Accidental wars

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The Spanish-American war was almost certainly started by an accident. The Casus Belli was an explosion that sank the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. There's a good chance it wasn't even an external source that caused the explosion. Even if it was a mine, it is highly unlikely the mine was placed where it was in hopes of sinking a US ship. Even one of the newspaper magnates who was hyping it up in his papers publicly admitted this at the time.

However, US public opinion was strongly in favor of Cuban independence (from Europe, that is), and it didn't take much to get it thinking this was a stellar pretense to use war to force the issue. So was the start of the war itself an accident? Not really. But it was almost certainly started by one.

T.E.D. 117408

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Source: stackoverflow.com

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