Op-Ed | Errol Morris: The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 2)

Errol Morris on photography.

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

2.
THE KNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN

The phrase "unknown known" first appears in early 19th-century Romantic poetry — in John Keats's Endymion, his ode to the sovereign power of love.[1] Fifty years later it appears again in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book.[2] A metaphor for the unknowability of the mind of man. And then John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who traveled through the Grand Canyon, compared the unknown known and the known unknown. Savagery versus civilization — the first use I can document of the two phrases in one sentence.[3] Powell wrote:

There is an unknown known, and there is a known unknown. The unknown known is the philosophy of savagery; the known unknown is the philosophy of civilization. In those stages of culture that we call savagery and barbarism, all things are known — supposed to be known; but when at last something is known, understood, explained, then to those who have that knowledge in full comprehension all other things become unknown. Then is ushered in the era of investigation and discovery; then science is born; then is the beginning of civilization. The philosophy of savagery is complete; the philosophy of civilization fragmentary. Ye men of science, ye wise fools, ye have discovered the law of gravity, but ye cannot tell what gravity is. But savagery has a cause and a method for all things; nothing is left unexplained.[4]

In short, the savage is free to imagine anything; the civilized man is constrained by evidence. The known unknown "usher[s] in the era of investigation and discovery;" the unknown known is the savage's false belief that he can explain everything.

——–

Rumsfeld, in his memoir, Known and Unknown, says he learned about the known and unknown from William R. Graham, who served with him in the late 1990s on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission — an attempt to undermine or at least question the C.I.A. assessment asserting the improbability of a ballistic missile attack since the fall of the Soviet Union.[5] (For years Rumsfeld had proposed "defensive" missiles as a shield against offensive missiles — in my opinion, setting off yet another arms race. On my visit to his offices in Washington, Rumsfeld went into a closet and pulled out a heavy, crumpled piece of metal — part of a deployed antiballistic missile. It was his trump card: "Who says you can't shoot down a missile with a missile?")

The known known, the known unknown and the unknown unknown seemingly have straightforward interpretations. Or do they? Things we know we know — like the name of the president of the United States or the capital of France. And things we know we don't know — like the exact population of Kathmandu. (I know I don't know it.) Things we know we don't know but we can look them up, say on Wikipedia. Like the atomic number of tungsten. (It's 74. I just looked it up.) Or things that we know we don't know but need to be investigated. (Who killed JonBenét Ramsey? I don't know, but someone probably does know — the killer? — although I know I don't know who that person is.) Things that our enemies know but may not be known to us. (How many atomic warheads are there in North Korea?) And then, of course, there are the things I once knew but can't remember. It goes on and on and on. It begs us to answer the question what does it mean to know something? Or to know that we know something? Or to know that we don't know something? Doesn't it depend on evidence?[6]

As Rumsfeld tells the story, the known and unknown are linked (see also the aforementioned Feb. 12 news conference) with the absence not the presence of evidence. Rumsfeld writes in his memoir:

The idea of known and unknown unknowns recognizes that the information those in positions of responsibility in government, as well as in other human endeavors, have at their disposal is almost always incomplete. It emphasizes the importance of intellectual humility, a valuable attribute in decision making and in formulating strategy. It is difficult to accept — to know — that there may be important unknowns. The best strategists try to imagine and consider the possible, even if it seems unlikely. They are then more likely to be prepared and agile enough to adjust course if and when new and surprising information requires it — when things that were previously unknown become known.

I also encountered this concept in Thomas Schelling's foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter's book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, in which Schelling identified a "poverty of expectations" as the primary explanation for America's inability to anticipate and thwart the Japanese attack on Hawaii. Schelling's message was as clear as it was prescient: We needed to prepare for the likelihood that we would be attacked by an unanticipated foe in ways that we might not imagine.[7]

Let's examine this passage.

As Rumsfeld writes, the known and unknown recognizes that information is always incomplete. Correct as far as it goes. Information is always incomplete — do we ever have all the evidence we want or need? Of course not. But was the threat of the Japanese in 1941 or Al Qaeda in 2001 an unknown unknown or even a known unknown? Evidence was ignored or underestimated — in 1941 and 2001 — not because it was "unknown," but because it didn't fit a preconceived agenda.

Both Roberta Wohlstetter and Thomas Schelling, writing for publication in the early 1960s, were concerned with the possibility of a nuclear war — how to prevent it. Wohlstetter's book ends with an admonition, not a solution:

We cannot count on strategic warning. We might get it, and we might be able to take useful preparatory actions that would be impossible without it. We certainly ought to plan to exploit such a possibility should it occur. However, since we cannot rely on strategic warning, our defenses, if we are to have confidence in them, must be designed to function without it. If we accept the fact that the signal picture for impending attacks is almost sure to be ambiguous, we shall prearrange actions that are right and feasible in response to ambiguous signals, including signs of an attack that might be false. We must be capable of reacting repeatedly to false alarms without committing ourselves or the enemy to wage thermonuclear war …. We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it. No magic, in code or otherwise, will provide certainty. Our plans must work without it.[8]

Schelling's foreword, likewise, spells out the ways in which intelligence can fail despite our best efforts — not because we don't know about it, but because we fail to interpret it correctly or to act on it. As Schelling puts it, "There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable." But this is not an invitation to imagine the worst and to act on it.

