Well, you can break "why does a country go to war" into two separate questions: first, why has war been declared? And second, why do the soldiers enlist and wil

Well, you can break "why does a country go to war" into two separate questions: first, why has war been declared? And second, why do the soldiers enlist and willingly go? You can probably put together a decent argument saying "The second War in Iraq was because of oil", but I haven't heard any stories of soldiers who signed up and came out of their deployment with the rights to an oil well. If you want to have a discussion about the motivations for war, it seems foolish to ignore the motivations of the boots on the ground that are actually making shit happen out there.