LIES AND FOREIGN POLICY:Old and New Stories

 Saturday, March 5, 2022

LIES AND FOREIGN POLICY: AN OLD STORY

 Harry Targ

This is an old story. As Professor John Mearsheimer has pointed out, governments, often democracies, lie to convince their citizens that war is justified. As many have pointed out, lies have been perpetrated on all sides about the Ukraine war.

Part of the job of peace activists is to interrogate all the narratives, seek truth, and stand up for basic principles: no war, no interventions overt and covert, and justice for all people.

And it is a testament to the potential wisdom of people that governments feel they must lie to achieve their goals.

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Foreign Policy Lies Lead to War

July 25, 2003

By Harry Targ

On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression.

Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted "no." Over the next three years the U.S. sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.

Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.

President Johnson's lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.

Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq- imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.

The American people must insist that their leaders tell the truth about the U.S. role in the world.

And from Peace Action October 23, 2025

Subject: BREAKING: 9 illicit military strikes, 37 dead, no legal authorization

n Venezuela - help stop Trump's march to endless war!

Harry - If the now NINE illicit military strikes from the Trump administration on small craft in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific ocean are beginning to look a lot like the “endless wars” we confronted over the last 25 years, you’re on to something. ✅ No Congressional authorization for military strikes ✅ Vague, unsubstantiated threats to our security ✅ Designation of actors as “enemy combatants” to have them summarily killed without any legal review ✅ Lies, lies, and more lies If it looks like endless war, talks like endless war, and walks like endless war, then it’s more than likely the beginning of yet another endless war. As of this week, the Trump administration has now bombed nine individual small boats, killing 37 people. The President has justified the strikes as a matter of national self-defense, claiming, without evidence, that drugs from the region are responsible for three hundred thousand deaths in the U.S. last year. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” Trump said at the United Nations last month. “Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than twenty-five thousand Americans.” In reality, there were about eighty thousand drug-overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. Fentanyl, which was responsible for the overwhelming majority of them, doesn’t come from Venezuela, and the Coast Guard has NO record of ever seizing it in the Caribbean.[1]  Trump's strategy also now extends well beyond these small boat attacks. Media reports indicate his administration is preparing potential drone strikes within Venezuela itself, targeting what they claim are cartel leaders and drug labs.[2] Officials have suggested similar military actions could extend to Mexico, where Trump has repeatedly threatened intervention. This represents Trump's broader attempt to assert U.S. military dominance throughout the Western Hemisphere, treating our neighboring countries as targets for American force rather than partners for diplomatic solutions. Earlier this month, Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) introduced a broad War Powers Resolution to block strikes in the Caribbean Sea. Their resolution lost on a largely partisan vote, and the strikes have predictably escalated. Now, they are back with a more specific War Powers Resolution aimed at stopping an unauthorized war with Venezuela, and the Senate needs to feel the heat from the majority of Americans who want an end to these unjustified, illegal, endless US wars.  Click here now to demand your senators support the Kaine/Schiff/Paul War Powers Resolution today! Harry, this is a critical moment in stopping this dangerous new war from escalating out of control. Trump has indicated that he plans to step up his dangerous warmongering. In addition to the drone strikes in the Caribbean, he’s already admitted to authorizing CIA operations within the borders of Venezuela. He’s ordered B-52 bombers to fly just off the Venezuela coast. Trump has foreshadowed a land war as well, threatening "so now we’ll have to start looking about the land because they’ll be forced to go by land.” With the initial War Powers Resolution earlier this month, forty-four Democrats, two Independents, and two Republicans showed they had the spine to stand up and block Trump’s unauthorized, unjustified military strikes against boats in the Caribbean. We now need to turn those 48 votes into the 51 we need to pass this War Powers Resolution. We must get louder and even more insistent in our calls for no more war –– and that’s what we need you to do today. Contact your senators today and demand that they reclaim their constitutional authority to debate and vote on war authorization, and support SJ Res 90 - the Kaine/Schiff/Paul War Powers Resolution to end U.S. armed hostilities with Venezuela. Behind this ramped-up militarization of U.S. relations in the Western Hemisphere is Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and the head of the White House Homeland Security Council. Miller is also a key figure behind the appalling increase in militarization against immigrants here at home. In Miller’s view, these military strikes help expand the President’s power, while also reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as “alien enemies.” As another former Trump Administration official put it, “this just feels like the militarization of domestic policy. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other.’ You say that we’re under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities. You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”[1] Yet our constitution gives the power to authorize the use of military force to Congress, and it’s incumbent upon us to make sure they hear our insistent demand to take that authority back. Or, as Senator Tim Kaine more aptly put it, “Should this lawless Administration drag our servicemembers into an escalating conflict without a specific authorization by Congress, every American will be able to tell from today’s vote if their senators tried to stop it, or rolled over.” Please, write to your senators today and demand they go on the record for ending this potentially disastrous war.  In solidarity against this disastrous, illegal, and unnecessary war with Venezuela,  All of us at Peace Action Sources: [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-real-target-of-trumps-war-on-drug-boats