Republicans, who have been shamelessly exploiting the Chinese balloon incident in a self-serving attempt to gain political advantage over Biden, are responding to the latest “takedown” of an unidentified object over Canada in a way suggesting a Gulf of Tonkin-like reaction.
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) said in a statement that the U.S. military has been working to eliminate this “unprecedented challenge” in Alaska’s skies. “Can the Biden Admin please explain why they shot down two relatively small ‘objects’ over Alaskan and Canadian airspace this week, but allowed a known Chinese Spy balloon to collect and transmit data about our country for a week before it was brought down?” asked Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT).
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) claimed on Fox News that the Biden administration knows exactly what it’s been shooting at, but is hiding it from Congress and the American people.
Yesterday’s incident over Canada, the second shoot down (or alleged shootdown) in two days, brings to mind the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, particularly the second one, on Aug. 3, when the destroyer crews began to realize immediately after their guns went silent that maybe they were shooting at the waves and not North Vietnamese gunboats. Their doubts, which they began transmitting up the chain of command almost immediately, were ignored, however, and the myth of a second North Vietnamese attack on U.S. Naval vessels plying international waters became the basis for Lyndon Johnson ordering retaliatory strikes on North Vietnam and then for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by the U.S. Congress on Aug. 6 with only two dissenting votes. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
A statement sent out by U.S. Northern Command/NORAD, last night, should further raise concerns in that regard. It reported that NORAD and the FAA implemented a temporary flight restriction airspace in central Montana to ensure air traffic safety, a restriction that has since been lifted. “NORAD detected a radar anomaly and sent fighter aircraft to investigate,” it said. “Those aircraft did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits.” Since next to no information has been made available on the objects supposedly shot down on Friday [Feb. 10] and now Saturday, one might legitimately ask “are they shooting at radar anomalies?”
As for the Feb. 11 incident, it was clearly a joint U.S.-Canadian operation. The object was tracked for more than 24 hours—in other words, since Friday—as it passed through Alaskan and then into Canadian airspace, according to the White House statement. “ Canadian Minister of Defence Anita Anand later described the object as cylindrical to reporters Saturday night and said it was shot down at an altitude of about 40,000 feet. She said it appeared to be smaller than the downed Chinese balloon. The latest object appeared to be a small metallic balloon with a tethered payload, according to U.S. officials familiar with the situation, reported the Wall Street Journal.
A Canadian patrol aircraft is trying to pinpoint the debris from the destroyed object. Ms. Anand said she wouldn’t speculate on the object’s origins. “The importance of this moment should not be underestimated. We identified the object together and we defeated this object together,” Anand said of the joint U.S.-Canada mission.
