Howard Berman: “I remember the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This is not the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. At that particular time, based on…”

“I remember the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This is not the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. At that particular time, based on an incident on the high seas, Congress quickly and without much discussion authorized a response that hardly anyone in either Chamber believed was an invitation to a massive expansion of U.S. participation in Vietnam. The subsequent use of that resolution to justify that action was not known at the time. Here it is totally different. We know what we are talking about. We are talking about authorizing the use of force, i.e., war, against Iraq, a major difference between now and the Gulf of Tonkin. This is what we are debating, this is what the American people understand this authorization to be, and the after-the-fact justification of the war in Vietnam based on that resolution is not what is taking place here. It is up front, and we know it.”