Call this the Chicken Little Principle. Do you remember Chicken Little? An acorn falls on Chicken Little's head, and she decides the sky is falling. Other animals are warned in turn — Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey — until they are all eaten in their panic by Foxy Loxy, who sees an unparalleled gustatory opportunity. There are a number of staggering what-ifs. What if Chicken Little had asked for additional evidence that the sky was falling? What if Henny Penny or Goosey Loosey had been more skeptical of Chicken Little's claims? You can't fault Chicken Little for a lack of imagination, but the fable is a warning against unfettered credulity — and imagination. If Chicken Little had reacted to the falling acorn with greater equanimity, she might still be alive today — along with many, if not all of her barnyard friends.

Remarkably, the Chicken Little imagery comes from Rumsfeld himself, not just from me. For years he had been Mr. Naysayer — second-guessing the C.I.A., predicting Soviet nuclear dominance, attacking détente, proposing antiballistic missile shields, conjuring images of a Saddam armed with nuclear weapons and an assortment of biological and chemical W.M.D. He was the boy who cried "Armageddon." Now, the shoe was on the other foot. In a Pentagon news conference on April 11, 2003, a few weeks before victory in Iraq was declared — somewhat prematurely, I should add — Rumsfeld responded to reports of looting and anarchy by accusing his critics of being — guess what? — naysayers.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, "My goodness, were there that many vases?" (Laughter.) "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?"

CHARLES ALDINGER: Do you think that the words "anarchy" and "lawlessness" are ill-chosen —

DONALD RUMSFELD: Absolutely. I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny — "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot — one thing after another. It's just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country!

For Donald Rumsfeld, evidence of anarchy and chaos is not evidence of anarchy and chaos. For Donald Rumsfeld, the presence of evidence isn't evidence of presence.

---

[1] John Keats's Endymion (Book II) (1818). But would Keats have seen Rumsfeld's known unknown as a thing of beauty or a joy forever? Here is the quote from Endymion—

O known Unknown! from whom my being sips
Such darling essence, wherefore may I not
Be ever in these arms? in this sweet spot
Pillow my chin for ever? (Book II, l. 741-44)

[2] Robert Browning, The Ring and The Book (1869)

O Thou, — as represented here to me
In such conception as my soul allows, —
Under Thy measureless, my atom width! —
Man's mind — what is it but a convex glass
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
Picked out of the immensity of sky,
To re-unite there, be our heaven on earth,
Our known unknown, our God revealed to man? (ll. 1308-15).

[3] Powell was clearly interested in the known and the unknown. Even though he disapproved of the philosophy of the unknown known, he toyed with the formulation in his description of the Grand Canyon, referring to it as "the Great Unknown." See Edward Dolnick's Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (2001).

[4] J. W. Powell. 1881, "Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians." In the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

[5] Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, Penguin, 2011, p. xiv:

I first heard a variant of the phrase "known unknowns" in a discussion with former NASA administrator William R. Graham, when we served together on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in the late 1990s. Members of our bipartisan commission were concerned that some briefers from the U. S. intelligence community treated the fact that they lacked information about a possible activity to infer that the activity had not happened and would not. In other words, if something could not be proven to be true, then it could be assumed not to be true. This led to misjudgments about the ballistic missile capabilities of other nations, which in some cases proved to be more advanced than previously thought."

[6] Maria Ryan at the University of Birmingham,

Thus what appeared to be an intelligence failure over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction actually represented the temporary institutionalisation of a method of intelligence analysis long favoured by some conservative and neo-conservative hawks. Team B, the Rumsfeld Commission and the Office of Special Plans were all successful on their own terms, encouraging increases in defence expenditure, missile defence and war in Iraq as their authors had conceived.

However, in hindsight, not one of these reports proved correct in the long term. Team B reported just as the Soviet Union's military expenditure was slowing and its economy was contracting (and 15 years later it would no longer exist); the United States does not a face a hostile ballistic missile threat and will not in the near future; and Iraq's WMD are nowhere to be found. In sum, although intelligence gathering may always be an inexact science, policy makers would do better to concentrate on what we do know rather than fantasise about what we do not.

[7] Donald Rumsfeld, op. cit., pp. xiv-xv.

[8] Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford University Press, 1962, pp. 400ff.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Op-Ed | Errol Morris: The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 2)

Dengan url

http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2014/03/op-ed-errol-morris-certainty-of-donald.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Op-Ed | Errol Morris: The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 2)

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Op-Ed | Errol Morris: The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 2)

sebagai sumbernya