Seven Red

BAGHDAD – Shiite militiamen are everywhere. Police and Iraqi army checkpoints are nowhere in sight. U.S. soldiers are keeping their distance. [...]But a more finely tuned measure of the tensions may be found among the one- and two-story homes and shabby storefronts of Sadr City. As the crisis deepened, The Associated Press toured Sadr City on Wednesday to observe its rapid swing from relative quiet to a return of the Mahdi Army swagger before the U.S. military troop buildup in Baghdad last year.- “Mahdi Militia Makes Sadr City its Stronghold“

You never know what you’re going to get with a Secretary of Defense. The Vietnam generation got a sad statistician; Robert MacNamara could dazzle with his sheer grasp of the numbers – how many sorties, the rice production in tonnage of New Life Hamlets in a particular province, the percentage of remaining petroleum, oil, and lubricant facilities within 45 miles of Haiphong. And so you got those kinds of briefings, but a different kind of war. Maybe the war always goes the opposite way. When your guy at the DoD is a maniacal rationalist, you get a war of concerted irrationality. So what do we get?

Let us now praise Donald Rumsfeld, five years hence. If you wanted an anti-MacNamara, well, you sure got it. Rumsfeld is like an intuitionist, even a Romantic. Whereas MacNamara gave us the POL percentage destroyed, Rumsfeld gave us tales of the glass boxes from his childhood. If you haven’t seen it already, I strongly suggest a reading of the poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld. Journalist Hart Seely took a few of Rumsfeld’s ridiculous press conference proclamations, and just introduced line breaks to make them “look like poetry.” In an Intro to Critical Reading class, I gave the students three “poems” to analyze by close reading. One was e.e. cummings “Plato told,” another was a verbatim transcript of a found grocery list from Grocerylists.org, and the last was one of D.H. Rumsfeld’s poems. Their readings were ingenious, but they felt cheated when I showed them the sources of the poems. Apparently few had read the reading for that day, Stanley Fish’s “How to Know a Poem When You See One,” since that would have given away the game, one would think. Needless to say, one of the all-time greats is Rumsfeld’s meditation on epistemological classifications, called simply “The Unknowns.”

The Unknown
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.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

The genius of the classification schema – which would pass quite well as some rhetorical declamation exercise – is the lead-in: “As we know…” We know all these things about knowledge: that’s taken as an axiom. Consider then one of the unknown unknowns. It is something that we know we don’t know we don’t know. If MacNamara was on some Cartesian jag, Rumsfeld operated more in the mode of Duns Scotus (which is not surprising, given the medieval character of The War). So what kind of war do we get, if it turns out to be the opposite of such poetry? I remember when The War began, I heard Rumsfeld on the radio doing his usual ask-yourself-a-question-and-answer-it routine. He said “How long will it last? We can’t say. Will it be six weeks? We hope so. Six months? Maybe. Six years? I don’t think so.” I’m a pessimist, but I didn’t think so either. I couldn’t believe it. So here we are now.

Imagine if somebody had said to you in March 2003 that these unknown unknowns will be true in five years time:

• The United States will have 160,000+ troops still in Iraq, with hopeful talk of a draw down to 140,000 vaguely mentioned for summer
• The Iraqi Army will be engaged in fierce street battles with the Jaish al-Mahdi, a Shiite militia nominally led by a guy whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein (he will be known as the “radical cleric” whenever his name is mentioned)
• US jets will be flying close air support to assist the Iraqi army in their militia crackdown; US troops will be running hammer-and-anvil sweeps in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, largely to tamp down the barrage of mortar fire being launched into the city center from that area
• We will be paying off Sunni tribes to fight an entity called “al Qaeda in Iraq;” many of the Sunnis we pay will be former “insurgents” who fought American troops from 2003-2007, when they joined this extortion scheme called the “Awakening” movement
• the Awakening Movement will be fraying, leading to fears that Anbar Province and towns to the north of Baghdad will turn into fierce combat zones once again
• The American military will have lost the equivalent of a complete regiment in Kilo India Alpha, with the equivalent of two reinforced divisions severely wounded
• Numbers on Iraqi civilian deaths would be spotty, but range between many tens of thousands and many hundreds of thousands

I’m a pessimist, but if Rumsfeld had made such proclamations during one of his pre-war poetry jams, I would have thought him an alarmist, and I knew something about Iraq, having been involved in activism against the sanctions regime during the late-1990′s. I wouldn’t believe it, no sir. But there it is. Four thousand, or the ones we didn’t know we didn’t know.

it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

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