Via Mike in email, The Roots of War over at AlterNet. Excerpt: "What is it, then, that has made war such an inescapable part of the human experience? Each war, of course, appears to the participants to have an immediate purpose – to crush the "Hun," preserve democracy, disarm Saddam, or whatever – that makes it noble and necessary. But those who study war dispassionately, as a recurrent event with no moral content, have observed a certain mathematical pattern: that of "epidemicity," or the tendency of war to spread in the manner of an infectious disease."