What if Economic Integration Was the Problem?
Who said, "It is an economic impossibility for one nation to seize or destroy the wealth of another, or for one nation to enrich itself by subjugating another," while arguing that war would therefore be impossible? [Try Sir Norman Angell, a British writer who eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1933), published "The Great Illusion" in 1910] At a moment in history when economic alignment, foreign trade and direct investment in foreign economies was greater than at any time in history, the world was also on the verge of the most spectacular and pointless orgy of death it had ever seen.

What is more the occasion was the murder by an anarchist of a minor and foppish twit in e minor royal family. So what really caused it?

But it must be a caution that when we have once again gone through the most tightly integrated economic process the world has ever seen, this time called globalisation, the world is not merely putting up its dukes for wars in Iraq, India/ Pakistan, Ivory Coast and Korea, but the whole idea of Europeanism appears to be splitting at the seams as well.

Maybe the cause is the globalisation itself? And there is another matter;

But history does contain lessons. And one of the most chilling currently might be this: Globalization is an almost unstoppable force. But stress the 'almost.' War has the power to overcome the seemingly inexorable forces of integration.

The rest of the story is here. The most worrying part is that 100 years ago we were armed with bits of lead and some explosives, primitve poison gasses and a stubborn willingness to shed the blood of our own children. Now we are armed wo the teeth with the most vicious and destructive devices that anyone ever conceived and driven by the voice of Madeleine Allbright who once famously calculated that the deaths of many thousands of Iraqi civilians, even children, "was a price worth paying"

While we are on The Price, this is an essay well worth the extended reading on the costs of war with Iraq. The final paragraph sums up a lot of the absent public debate.

Particularly worrisome are the casual promises of post-war democratization, reconstruction, and nation building in Iraq. The cost of war may be turn out to be low, but the cost of a successful peace looks very steep. If American taxpayers decline to pay the bills for ensuring the long-term health of Iraq, America would leave behind mountains of rubble and mobs of angry people. As the world learned from the Carthaginian peace that settled World War I, the cost of a botched peace may be even higher than the price of a bloody war.