Known and Unknown

I expect all my American friends have already ploughed through Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir Known and Unknown. I suspect the review will suffice in my case.

It was in June 2002 that a reporter asked Donald Rumsfeld about the lack of any obvious connection between the 9/11 terrorists and Saddam Hussein and he responded by talking about the limitations of human knowledge. There were things we know we know, he said (“the known unknowns”), then there was another category of knowledge - “the unknown unknowns”, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Many people then and since then have had trouble grasping this concept. I’m not sure it qualifies for metaphysics, but I’ve spent many a happy hour down the pub explaining the limitations of human knowledge in the light of this speech.

While I understand perfectly what Rumsfeld was trying to say, I have a lot more trouble in trying to understand the people who with perfect hindsight have had so much to say over the Iraq war. The idea that there was no reason to believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, seems like the unknown unknowns and an interesting lesson in logic. He’d already gassed the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs as well as peppering the Iranians with phosgene and a whole lot of other nasties. Logically (to me at least) it seems not unreasonable to assume he still had a stash. Certainly it was known that the Germans, French and North Koreans had sold him enough suspect kit.

Then of course there’s International Law, this apparently says that anyone is perfectly entitled to kill as many of their own people as they like as long as it’s done within one’s borders. Perhaps the problem really comes in trying to prop up a morally bankrupt United Nations?

Apparently Rumsfeld takes the view that it was all somebody else’s fault, which is hardly surprising he’s a politician. However as a former US ambassador to Nato, as advisor to Richard Nixon, as Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff, as a member of Congress for Illinois and as the US secretary of defence (twice) he can hardly be a slouch. I wonder how my American friends would contrast Rummy’s day with the current administration who from a very distant and unpractised eye seem to specialise more in dithering as well as blaming others of course.

Maybe if somebody will lend me a copy I will read Rummy’s book.