You can't compare Vietnam to Iraq, no way! There are absolutely no similarities between the two. One's a jungle, you see, and one's a desert. Nothing at all alike. Well, except for maybe
this:
he U.S. National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that NSA officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence during the Tonkin Gulf episode that helped precipitate the Vietnam War, according to two people familiar with the historian's work.
The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the NSA, the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash.
Woohoo! Falsified Intel strikes again!
More:
President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.
The NSA historian, Robert Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that mid-level agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.
Wonder if Johnson had a stovepiping op like Cheney's? Hanyok is forgiving to theJohnson era intelligence operatives:
Both men said Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work in the NSA's archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials had discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.
"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years," Aid said.
Same shit, different decade....