I was thinking Veeky Forums. In the real world there are wars fought over oil and other resources...

>religious sites
for tourism gains. The resulting war is more economically beneficial for one side than the actual profits from tourism that they have a vested interest in the war continuing. Cue conspiracy music, they're "not winning" on purpose because the king or whoever is invested in the mecenary company

Farmland. Easy to underestimate in modern times.

>Bush and friends genuinely believed Iraq WMDs were real

Bullshit, if that was the case then why undermine the UN and basically tell them to fuck off and go straight to war? They wanted war and got a nice excuse for it.

An ample food supply is the foundation of a strong military. An army marches on its stomach. For this reason, fertile ground is supremely valuable. Before the industrial revolution, 80% of the population engaged in farming to keep themselves and and the other 20% of the people.

>oil wars IRL
olive oil

Fertile women.

>Bullshit, if that was the case then why undermine the UN and basically tell them to fuck off and go straight to war?

Because the UN had long been dicking around with whether or not to actually do anything to Saddam Hussein, going all the way back to the first Gulf War.

NATO pretty much told them to fuck off because they were tired of the UN riding the fence and doing nothing about the whole situation.

Bush legitimately did believe that Iraq had WMD's, made more credible by the fact that Saddamn did previously have WMD's and had previously used them on ethnic minorities (the Kurds), meaning he had absolutely no qualms about obtaining and using them.

It would only be revealed later that the information they had was incorrect, and multiple people down the line attempted to cover it up to save their own asses until it was simply too late, and it blew up in the Presidents face (who had nothing to do with any cover-up, at least knowingly).

This is a common problem in pretty much any political system, where mid-level bureaucrats and politicians fudge the information they give their bosses to make themselves look better, and the boss takes them at their word and acts accordingly.

I dunno, is there likely to be some sort of vast repository of Magical Artifacts just buried underground that multiple different groups might make claim to?

The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has the army and the treasury may conquer the Earth.

The same fractured political landscape, the same rise of trained, professional armies, and the invention of coined money largely in order to pay them.

Slaves.

Not sure about it being high up enough in priority to cause a war, at least not officially, but on a strategic level a hell of a lot of assets go towards obtaining major resource sites in any given conflict where they might be relevant, particularly in Africa (because there's so many of them and no developed nation ever trusts either side with expensive mining/extraction equipment paid for by foreign investment). I mean South Africa spent the entire time it was involved in Angola guarding a dam.

Yes. The abandoned den of an ancient dragon. This dragon was the stuff of legend, the world-ender. Recorded history itself is broken up into ages defined by cataclysmic evenets triggered by the dragon's greed. Rumored to finally be dead, a map has been found to the dragon's lair, supposedly littered with the wealth, artifacts, and treasures of every age in recorded history. The lair of the world-dragon.

Coin and markets sprung up above all, to feed the machinery of war.

Strategic trade chock points.

A number of medieval wars have been fought over geographic access.

For example, the constant point of contention in medieval scandinavia was the strait of Oresund, which was a chokepoint for ships in & out of the Baltic Sea, and thus essential to the fishing industry.
The danish king would extract tolls on cargo passing the strait, and fish, since they can be salted, brined, or dried, are an excellent non-perishable food-source in pre-refrigeration times.

The same goes for rivers and other straits.
If you want to up the fantasy-rating, a mountain with an ancient and glorious dwarven city inside.
A treasure-trove of magical and mechanical marvels, codices for advanced technologies, and runecraft unknown by the human smiths.

Anything that feeds that machinery for war is worth wage war for:

>Soldiers like to be paid in hard cash, not credit (because they know very well that they might die soon).
>Hard cash is available in mines.
>Slaves are used to work the mines extract gold so soldiers can be paid in gold.
>You can wage war to capture slaves so they work on the mines to pay your soldiers.

>Soldiers need plenty of food.
>For food, you need fertile farmland and subjects to farm it.
>Capture more lands and population.

And so on.

>If you believe the futurists and conspiracy theorists, it was a strike to prevent challenges to the USD as the chief medium for oil exchange

What? Conspiracy theorists believe usa gone to middle east to build groups there, to then do the arab spring and take down governments with it.
Some also believe, they got there to put more "terrrosits scare" news at news channels, using this as a excuse to push laws (like when some father use santa claus as a excuse to make his children go to school), like spying and etc....

Ichor of godmonsters sleeping in the ground.

Nanoha grunts game when.

>[planet name] has a shitton of Belkan/Al-Hazredi ruins in good shape
>go there, shoot other groups that want the ruins

There were wars over opium back in the day.

There could be wars over a specific location, whether that be a holy city or a magical river that makes crops grow faster/bigger.

You can always make your own resource as well, like the mana crystals or what have you others have mentioned above.

If you're referring to the opium wars, it was because China wanted the UK traders to stop selling opium (The only thing the chinese wanted)and started confiscating boats and shipments of the stuff. Traders then bitched to the Queen at the time, which in their tea lust, the UK invaded the south east coast of China.

>Ichor of godmonsters sleeping in the ground.
I like the way you think.
You're hired.