That's right, BB. They all believed the same sorts of things. I know that, and that's why I am repelled by war movies that cast one side (whoever) as evil, nasty, vicious people who grin in an evil fashion as they mow down their helpless opponents. (this was the way Germans and Japanese were routinely depicted oftentimes in those old war movies, and I don't doubt that the German and Japanese war propaganda films of WWII were similarly distorted).

It's sad.

Countries almost always get into wars over various important interests they have, like: competing spheres of influence, trade considerations, access to vital land and resources, control of some large material agenda.

Your suggestion that the British (and French) could have ignored or swallowed the German attack on Poland is entirely worth considering...and it was certainly exactly what Hitler expected them to do! He grossly miscalculated their reaction, probably because he had been made overconfident by their previous lack of resolve in earlier crises he had provoked.

His next objective after Poland was in the East...Russia. So, if the French and British had decided to sell out the Poles, which they very well might have done, then I believe there would have followed a major war between Germany and Russia sometime in 1940 or '41, and no war in the West at all at that time. Farther on down the road? Hard to say. It would have depended on how well the Germans did in Russia.

Would that have been a better way to go from the point of view of Britain and France? Quite possibly. But who knows? It would not have been nearly so good for the Russians.

As an aside, Britain and France were deeply upset by the Russian attack on Finland in the Winter War as well as the earlier Russian move into Poland in concert with the Germans, and the French were close to declaring war on Russia even after they were already at war with Germany! It's incredible in retrospect that they could have been so foolish as to contemplate that.

I think that everyone would have been better off if the citizens in ALL the involved countries had refused to believe their leaders and had refused to go to war for them. ;-) But how does one arrange that? Most people are essentially fairly sheeplike, and they will obey orders from higher authority, even if those orders cause them to commit mass murder on foreigners.

The propaganda in all the fighting countries was distorted, hate-filled, and intended to inflame people to go out and kill for their country. That's standard prodedure.

The reality was that all those major countries were jockeying for position in the world...Germany, France, the UK, Russia, the USA, Japan, and Italy. It was inevitable that in their jockeying for control of spheres of influence, they would come up against each other. The British and French were only willing to let either Germany or Russia go so far...but no farther. Germany and Russia had both suffered great losses of territory in WWI and were looking to restore their fortunes. They were in an expanding phase (as the USA is now...), looking to enlarge their spheres of influence. That would bring them into conflict with each other and with Britain and France, and eventually the USA. Japan was taking advantage of the decline and weakness of a hereditary enemy (China) and of their own emergence into the only modern military power in East Asia. The USA was not willing to tolerate either Japan or Germany expanding beyond a certain point, again because it would impinge on American spheres of influence. The USA held the wild cards, because it had the greatest GNP in the world, and was basically unattackable behind 2 great oceans.

They all acted in their own self-interest. Their people and a lot of other people paid the price. They all made up grand and noble-sounding stories to prove why it was all worthwhile. It wasn't. It was a tragic, incredible waste of human lives on a vast scale.

Have you seen the recent Japanese movie made in 2005 about the sinking of the battleship Yamato? It's an interesting view of the psychology of people on the Japanese side, seen through the eyes of patriotic young cadet sailors on the doomed ship caught up in the events of the time. They managed to avoid saying anything inflammatory about the Americans during the entire movie, and it has some very striking scenes. Those young men, like all young men everywhere who go to war, figured that they were defending their homeland and their loved ones, and they were ready to die if necessary. War is simply a very, very sad and tragic business. Those Japanese cadets felt exactly the same way as the young American airmen who bombed and torpedoed them, strafed them on the decks of the ship, slaughtered them by the hundreds, and even strafed the survivors in the water after the ship went down. (that last part was not shown in the movie)

War is murder. Bloody murder. If people were not so sheeplike, they would not so easily be fooled into doing it.

Once it starts, though, it takes its own inevitable course until someone gives up fighting. That's why I say the onus is on those who either launch the initial attack(s) or who make the initial declaration of war. They are the ones who open the door to chaos and disaster.

In the case of the invasion of Kuwait, it was Saddam. In the case of the Iraq war in 2003, it was the USA.