Why Do Fools Start Wars?

Is it because they are fools? Is it because they cannot fall in love? Do only fools out-of-love start wars?

I was thinking and wondering about whether someone has researched, written about and reached any conclusions about who, exactly, starts wars? I mean, if we can name specific individuals that apparently triggered various large wars in the last 1000 years or so, can they be reliably profiled? Were they fools, dictators, narcissists, demagogues, warriors, schizophrenics, ignoramuses, delusional, bullies, autocrats, paranoid, mercenaries, autodidactic, or maybe wealth-seekers hungry for the spoils of war? Or some combined characteristics of the above? Were they abused, deprived, neglected, abandoned, malnourished, poverty stricken, homeless in childhood?

Who were they and and what can be discovered and discerned about why they started wars wittingly or unwittingly?

The somewhat obvious origin of my question is pretty existential: the frightening and dangerous era in contemporary American history, that is currently scaring not only Americans, but sensible and alert people worldwide. Some are perhaps playing with a delusional deck of cards. I think there is that, but probably more than that.

Historically, why did no one stop these war-mongers? Stupidity, cowardice, lethargy, inattentiveness, greed, vested interests (political or otherwise)?

Sleeping giants do wake up eventually. Some of them are also undoubtedly fools. Some of them actually do stop or avert wars. Some of them just go with the flow. Some of them are profiteers. Some are self-involved, corrupt beings that have no human compassion or care for others. Some are mean and hateful and angry and aggrieved without cause. They lack rationality. But when they tolerate or start wars, indiscriminately attacking cultures, torturing individuals, separating families, and with scorched earth methods totally disregard all human values, they earn a special place in Hell.

Only God sees the heart, or so believers believe. But any conscious and conscience-driven human being senses evil when it touches them. Asleep or awake, evil has a way of getting our attention and sometimes killing us. War, slowly or suddenly, inflicts the evil of an unnatural death, and so we must resist it. I repeat: We must resist war, it’s evils, and those unmindful of its evil.

And we must remember that wars in this day and age do not always startle us. Their toxic fumes can slowly, subtly creep out of small societal cracks and then explode. The enemy within is not always a Manchurian candidate. (And it seems that the mustache is fairly irrelevant - despite Stalin, Hitler,  Bolton, etc - since not a consistent factor.) Sometimes the home grown enemy is simple bigotry or greed. Sometimes we cannot see it or sort it all out, but we can always try to be discerning and energetically mindful of the lethargy that refuses to say something (or do something) when we see or smell something evil. And we can be ever thankful that we are not alone, even in the darkest days and nights.

Fools do start wars. The rest of us can stop them if only we have the will to do so. Rome was not built in a day; it fell when no one resisted, and when the fools took over. Oh, oh, oh, say can you see that when the inmates run the asylum, it is not a pretty picture.

God bless America, from sea to shining sea.