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.