The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 1)

Ted Bafaloukos

By ERROL MORRIS, NYT

This is the first installment of a four-part series.

1. THREE REPORTERS

"Four kinds of persons: zeal without knowledge; knowledge without zeal; neither knowledge nor zeal; both zeal and knowledge." – Pascal, Pensées

When I first met Donald Rumsfeld in his offices in Washington, D.C., one of the things I said to him was that if we could provide an answer to the American public about why we went to war in Iraq, we would be rendering an important service. He agreed. Unfortunately, after having spent 33 hours over the course of a year interviewing Mr. Rumsfeld, I fear I know less about the origins of the Iraq war than when I started. A question presents itself: How could that be? How could I know less rather than more? Was he hiding something? Or was there really little more than met the eye?

Many people associate the phrases the known known, the unknown known and the unknown unknown with Rumsfeld, but few people are aware of how he first presented these ideas to the public. It was at a Pentagon news conference on Feb. 12, 2002. Reporters filed in to the Pentagon Briefing Room — five months after 9/11 and a year before the invasion of Iraq. The verbal exchanges that followed provide an excursion into a world no less irrational, no less absurd, than the worlds Lewis Carroll created in Alice in Wonderland.

Jack McWethy, the ABC Pentagon correspondent, asked Rumsfeld about the containment policies of the Clinton administration.[1]

The substance of Rumsfeld’s reply reiterated his previous condemnations of those policies — sanctions aren’t working, the no-fly zones produce little or no benefit, and Saddam is developing weapons of mass destruction.[2] It was also a warning:

DONALD RUMSFELD: Every year that goes by and the inspectors are not there, the development of their weapons of mass destruction proceed apace, bringing them closer to a time when they will have those weapons developed in a form that is more threatening than it had been the year before or the year before that.

(More here.)