The Unknown Knowns

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR >  

+ In 2002, that quipster Donald Rumsfeld responded to a reporter’s question about the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had given WMDs to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups (or had any WMDs, at all) with his now notorious “unknowns”: 

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 tends to be the difficult ones.

+ Despite the debacle he orchestrated in Iraq, Rumsfeld reiterated the quote years later (he was obviously proud of it) in his memoir The Known and Unknown. The so-called “Rumsfeld Matrix” wasn’t original to Donald Rumsfeld. He later credited the phrase to former NASA Administrator William Graham in the 1990s, who used the phrase to describe the difficulties (still unresolved) of building an effective ballistic missile defense system. But the formulation actually goes back at least to the 1960s when  Lt. Gen. William B. Bunker described the problems encountered when engineering complex weapons systems: “There are two kinds of technical problems: there are the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.”

+ All of these problems still exist, naturally. But with the Trump administration the most dangerous “unknown” is one that Rumsfeld didn’t think of mentioning: the unknown knows, the known consequences of actions that the leadership of the Trump war machine seem totally unaware of…such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks on Gulf oil producing states, the proven inability of airwars to provoke revolutions or install “friendlier” regimes.

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