise zones to make money and revitalize their economy.

The communism of the 50's and 60's that LBJ and Nixon fought was the communism that said, as Khrushchev bellowed at the UN: "we will bury you." It was an ideology that caused millions of deaths. A million Ukrainians were starved to death, quite on purpose. Soviet leaders regularly purged any opposition. It was extreme and it was brutal - and in China and Vietnam, it still is, It's just better at public relations now.

The new report concludes that the decision to fight in Vietnam was not political in a domestic sense; the intel was not cooked to convince others to go to war. And it wasn't approved at a high level - LBJ, McNamara and the other primaries were not aware that they had bad intel. Nor did they ever ask for bad or 'cherry picked' intel.

But Bush did. His ideologues weren't fighting a real menace like Soviet communism. They were fighting their own personal demons. The cooked intel was presented for a domestic audience, and was purposefully misleading. These were not earnest Cold Warriors trying to defeat an implacable global foe.

These were representatives from big defense and energy industries trying to drum up business.

They knew just what they were doing. When they told a lie, they knew they were lying. Why do you think their terms were all so carefully couched? They knew - from Georgie to Chicanery to Rummy and on down - that they were cooking up a bad war.

More proof is in the hiding of this new history. Just the act or refusing its release is proof that the traitors know their treason.

"This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and intelligence reform," said Mr. Aid, who is writing a history of the N.S.A. "To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is wrong."