Yesterday was Rummy’s last day. I heard some retired general interviewed on the BBC about his legacy. I find it completely incredible that there’s any sort of “on the one hand…, and on the other…” to that. The man is a complete and utter disaster.
Everyone is dragging out his famous quotes, especially the one about the known knowns and the known unknowns, etc. To the extent that you can set aside the horror of what he’s done, it’s amusing enough, and you can sure see how he’d have to resort to circumlocution and mystification with regard to planning and predicting. The “unknown unknowns” are, I guess, what the rest of us call surprises, and it’s certainly true that you have to expect surprises in life and in war. I can’t for the life of me see how anyone can be surprised by how this particular one is going, though. A war started by an insular, arrogant group of people who are utterly contemptuous of any “establishment” besides their own, and whose justification is a vision of foreign policy that’s nothing less than pornographic (the Iraqi’s will welcome us with open arms, democratic Iraq will start a domino effect that sweeps the Middle East clean, etc.). How could that be anything less than a disaster?
The one thing that’s truly beyond belief is that people with so much at stake, with reputations on the line and a whole sackful of points to prove, would march themselves into a war with such heedless ineptitude. I don’t know how they managed to get re-elected even as the scale of the disaster was becoming clear. At the time I consoled myself that at least Bush would be around long enough so that some of the mess might stick. Had Kerry taken over it would have become Kerry’s mess. Even if, under a hypothetical new administration, the situation was better today than what Bush has led us into, it could still go down as “Kerry’s fault,” because at this point things could be quite a bit better and still look awfully bad.
Anyways, two depressingly non-hypothetical years later and “the electorate” has finally realized that it’s a mess and they’re pretty sure who made it, but things won’t be better in Iraq anytime soon. We’ll hear, day after day, about another Corporal Smith blown up by a roadside bomb and another Private Jones shot by a sniper, about another 30 or 50 nameless Iraqis blown up or found dead with their hands tied behind their backs and a bullet through their brain. None of the people who have led us down this road will be held responsible in any meaningful way.
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Sorry for the late comment but just found your blog off Sequenza21.
Everyone loves Rummy’s quotes about the known unknowns (amongst others) but he’s hardly original: for fun, here is a bit of the poet and psychoanalyst R.D. Laing from 1970:
Jack
knows he does not know
and sees that Jill
does not know she knows.
By telling Jack
what Jack knows he does not know
Jill helps Jack to help Jill
to know she knows
what she does not know she knows.
Jill however
thinks
she knows she does not know
and that Jack knows
she knows she does not know
and that Jack knows
what Jill does not know.
or,
Jack knows he does not know.
Jill thinks she knows what Jack does not know, but
she does not know he does not know it.
Jack does not know
Jill does not know he does not know,
and thinks she knows what he knows he doesn’t.
etc.
Walter Ramsey
Check out composer Phil Kline’s Three Rumsfield Songs on the album Zippo Songs (available on iTunes).
The difference is that Laing was having fun with words and maybe trying to make a point about language (at least I hope it was something like that), while Rumsfeld actually thought he was saying something. It smacks of self-delusion, the kind of clever web a mind weaves to escape responsibility, and Rumsfeld is certainly more clever than most in that respect.
Kline’s songs are cute. The opera can’t be far off.