Word: pretexts
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...declared that a "state of war" existed with the U.S. and installed Noriega as Panama's "Maximum Leader." Then he sat back while his troops shot a U.S. Marine and abducted and abused a Navy lieutenant and his wife. Noriega could not have handed his American adversaries a better pretext for invasion...
...also provided public approval to the Hungarian reformers. In summing up a Warsaw Pact meeting in Bucharest last July, he pronounced: "Each people determines the future of its own country and chooses its own form of society. There must be no interference from outside, no matter what the pretext." What it all adds up to is that both in rhetoric and in reality, Gorbachev has done what Western leaders have been demanding for 21 years: repealed the "Brezhnev Doctrine," under which the Soviets claimed the right to provide "military aid to a fraternal country" (translation: invade it) whenever there...
...extended period of posturing by the Chinese and Japanese. But in January 1932, as the League of Nations debated Tokyo's aggression, a Japanese cruiser, four destroyers and two aircraft carriers anchored in the Yangtze River off the international city of Shanghai. They had come on the pretext of protecting Japanese citizens from attacks by Chinese mobs. In response, Nationalist forces moved into the Chinese suburb of Chapei and skirmished with patrolling Japanese marines. With his men giving way to the larger Chinese forces, Admiral Koichi Shiozawa ordered planes from his carriers to drop 30-lb. bombs over densely populated...
Independent experts assumed from the beginning that the Nazis had started the fire, but Hitler immediately made it his pretext for seizing power. He persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree that gave the government broad powers to make arrests, search homes, confiscate property and impose "restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion." The Storm Troopers were in power now, and mass arrests began. "My mission is only to destroy and exterminate," said Goring...
...Administration was not embracing the plan. Last week Kissinger insisted that his purpose is not to redo Yalta but to undo it. His proposal, he says, is to provide Eastern Europe with the political breathing room to reintegrate with the West while depriving the Kremlin of a military pretext to interfere...