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meme contraexample of course being the gulf of tonkin incident where us warning fire on vietnamese vessels in vietnamese waters being responded to with actual f
by smegsicle 3y ago
meme contraexample of course being the gulf of tonkin incident where us warning fire on vietnamese vessels in vietnamese waters being responded to with actual fire was taken as grounds for war, because war was desired
- vidarh 3y agoIt's worse than that: The US intentionally provoked the incident with sabotage and hit and runs, and then "faked" the second incident (they had bad data, fired on nothing, and then used skewed intelligence reports to back up a false claim of an attack) which was used as the final excuse (the latter was long suspected, but admitted to by McNamara in 2003, and by NSA records declassified in 2005).
- pclmulqdq 3y agoYeah, this is not a counterexample to the Clausewitzian view of war, but an example of it, because the converse of what I said is also true: If there is a political will to war, there will be a causus belli, no matter how weak. In the case of the Vietnam war, it does appear that the US military and the CIA basically manufactured that causus belli. A lot of cold war conflicts had the same sort of thing happen.