February 15, 2025

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill’.

Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), British general, politician, prime minister, in The Croker Papers (1885), vol.3, Jay p.384

Didn’t Donald Rumsfeld make much the same point in all his talk about “known unknowns”, “unknown unknowns” and so on? Did it do him any good?

Regarding Iraq (which Rumsfeld was super-keen to see the U.S. invade), what he did know was that Iraq had no “weapons of mass destruction”—a “known never to be admitted”.