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Dear Progressive Reader,

The United States has launched a series of military strikes against Houthi-controlled positions in Yemen. Speaking on Friday, President Joe Biden said ([link removed]) , “These strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea . . . . These targeted strikes are a clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation.” The President concluded by warning, “I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.” Which he did ([link removed]) early this morning. White House spokesperson John
Kirby was quick to explain ([link removed]) that the military strikes were “not designed to spark a wider regional war.”

But wait, those words sound a bit familiar. Sixty years ago, on August 4, 1964, then-President Lyndon Johnson took to the television airwaves ([link removed]) to announce U.S. retaliation in the now-infamous “Gulf of Tonkin incident,” which led, three days later, to a Congressional resolution ([link removed].) authorizing the war in Vietnam. “Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America,” said ([link removed]) Johnson. “We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.” Those words, enshrined in song ([link removed]) by
political folksinger Phil Ochs, always seem to be the precursor of a wider war.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident has since been revealed as false. Previously secret tape recordings of Johnson’s phone conversations in the days preceding the August 4 speech were released ([link removed]) to the public in 2001. The recordings showed that before taking action, Johnson already believed ([link removed]) that “maybe they [the North Vietnamese] hadn’t fired at all,” that it was, in fact, “a false alarm.” Twenty-six years later, in the lead up to another war in 1990, Iraq was accused of assembling tanks on the border of Saudi Arabia. At the time, the Pentagon was claiming ([link removed]) that “up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil supplier.” But a small Florida newspaper, The St. Petersburg Times, obtained satellite photos
([link removed]) from a Russian commercial flyover to show that no such troops or tanks were being assembled. Again in February 2003, Secretary of Defense Colin Powell went to ([link removed]) the United Nations to give definitive evidence of Iraq’s manufacture of “weapons of mass destruction.” That too was later proven false, and a decade later Powell himself said ([link removed]) , “I regret that a lot of it turned out be wrong.”

Independent investigative journalist I.F. Stone, who exposed ([link removed]) some of the lies surrounding the 1950s Korean War, is known to have ([link removed]) often said ([link removed]) , “All governments lie.” Certainly in this case ships have been targeted. This is wrong. But does it merit further raining down missiles and bombs on the people of Yemen who have suffered ([link removed]) for so long ([link removed]) in a war that has been ([link removed]) fueled by U.S. and Saudi weapons and technology ([link removed]) ? At The Progressive, we say ([link removed]) “No!” We call for
([link removed]) peaceful alternatives—before it is too late.

This week on our website, Rann Miller reflects on the ninety-fifth anniversary of the birth of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Throughout his life, King promoted non-violence, but in the final year before his assassination, he regularly spoke ([link removed]) against the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” In his speeches and his last article ([link removed]) (published posthumously on April 16, 1968, in Look magazine), King pushed for an “economic bill of rights” for all people. As Miller writes in today’s tribute, “If it’s true that the United States is the most powerful country in the world with the ability to fund a war and a genocide, why not fund people instead of wars? Why not forgive student loans, provide universal child care for all working families, make election day a paid federal holiday, protect the right
to vote for all, take health insurance out of the hands of the free market, mandate a baseline universal income, and provide reparations to African Americans for the unpaid wages owed to our ancestors? Where is the political will to accomplish these things?”

Elsewhere on our website this week, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies describe ([link removed]) the genocide hearings being held in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands; Sam Stein, an activist in Israel, tells of ([link removed]) his thirty-two hour fast for Gaza; and Southern Baptist minister David Key pens an op-ed ([link removed]) looking at U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and his “lifelong mission to use the power of the government to impose his own faith upon others.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – Don’t miss a minute of the “hidden history” of 2024 – you can still order The Progressive’s new Hidden History of the United States calendar for the coming year. Just go to indiepublishers.shop ([link removed]) , and while you are there, checkout some of our other great offerings as well.

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