Daily Times

History may or may not repeat and may or may not rhyme. But certain events can only be ignored or dismissed with great peril. Sixty years ago this month, the United States Congress recklessly and foolishly raced to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on August 7th, 1964 with just two dissenting votes in the Senate. That law gave President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to begin a war in Vietnam that the U.S. would eventually lose.

The cause celebre was an alleged attack by North Vietnamese PT boats against two US Navy destroyers patrolling off the North Vietnamese coast in international waters on August 4. Two days before, PT boats had attacked USS Maddox causing no damage. Maddox and USS Turner Joy were ordered to return to the patrol area.

But the second attack, like Iraqi weapons of mass destruction four decades later, never existed. How the United States could make two such grievous miscalculations is less important than preventing similar catastrophic decisions based on faulty or fabricated information. The murder of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran is one such event that could precipitate a disastrous outcome for the wrong reasons.

The murder of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran is one such event that could precipitate a disastrous outcome for the wrong reasons.

Who did kill the Hamas leader? Israel is the most likely suspect. Israel has undertaken a decapitation strategy to eliminate the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, killing the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon accused of planning the missile strike that took the lives of twelve Druze children on the Golan Heights. But unless Israel was entirely cynical, why eliminate the lead Hamas negotiator if any kind of settlement over hostages and ending the war in Gaza was possible? Of course, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu may have had no intentions of seeking a ceasefire until Hamas was destroyed.

More importantly, if Haniyeh was assassinated by a bomb planted in his apartments could this have been a Mossad plot? Unless the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Security Forces were incompetent or part of the plot, it seems inconceivable that these apartments were not regularly swept for bugs and bombs. Who would have had advanced warning that Haniyeh would stay in this particular flat and who would have triggered the bomb since it is unlikely it was preset to explode at a given time? No answers there.

The list of possible suspects could include dissidents within the Iranian regime; those wanting to stop the negotiations over Gaza; and those blaming Israel either to provoke escalation or to isolate it further. And the tensions between Sunni Hamas and Shia Hezbollah might have played a role as neither is a permanent ally. In any case, no smoking gun or bomb has directly linked Israel or any other party to the assassination. And that Israel has not taken responsibility does not lead to any particular conclusion.

Yet, at this writing, Tehran may have little choice other than to retaliate as LBJ did sixty year ago. Whether such a retaliation would have the consequences of the Vietnam War is far from certain. A regional war might. And there is another reason for worry.

Suppose the decision was made to fabricate, threaten or indeed attack US military or civilian targets in the Greater Middle East to force the United States to retaliate. The aim would be to embroil the US in a possible Middle East conflict that would tax its resources and force profound disruption at home in the midst of a turbulent election. In the event of a USS Cole type suicide bombing that crippled the ship in 2000 in a Yemeni port or the Beirut bombing of the barracks in which 241 US Marines died in 1983, both presidential candidates could be in competition to take the stronger action.

Donald Trump could have the advantage. Being out of office, he has no responsibility and could be as critical or outrageous as possible of whatever action the administration took. Joe Biden is still president and thus the commander-in-chief. Kamala Harris is the nominee. How would decision-making work in this case?

The fear is that any sort of attack against the US in these conditions could easily provoke an overreaction much as how Israel responded to the heinous and murderous rampage of October 7th. In a rush to judgment, would cooler heads prevail to determine first what happened either in the killing of Haniyeh or of an attack made against US targets?

The events of 60 years ago, along with the 2002 authorization to use force in Iraq, should inform our thinking. Ready, fire, aim is not the answer.

The writer is a senior advisor at Washington, DC’s Atlantic Council and a published author.