A faction that wants to make war creates an incident and blames it on the enemy. The real warmongerers can then attack while falsely claiming that their targeted enemy started the hostilities.

Examples:
The Enterprise-D nearly destroyed a Lysian space station in revenge but then it turned out the whole situation had been orchestrated by the Sataarans in tng5x14 "Conundrum".

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag