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The virus is cosmopolitan; in more recent times, stupidity infected the Chinese effort to bribe a sitting Democratic President with $300,000--the equivalent of entering the most expensive restaurant in New York and slipping the maitre d' a quarter for a good table.
There are worse consequences in the Balkans. Peacekeeping by means of smart bombs that now and then drop down hospital chimneys breeds contradictions. The physician's--and presumably the peacekeeper's--principle, "First, do no harm," loses to the general's "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Everyone expects mistakes and stupidities in war; but when you make war by remote control, a superpower ex machina raining destruction without concomitant risk to self, then your invulnerability (the arrogance of powers unwilling to pay war's reciprocal price in blood) tends to subvert the moral basis of the exercise--and, incidentally, to magnify the importance of errors. Further, the use of computerized high technology creates an expectation of perfect precision. But war drags technology down to its level.
Stupidity gets to be dangerous. It gets to be tragic. The late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen had a famous funny line about federal spending: "A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."
A stupidity here, an incompetence there, and pretty soon you're talking about real folly.