The Unknown Known (4/5 Stars)

Any military commander who is honest with himself or with those he’s speaking to will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people! unnecessarily, his own troops or other troops through mistakes or errors of judgment…and the conventional wisdom is don’t make the same mistake twice. Learn from your mistakes.”

- Robert MacNamara, The Fog of War

Certainty. That is the subject of the new Errol Morris documentary, “The Unknown Known,” in which he interviews at length Donald Rumsfeld, the United States Secretary of Defense from 2000 to 2006. Many a comparison has been made to Errol’s previous Oscar winning documentary, “The Fog of War, “ in which he interviewed Donald MacNamara the Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ during the Vietnam War. That interview started with the exceedingly wise statement above. As it so happens Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War as well. He served under President Gerald Ford at the very end of the Vietnam War. Errol Morris asks Rumsfeld if there was a lesson any lesson to be learned from that war. “Some things work. Some things don’t.” states Rumsfeld matter-of-factly apparently feeling no need to elaborate.

This is not your usual documentary. The subject is Donald Rumsfeld and the research is limited to Rumsfeld. Morris excavated more than 20,000 memos nicknamed ‘Snowflakes’ because of their frequency that Rumsfeld had dictated to his staff during his periods of public service. There are no other people talking or giving opinions about Rumsfeld in this movie. It is just Rumsfeld reading aloud his memos and elaborating on them into the Interrotron. By doing this Morris intends to tell the story of this man inside out, to hopefully help get a sense of how he thinks. And what he finds or more specifically what he does not find are parts charming, chilling, and downright stunning at times.

What is going on here? Rumsfeld speaks with such certainty. He uses words so expertly. His style of combative debate is almost flawless. The only problem is that his arguments lack substance. He speaks at one point about choosing specific words to describe the Iraq war in order to further the cause of the USA and hinder the terrorists. He looks up several words in the pentagon dictionary: ‘guerilla warfare,’ ‘insurgency,’ and ‘unconventional warfare’ and finds them all lacking with his political mission. But let us take a step back and consider that beyond what words someone chooses to use to describe a situation, there is still that situation that exists in objective truth in the world. That is to say no matter how you describe something, that something cannot be changed by how you choose to describe it. There is a concept in George Orwell’s 1984 called doublethink, that is the ability to hold the objective truth of a matter in your head and speak the politically expedient truth with certainty at the same time. The scary thing about Donald Rumsfeld is that he does not seem to be guided by doublethink. It seems that the politically expedient truth is the only thing in his head, that there really is no separate objective reality. How scary that is! You would hope your leaders would at the very least lie while knowing the truth. That is not the best of worlds but that is surely better than them not knowing truth and being guided by wishful thinking!

In several video clips from several news conferences Rumsfeld defends with absolute certainty the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq with the phrase “The Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence.” That is to say even though UN inspectors did not find any WMDs in Iraq that did not prove that Saddam had not stashed them somewhere the UN inspectors did not look. This technique of logic is called trying to prove a negative. An example: A man sees an Unidentified Flying Object in the sky and claims that it is an alien spacecraft. He insists on believing it is aliens until you prove him wrong. How easy would it be to actually prove that the UFO was not an alien? Well almost impossible. For instance it might have been a weather balloon or something else or just his imagination, but none of that can be proven. You weren’t there and even if you were, the thing is unidentified, that is to say it literally can’t be described as anything and in essence it really could be anything, possibily even the highly improbable nearly impossible alien aircraft aforementioned.

There is an old joke (told to me by Neil DeGrasse Tyson). A man tells a famous astronomer with absolute certainty: ‘There is a teapot revolving around the sun.’ The famous astronomer scoffs and says ‘no way.’ “Prove me wrong,” the man says. So the famous astronomer spends sleepless nights scouring the night sky mapping out the entirety of expanse surrounding the Sun. An expanse so vast the astromer would die at least a thousand deaths before he would be able to map every square inch of it and that is supposing he did it perfectly on the first try. Where is the man during all this? Well as the astronomer works himself to death he is on some Caribbean Beach drinking a margarita and getting a suntan. The moral: Don’t let someone ask you to prove a negative. If they have some claim about the objective reality of the world, it is on them to prove it exists, not for you to prove that it does not exist. Yet this type of reasoning is everywhere and it feeds on the desire of human beings for certainty, our fantastic imaginations that can readily supply that certainty, and the uncertainty inherent in the human experience given the limited senses of our anatomy. (On this last point, the next time a creationist uses the human eye has an example of intelligent design, please point out that our eyes see very little of the electromagnetic spectrum. If it were intelligently designed would we not be able to see far more than we are able.) This is an uphill battle for anyone who would wish to explain why beliefs based in faith are not to be taken seriously, but such battles are some of the noblest battles to fight for anyone with a token interest in objective reality.

Most people don’t have that interest and surely lead happier lives and sleep better at night. After all, to take that interest is to acknowledge the presence of uncertainty, a very worrisome peristant fact. The problem of course is that the former fall prey to confidence men like Donald Rumsfeld who could imagine WMDs in Iraq and so advocated invading a sovereign nation and wasting thousands of lives and billions of dollars in the process. Errol Morris claims that he knows less about why we invaded Iraq now that he has spent 36 hours talking to Donald Rumsfeld than when he started. It is an exceedingly depressing truth to acknowledge that he may be right. When asked if the Iraq War was worth it, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged and said, “Time will tell.”

That asshole didn’t learn a goddamn thing. We couldn’t even achieve that.

p.s. Some person would say that there was some evidence of WMDs in Iraq. For instance, that guy named Curveball who was lying. I ask you this: was that evidence enough to justify standing in front of the world and stating with 100% certaintly over and over again that WMDs did exist. Because that happened. I was there. There were no qualms about it. It wasn’t ‘maybe’ or ‘possibly’ or ‘likely.’ It was certainty. I would posit that there was not enough evidence to induce 100% certainty. And I point to the lack of evidence before and the non-existence of WMDs after to support that assertion.