The U.S. Is Looking for an Excuse To Fight

As the American armada of ships, warplanes, tanks and other equipment pours into the region around Iraq, the only uncertainty about President Bush's misguided and dangerous war seems to be just when it will start. But there's something else we should watch for closely, for wars seldom start without one.

What will be the final pretext for opening fire? Most wars need such a fig leaf, and unpopular wars most of all. Seldom, if ever, has the United States prepared for war with so little support. The administration itself is divided. Major allies are balky. At home, there are peace marches but no war marches; abroad, opinion polls almost everywhere show angry, overwhelming opposition. All this makes President Bush, more than ever, need a plausible excuse to start his war.

What will that be? Iraq's ties to al Qaeda? No evidence so far, and the administration has even stopped talking about that mythical meeting in Prague. Saddam Hussein's refusal to cooperate with the U.N. inspectors? For the moment, they have free run of the country, even of the hideously extravagant palaces. Iraq's failure to account for various sinister weapon ingredients it once had? Bush representatives are thundering away about this, but those 12,000 pages of documents and the accompanying CD-ROMs do not make for high drama. Bush needs a Pearl Harbor, not some disputed aluminum tubing or buried canisters.

Despite the desire for territory, riches or power that drive most wars, regimes itching to fight almost always find an immediate pretext. When Germany launched its long-prepared blitzkrieg against Poland in 1939, it claimed it was avenging cross-border attacks by Polish soldiers, who seized a German radio station and broadcast hostile statements. Newspapers around the world carried the story. After the war, it was revealed that the attackers were German SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms. As Hermann Goering. commander of the Luftwaffe, said before being sentenced to death at Nuremberg, "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Indeed it does. The United States has long found its own share of war pretexts. Eager to seize the crumbling overseas empire of Spain, President William McKinley had no convenient excuse until, providentially, the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor. The Spaniards apparently had nothing to do with this -- historians think that spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker ignited the ship's powder magazine -- but it didn't matter. Crowds shouted, "Remember the Maine!" as the United States took over Spanish possessions around the world, grabbing even Hawaii, which had no connection to Spain whatever.

In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson was eager to escalate the war in Vietnam, he pointed to attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. This provoked a stern Senate resolution and the first big bombing raids on North Vietnam. Only much later did it emerge that one destroyer was sailing provocatively close to the North Vietnamese coast, and the second of these attacks had never happened at all.

As the truth dribbled out over the years, many senators complained bitterly of having been misled, and turned against the war. But by that time nearly 60, 000 Americans, and a vastly larger number of Vietnamese, were dead.

One of the aircraft carriers that launched bombing raids after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the U.S.S. Constellation, is now in waters off Iraq. What will be the Gulf of Tonkin episode of this coming war? In the face of mounting doubts about the war at home and downright hostility abroad, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sorely need some provocation they can either point to or invent.