Reply #6: Book suggestion

[gratuitous]

"War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" by Chris Hedges. In it, he puts the words to a lot of the memes and the symbols that accompany war. I'm only a couple dozen pages in, and it's good stuff.

I don't know that it explains why nations are so ready to go to war, but it does lay out much of the groundwork that has to be done before a nation will get hot to trot for war, and reads like a road map (you should pardon the expression) for what the corrupt Bush administration did from rolling out its new product line in September 2002 through the actual launching of the invasion six or seven months later.