Every time the U.S. has gone to war, pretext incidents have been used as triggers to justify military action. Later, the conventional views of these controversial events have been challenged and exposed as untrue. Historians, investigative journalists and others, have cited eyewitness accounts, declassified documents and statements made by the perpetrators themselves to demonstrate that provocative incidents were used to stage manage the march to war. There are dozens of other examples from U.S. history besides those exposed in these pages. During the Cold War, dozens of covert and overt wars were promoted using specific pretext episodes. However, the crusade against communism was the generic backdrop for all rationales.
