Ummm... Given that neither Ms. Tuchman (I don't know her well enough to call her "Barb") nor Jacques Barzun (arguably the greatest living historian) cite religion as a major component of any of these conflicts, I find your analysis less than convincing.
That said, I fear we have ventured far off-topic from this thread. If you want to continue off-line, please feel free to FReepmail.
Well, laddie or lassie, ken this! A good thread takes a wander now and then.
I've been here a wee bit langer than you 'ave, and I am bold to pull me rank on you.
Young Tuchman, Barb -- she ne'er DID find the cause of war, eh? A wonderous reporter and researcher and defter than any writer of history to make it come alive, she was.
Yet those very skills may have blocked her sight towards those great marching forests of history for her's the more subtle focus on leaves and bark. The conductor of all's hand is yet obvious in the grand scheme o' things. And the Great War of two stages that started in 1911 -- Tisha b'Av the very day the Germans entered in -- was a War to liberate Jews from two forms of oppression: spiritual and physical, and to result under Truman's KKK-beringed hand to reform Isreal a nation and a country once again.