Yeah I had to read way back to figure out what was being talked about! Gulf of Tonkin was a repeat of the USS Maine. We're big on excuses; that's probably one reason the US has always acted so provocatively. If it hadn't been the Maddox it would have been something else; we spent something like 40 years flying loaded bombers up to the edge of Soviet air defense just to see if we could provoke them and boy howdy if you don't think we would have used that for boons had they plugged one... That P3 that crashed into a Japanese fighter in April 2001? The fact that Bush just backed down and ate shit was, in my opinion, a factor that led to the overreach after September 11. Somebody had to show the world he was tough; it's one thing to back down from the Chinese but a whole nuther thing to let a bunch of cave dwellers push you around. And then it felt gooooood. The '60s were a decade of amateur hour. Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Diem assassination, Gulf of Tonkin...