An interesting read. But, as I recall, the original reference to the conflict of 1861-65 was to the fact that it was not initiated as a war against slavery. My interpretation is that slavery did lead to session, which was in all likelihood legal. But it was the session and resulting loss in most of the federal government’s revenue at the time (tarrifs on goods moving through southern ports)that led to the war. As noted the federal government took care to engineer an incident to excuse their invasion, but make no mistake, the reason wasn’t to “free all men” nor was it to preserve the union for the sake of union. . . it was money, the same think that motivated session in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, fighting a war for natural resources i.e. money makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than fighting one for ideology (think Vietnam, and Korea here). Logic is used to fight wars, which are generally founded on logic (albeit often twisted), but it takes emotions to sustain and later justify them.

The 300 lb gorilla in the room is that Bushido was a long standing, pseudo religious, barbarous philosophy who’s followers were taught that suicide in killing the enemy was the highest calling. . . sound familiar? Yet two well placed weapons (albeit after much sacrifice and damage inflected with conventional weapons) stopped the practice cold. Wars only end when one side is made aware that the price of continuing is too high, when will we decide to end islamofacism?