Donald Rumsfeld (left), then US Secretary of Defence, and Vice President Dick Cheney in 2001 ©David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Apart from unleashing two wars, at a catastrophic human and financial cost, the government of George W Bush will always be remembered for the following statement made by a presidential aide, thought to be Karl Rove, to the journalist Ron Suskind. Liberal reporters like Suskind, the aide said, were part of a “realitybased community,” the type of suckers who believe that solutions emerge from “judicious study of discernible reality.” But that was not how the world worked under the Bush administration: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” These words express a particular view of politics, which is hardly new. Empirical knowledge is viewed with contempt. Instead there is a kind of blind faith in the righteousness of a cause based on the instincts of a leader and his coterie in government. This type of politics, which in the past marked both fascist and communist regimes, makes a fetish of authoritarian leadership. “I’m the decider,” said Bush, who may not have been aware of the term “decisionism,” promoted in the 1930s by Carl Schmitt, the legal defender of National Socialism. Decisionism (or Dezisionismus in German legal parlance) is a noxious doctrine which judges the validity of a decision by its source instead of its content. What makes a decision right is that it is made by the man in power. Every other consideration is worthless. Since the decisionmaker is correct by definition, he should also have the right to use force to implement his decisions. Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush’s Secretary of Defence, does not present himself as a man of blind faith. On the contrary, in Errol Morris’s brilliant and disturbing documentary film about him, The Unknown Known (which is in cinemas from 21st March), Rumsfeld expresses his pride in being a cool analyst, a “measured” thinker who tries to understand the world by firing off thousands of memos (known as Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes”) to his staff, questioning every premise and sharpening every definition. The film’s title underlines this aspect of Rumsfeld’s persona, referring to his notorious defence of a possible link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, in which he distinguished between “known knowns,” “unknown knowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Rimless glasses and a piercing gaze make him look like a ruthless technocrat with an almost scientific zeal to penetrate the murk and mess of reality in his quest for pure truth. There is another side to Rumsfeld too: the genial midwesterner with his ingratiating grin, the aw-shucks regular guy from Illinois. The grins tend to flash across his face in the weirdest places, in the midst of discussing responsibility for disastrous wars, for example, or torture techniques. Rumsfeld’s grin is one of the most memorable images in Morris’s film, captured by the camera’s steady gaze. In interviews, Morris has compared Rumsfeld to the Cheshire cat, as opposed to another famous subject of a previous Morris film, The Fog of War (2003): Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence during the Vietnam War, and before that the planner behind the carpet bombing of Japanese cities in the Second World War. Morris has likened McNamara to the Flying Dutchman, forever haunted by the blood on his hands. What lies behind Rumsfeld’s Cheshire cat grin? What faith drives the man? There is little reason to doubt his professed patriotism. Like many amiable midwesterners, Rumsfeld believes in the righteousness of the United States and its unique moral destiny. He believes that since the US is the chosen one among nations, its leaders not only have the right, but the God-given duty, to shape the world in any way they wish. This then becomes the basis for “creating reality,” an American reality. The idea of America as the City on the Hill has a Christian pedigree. But the US has also been an island of refuge from the ills and persecutions of the Old World, and this island is often perceived as a fortress surrounded by enemies, some more imaginary than others. American nationalism, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, is as much rooted in paranoia as it is in religious idealism. The so-called War on Terror has a strong paranoid component. There are many terrorists in the world, to be sure, and— like the “commies” before—quite a few of them are hostile to the US. But just as the country was never under any serious threat of a communist takeover, Islamist terrorists, however murderous, do not threaten the existence of the US today. They are nasty, but they hardly justify a global war. There is more than a little paranoia in the account given by Rumsfeld in Morris’s movie. What kept him awake at night, he muses, was an unanticipated attack on the US. What terrified him as Secretary of Defence was another Pearl Harbor which would have to be explained in hindsight. Why wasn’t it anticipated? Why hadn’t anyone had enough imagination to expect it? To Rumsfeld, “a failure of the imagining” amounts to a personal obsession. Pearl Harbor happened, he believes, because the people in charge of defence had not had the imagination to see it coming. He claims that the same was true of 9/11, even though there had been plenty of intelligence warnings of such an attack, all of which were dismissed, because the minds of the Bush administration were concentrated on Iraq. Rumsfeld’s supposedly profound, but in fact vague, philosophising about “known unknowns,” “known knowns” and “unknown unknowns” shows the paranoid flailing of a man who is terrified of losing control. Hence all those “snowflakes,” trying to get a fix on things. But instead of studying discernible reality, as a “reality-based” person might do, it is as if Rumsfeld prefers to make up a reality in anticipation of unknown unknowns. Empirical evidence plays no part in this effort of the imagination. For, as Rumsfeld says in the film, “the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence.” There was no need to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. One could imagine that he had them, and then act accordingly. This suggests more than a tenuous grip on reality. Rumsfeld’s disregard for discernible facts was an act of will, or as he would see it, imagination. As a ruling member of the world’s most formidable military power, this gave him licence for several years to make decisions that affected (and often destroyed) the lives of millions of people, Iraqis, Afghans and Americans too. And yet he is peculiarly airy about the consequences of his decisions. Baghdad is ransacked by looters: well, “stuff happens.” Would it have been better if the US had not started a war on the false premise of Saddam’s WMD? “Time will tell.” And each time that Cheshire cat grin.
