> Q: Could I follow up, Mr. Secretary, on what you just said, please? In regard to Iraq weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.
> Rumsfeld: Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
> And so people who have the omniscience that they can say with high certainty that something has not happened or is not being tried, have capabilities that are ...
https://archive.ph/20180320091111/http://archive.defense.gov...
The sophistry of his argument is extreme.
Yes, of course there are always "unknown unknowns"-- but the statement "there is no evidence that Iraq is supplying WMDs to terrorists" is not a statement made in a vacuum, in which all permutations of known/unknown are equally likely.
But whatever position he had, Iraq turning into a clusterfuck wasn't a sign of bad leadership by his part. It was a sign of bad ethics, but not leadership. His options were all of getting out of his position, disobeying the people above him, or leading the US into a clusterfuck.
> In the first emergency meeting of the National Security Council on the day of the attacks, Rumsfeld asked, "Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al-Qaeda?" with his deputy Paul Wolfowitz adding that Iraq was a "brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily—it was doable," and, according to John Kampfner, "from that moment on, he and Wolfowitz used every available opportunity to press the case."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld#Military_decis...
Anyway, another historical point besides what the other commenters have said is that Rumsfeld believed in “transformation” which meant you could do more with less in modern war. He was totally wrong about it.
It wasn’t his fault Turkey didn’t let the US attack from the north, but other than that, the fuck up is his responsibility, among others.
The occupation afterward was where the clusterfuck came in, and (somehow) none of the preparation had been directed toward that.
But thanks to enough loop holes, they can get into 'special military operations' (to misappropriate a recent term).
Calling them "special military operations," poor taste aside, especially with a focus on the formal process used, ignores the fact that all of those conflicts were entered and conducted with the full knowledge and involvement of Congresss.
If by “explaining how” you mean “deflecting (often preemptively) responsibility for”, yes.
There's no reason to think you can't do both of those with the same statement.
I’m characterizing what I recall Rumsfeld concretely doing, not what is abstractly possible for one to do.
If someone is 83.7% likely to provide good leadership, how would you evaluate the choice to hire that person as a leader in the hindsight that the person failed to provide good leadership -- was it a bad choice, or was it a good choice that was unlucky?
(Likelihood was selected arbitrarily.)
Then you add in a party system and it gets more complicated. Realistically, you don’t get to be the United States Secretary of Defense (twice) if you’re the kind of person who will ignore the will of the party and whoever is President.
If yes, you just evaluate the choice based on that probability (and other things you knew at the time), not on the actual outcome.
Prediction markets are one way to make these kinds numbers known.
Once they’re in, the predilections that led to power often rear their dark long tails. But they’re all (even the ones I disagree with) talented.
They're not always talented at the things we may want them to be, unfortunately. And that's true of both the ones I agree and disagree with.
You'd be surprised.
"Reaching positions of great power after mediocre lives" is the very art of career politics.