Finally, the government has admitted it doctored intelligence that plunged us into a disastrous war.

The Vietnam War, that is.

The New York Times reported this week that a National Security Agency historian concluded that communications intercepted by U.S. eavesdroppers during the Gulf of Tonkin incident were altered to make it appear that North Vietnamese had attacked American warships in August 1964.

I know, a lot of you are shocked to hear this news. You are flabbergasted to learn that this great nation went to war at least partly as a result of falsified intelligence. Who but the most rabid America-hater could ever have imagined such a thing?

What's really crazy is that the NSA officers who greased the skids for our Southeast Asian adventure apparently had no political motive; they distorted intelligence to cover up some of their initial blunders during their Tonkin surveillance.

"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war," said an independent historian familiar with the NSA's research, which the agency had kept secret since 2001.

It's hard to miss the irony of these findings coming to light at a time when the Valerie Plame case has been dominating the headlines. The CIA agent's outing occurred, of course, after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, revealed that the Bush administration had relied on fake documents to bolster its claim that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

Investigators may soon figure out for certain who was behind those forged documents and what their motives were. (The FBI suspects Italians produced the papers for financial gain.)

For now, what we know is that we're stuck with another Texan in the White House who can't find his way out of a military debacle that we charged into under false pretenses.

It's true that Iraq is no Vietnam. One reason this is so is that the current war will wind up being much more damaging to our security than Vietnam was. In spite of all the talk about the danger of falling dominoes in Southeast Asia, the communist victory in Vietnam had limited repercussions for the United States.

Not so the mess we've created in Mesopotamia. We've turned Iraq into the new Afghanistan, the place where tomorrow's global terrorist movements are being conceived and nurtured.

As Rand Corp. analyst Steven Simon told Reuters news service this week: "[Bush] has given them an excellent American target in Iraq, but in the process he has energized the jihad and given militants the kind of urban-warfare experience that will raise the future threat to the United States exponentially."

Those who have been paying attention know that this jibes with numerous other nonpartisan, expert assessments, including a CIA report earlier this year that said the Iraq war "could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills, and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists."

As if this weren't bad enough, the Saudis and others in the Middle East worry that the nascent civil war between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites could eventually spread throughout the entire region.

It's not as if no one saw any of this coming. Many people anticipated much, if not all, of this trouble, just as many anticipated those levees breaking in New Orleans. It's just that the White House, dominated by the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," had no interest in listening to anything but rosy post-invasion scenarios.

Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush's national security adviser, was always leery of an invasion. In a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine, he rehashes why U.S. troops didn't seize Baghdad during the first Gulf War:

"At the minimum, we'd be an occupier in a hostile land. Our forces would be sniped at by guerrillas, and, once we were there, how would we get out? What would be the rationale for leaving? I don't like the term 'exit strategy'--but what do you do with Iraq once you own it?"

Good question. Scowcroft wrote an op-ed in August 2002 arguing against an invasion. After the piece appeared, one of Scowcroft's proteges, Condoleezza Rice, is said to have confronted him and asked: "How could you do this to us?"

More than two and a half years into this calamity Rice helped engineer, shouldn't we be posing that question to her and her boss?

© 2005 Freelance Star