History may or may not repeat and may or may not even rhyme. But certain events can only be ignored or dismissed with great peril.

Sixty years ago this month, the Congress recklessly and foolishly raced to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 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 U.S. Navy destroyers patrolling off the North Vietnamese coast in international waters. Two days before, North Vietnamese 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 the discovery of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction four decades later, never took place.

How the U.S. 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.

Who killed the Hamas........

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