Kaiser Bush II?Man, when Bill­mon gets on a roll, he really gets going. He draws some excel­lent his­tor­i­cal par­al­lels between the present posi­tion of the United States under Pres­i­dent Bush and Ger­many under Kaiser Wil­helm II prior to World War I. For exam­ple:

Wil­helm II, how­ever, was a dif­fer­ent sort of emperor — inse­cure and arro­gant, inept as a strate­gist but intol­er­ant of crit­i­cism or dis­sent. He quickly rid him­self of Bis­mark, and embarked on a pro­gram of mil­i­tary expan­sion and aggres­sive, if erratic, diplo­matic blus­ter. Ger­many, he pro­claimed, must have its place in the sun.

That sounds famil­iar, indeed.
I men­tioned some sim­i­lar ideas, though not as fully fleshed out just over a year ago “when I wrote”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000281.php:

This isn’t the start of World War III, it’s the start of World War I — a very stu­pid war, started thanks to a tan­gle of alliances, national pride and per­sonal egos involved. It never had to hap­pen. And — again with the irony — WWI is the war that brought the world to this point, spawn­ing the League of Nations, the fail­ure of which led to World War II and the later cre­ation of the United Nations and the Secu­rity Coun­cil. It also saw the destruc­tion of the Ottoman Empire and the cre­ation of the King­dom of Iraq. And let’s not for­get the use of chem­i­cal weapons — allegedly the rea­son for the great big army in the desert. It was a war that embod­ied the Law of Unin­tended Consequences.

Well, we’ve cer­tainly got con­se­quences now. Iso­la­tion, man­power short­ages and nigh daily casu­al­ties, civil­ian deaths and a resur­gent foe. We’re in for a long year.