He himself had bitter experience of the mood of futility that characterized the years just after the pointless blundering of the Crimean War.
His 1914 sonnets and their torrent of imitations, published daily in newspapers along with the casualty lists, later came to represent the callous idiocy of the generals and politicians who blundered through the war until millions of people were dead.
The Iraq war has turned out to be one of the biggest foreign policy blunders of the United States' since the Vietnam War.
"There was a plan to start a coordinated series of attacks," he said, chuckling with good humor about the blunders of war.
But, all in all, "Unintended Consequences" offers a lucid, pointed and often powerful deconstruction of the Bush administration's blunders in prosecuting the war.
The Austro-Hungarian high command, which had blundered into the war unprepared in 1914, did little better at its conclusion.
The current administration and its neoconservative allies, he argues, have made energy independence part of the war on terror, a moral and tactical blunder.
Lord Franks's inquiry into the Falklands War of 1982 exposed the blunders of the Thatcher Government, which all but invited the Argentines to invade, with admirable clarity.
The American architects of the war defended their vision, even after the catastrophic disbanding of the Iraqi army in May 2003 – widely seen as the greatest blunder of the post-war period.
Shakespeare's witty and charming play tells of four young lovers who blunder into the crossfire of the warring fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania.
