I appreciate some ideological and more interest-based reasons for doing so, but the price of having done it was so high, the consequences so cataclysmic, and the long-term cost is still going up.

The amount of casualties in some battles staggers the imagination.

I wonder if in the future, or real soon now, we have the same sort of stupid bloodletting in some beef with China. The Chinese are moving up and most of the time this happens there’s a big war to balance things. You can look at WWI and WWII as being a test of Germany as a rising world power that they failed. Much the same could happen with China. We’ve certainly screwed ourselves by handing over large parts of our manufacturing economy to them for next to nothing.

To be honest, I think the whole question of who started WWI is somewhat academic; it’s like a house fire where there was bad wiring, poor housekeeping, smokers in bed, and rats gnawing at the wiring–You want any one cause for the resultant disaster, you have your pick of things that led to it all igniting.

In the end, though… It all stems from that one day in Sarajevo, and the fortuitous fortune that put a failed assassin at the right place and time to make good on his earlier failure. The steps that it took to get there make one despair of there being any real rationality to the universe, because the odds were so heavily stacked against that specific sequence of events. As well, you have to wonder who was really pulling the strings in the background–There are long-held traditions in Serbia that the Black Hand was heavily influenced or even run by the Russian Okrana. How to evaluate that, I don’t know. There is some documentation to back that idea up, but nothing truly definitive, and if it’s true…? Then, the death of the Romanov’s was a bit of nasty karmic justice.

The Austrians issued a set of ten [or five?] demands from the Serbs all of which but one was granted. So war should not have been an inevitable consequence.