Let's try to keep a single chain of responses.
Keegan gets that point entirely wrong
How do you know that? Generally, historians have been biased toward Serbia and the Entente. So is Keegan. Yet, he paints a picture of essential rejection. And indeed, mobilizing the army, attaching conditions and rejecting the major demand amounts to a rejection.
You are probably right that Austria would have preferred a local war so that it could eliminate future threats from insurgents (a global war would have required Austria to fight on two fronts, north and south, and was not in Austrian interest). Buth this is a fault of intent only. Austria was injured, presented an ultimatum, and was within its rights to ignore a dithered response.
somehow [the Kaiser] must not have meant it, you attempt to infer *and* imply.
He must not have meant it, as evidenced by the fact that he declared war a few days later.
I explained what constituted the military imperative for war in #238.
"How do you know that? Generally, historians have been biased toward Serbia and the Entente. So is Keegan. Yet, he paints a picture of essential rejection. And indeed, mobilizing the army, attaching conditions and rejecting the major demand amounts to a rejection."
I know it because:
1. It's a fact,
2. It makes logical sense, and
3. The most authoritative source WHO WAS THERE said that, specificly.
Keegan is a historical revisionist, as are you. Neither of you were there. We don't get to write the History that we want, we write what the past players said and did.
"No excuse for war."
That's Austria's ally speaking after seeing Serbia's capitulation.
That Austria invaded anyway shocked the world, and Germany's "Blank Check" to Austria for war was soon realized as an enormous mistake.