At a time when the War on Terror and its many fraudulent “terrorist” incidents were justifying invasions and authoritarianism, I wrote this piece to establish a basic typology of war triggers and to alert people to their creation and manipulation.

The concept of war as a “system” with cold and hot phases, briefly suggested in this article but not elaborated in the present collection, has been discussed in a separate essay, “War as a System in Nature” [PDF], co-authored with Tom Slee in late 2022