MB Civic

WHAT ARE national leaders to do when they want to thoroughly discredit another country or mount an attack when a provocation is lacking? “Casus belli” is defined in my dictionary as (1) “an event or combination of events which is a cause of war, or (2) may be alleged as a justification of war.” So the time-honored answer is: If you don’t have a casus belli, go for option 2 and invent one.

In the now-famous British confidential memos that described how President Bush was determined to attack Iraq no matter what, Bush discussed with Prime Minister Tony Blair the possibility of painting a surveillance plane in United Nations colors and flying it over Iraq in the hope that Saddam Hussein’s gunners would take the bait and shoot it down.

One thinks of the precedents the president and the prime minister could have drawn from. There was the “Mukden Incident” of Sept. 18, 1931, when the Japanese commander in Manchuria took it upon himself to provoke a war with China. His men blew up a segment of railway track near Mukden and made it look like the Chinese had done it. The Japanese promptly attacked the Chinese army barracks at Mukden, and took over the walled city. By year’s end, all of Manchuria was in Japanese hands.

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 was first described to correspondents in Berlin as a “counter attack.” The Poles had attacked the border in several places, it was alleged, including a German radio station at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. In fact, the assault had been made by German SS troopers dressed in Polish uniforms. In order to make it look authentic, the Germans had gathered a number of concentration-camp inmates, killed them by lethal injections, and left their bodies on the Polish frontier to provide the necessary casualties for a proper casus belli.

Israel went out on a limb in the summer of 1954 when it instigated an operation against Egypt that, when finally exposed, became known as the “Lavon Affair,” after Israel’s then minister of defense, Pinhas Lavon. Gamal Abdel Nasser was just coming to power in Egypt, and Israel wanted to discredit him and his government. So agents recruited by Israel set off bombs at the American libraries of Alexandria and Cairo, making it look as if the Egyptians were responsible. The fiasco caused a first-class scandal at the time.

Protecting one’s citizens used to be a good excuse for armed intervention. Stephen Kinzer, in his new book “Overthrow, America’s century of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq,” recalls that when the United States overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 in order to take the islands for itself, US Marines were landed “ `for the protection of the United States legation . . . and to secure the safety of American life and property,’ ” as the American minister in Honolulu had requested.

Eleven years later in 1904, when a Greek-American named Ion Pedicaris was kidnapped by a Moroccan bandit named El Raisuli, Teddy Roosevelt famously said: “Pedicaris alive, or Raisuli dead,” and sent warships to the harbor of Tangier. The Sultan of Morocco paid the ransom, and Pedicaris was freed.

Unlike Bush in Iraq, however, Roosevelt had no desire for regime change in Morocco, and as far as he was concerned Pedicaris’s release ended the matter.

Germany, however, did have designs on Morocco, which by 1911 was one of the last remaining un-colonized territories in Africa. In an incident remembered as the “Agadir Crisis,” the Germans hoped to beat the French to the colonial draw by sending the gunboat “Panther” to the sleepy Moroccan port of Agadir. The incident nearly triggered World War I three years early.

The German excuse for “the Panther’s leap,” as the press called it, was to protect German citizens from unruly tribesmen. The only problem was that there were no German citizens in Agadir to protect. So one was sent for.

A man named Wilburg was found in Mogador, 75 miles to the North, and dispatched to be the endangered German. He arrived in Agadir three days after the Panther had dropped anchor. He ran up and down the beach waving his arms, but the Panther’s crew at first mistook him for an excited rug merchant.

It is not recorded whether Prime Minister Blair or President Bush ever discussed these, or any other, past black operations to legitimize their takeover of Iraq. But in the end, manipulating the intelligence proved sufficient for the task.