Small men with small minds.

In her new work, The War that Ended Peace, Margaret Macmillan indexes the role of a small clutch of very small men the decided WW I for all of Europe:

The public, which had played its part over the decades in pushing its leaders toward peace or war, now waited on the sidelines as a handful of men in each of Europe’s main capitals juggled with fateful decisions. Products of their backgrounds and times, with deeply ingrained  beliefs in prestige and honour (and such terms were going to be used frequently in those hectic days) they based their beliefs on assumptions they did not always articulate, even to themselves. They were at the mercy of their own memories of past triumphs and failures, and of the hopes and fears for the future.

Margaret Macmillan: THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE, EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT,  Macleans, November 4^th 2013, Volume 126, page 29.

^ξ Margaret Macmillan: is Warden of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, recipient of Governor General’s award and Samuel Johnson Prize.

What she has to say as cited above, brings to mind the  men, known as the NEOCONS, who propelled Bush into the War of Regime Change in Iraq.
Those that Macmillan writes about above failed Europe because WW I was a futile exercise in carnage of an entire generation of the young of Europe. These NEOCONS failed the United States because the entire exercise was a futile waste lives and of trillions of American $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.