Apart from unleashing two wars, at a catastrophic human and financial cost, the government of George W Bush will always be remembered for the following statement made by a presidential aide, thought to be Karl Rove, to the journalist Ron Suskind. Liberal reporters like Suskind, the aide said, were part of a “realitybased community,” the type of suckers who believe that solutions emerge from “judicious study of discernible reality.” But that was not how the world worked under the Bush administration: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” These words express a particular view of politics, which is hardly new. Empirical knowledge is viewed with contempt. Instead there is a kind of blind faith in the righteousness of a cause based on the instincts of a leader and his coterie in government. This type of politics, which in the past marked both fascist and communist regimes, makes a fetish of authoritarian leadership. “I’m the decider,” said Bush, who may not have been aware of the term “decisionism,” promoted in the 1930s by Carl Schmitt, the legal defender of National Socialism. Decisionism (or Dezisionismus in German legal parlance) is a noxious doctrine which judges the validity of a decision by its source instead of its content. What makes a decision right is that it is made by the man in power. Every other consideration is worthless. Since the decisionmaker is correct by definition, he should also have the right to use force to implement his decisions. Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush’s Secretary of Defence, does not present himself as a man of blind faith. On the contrary, in Errol Morris’s brilliant and disturbing documentary film about him, The Unknown Known (which is in cinemas from 21st March), Rumsfeld expresses his pride in being a cool analyst, a “measured” thinker who tries to understand the world by firing off thousands of memos (known as Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes”) to his staff, questioning every premise and sharpening every definition. The film’s title underlines this aspect of Rumsfeld’s persona, referring to his notorious defence of a possible link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, in which he distinguished between “known knowns,” “unknown knowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Rimless glasses and a piercing gaze make him look like a ruthless technocrat with an almost scientific zeal to penetrate the murk and mess of reality in his quest for pure truth. There is another side to Rumsfeld too: the genial midwesterner with his ingratiating grin, the aw-shucks regular guy from Illinois. The grins tend to flash across his face in the weirdest places, in the midst of discussing responsibility for disastrous wars, for example, or torture techniques. Rumsfeld’s grin is one of the most memorable images in Morris’s film, captured by the camera’s steady gaze. In interviews, Morris has compared Rumsfeld to the Cheshire cat, as opposed to another famous subject of a previous Morris film, The Fog of War (2003): Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence during the Vietnam War, and before that the planner behind the carpet bombing of Japanese cities in the Second World War. Morris has likened McNamara to the Flying Dutchman, forever haunted by the blood on his hands. What lies behind Rumsfeld’s Cheshire cat grin? What faith drives the man? There is little reason to doubt his professed patriotism. Like many amiable midwesterners, Rumsfeld believes in the righteousness of the United States and its unique moral destiny. He believes that since the US is the chosen one among nations, its leaders not only have the right, but the God-given duty, to shape the world in any way they wish. This then becomes the basis for “creating reality,” an American reality. The idea of America as the City on the Hill has a Christian pedigree. But the US has also been an island of refuge from the ills and persecutions of the Old World, and this island is often perceived as a fortress surrounded by enemies, some more imaginary than others. American nationalism, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, is as much rooted in paranoia as it is in religious idealism. The so-called War on Terror has a strong paranoid component. There are many terrorists in the world, to be sure, and— like the “commies” before—quite a few of them are hostile to the US. But just as the country was never under any serious threat of a communist takeover, Islamist terrorists, however murderous, do not threaten the existence of the US today. They are nasty, but they hardly justify a global war. There is more than a little paranoia in the account given by Rumsfeld in Morris’s movie. What kept him awake at night, he muses, was an unanticipated attack on the US. What terrified him as Secretary of Defence was another Pearl Harbor which would have to be explained in hindsight. Why wasn’t it anticipated? Why hadn’t anyone had enough imagination to expect it? To Rumsfeld, “a failure of the imagining” amounts to a personal obsession. Pearl Harbor happened, he believes, because the people in charge of defence had not had the imagination to see it coming. He claims that the same was true of 9/11, even though there had been plenty of intelligence warnings of such an attack, all of which were dismissed, because the minds of the Bush administration were concentrated on Iraq. Rumsfeld’s supposedly profound, but in fact vague, philosophising about “known unknowns,” “known knowns” and “unknown unknowns” shows the paranoid flailing of a man who is terrified of losing control. Hence all those “snowflakes,” trying to get a fix on things. But instead of studying discernible reality, as a “reality-based” person might do, it is as if Rumsfeld prefers to make up a reality in anticipation of unknown unknowns. Empirical evidence plays no part in this effort of the imagination. For, as Rumsfeld says in the film, “the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence.” There was no need to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. One could imagine that he had them, and then act accordingly. This suggests more than a tenuous grip on reality. Rumsfeld’s disregard for discernible facts was an act of will, or as he would see it, imagination. As a ruling member of the world’s most formidable military power, this gave him licence for several years to make decisions that affected (and often destroyed) the lives of millions of people, Iraqis, Afghans and Americans too. And yet he is peculiarly airy about the consequences of his decisions. Baghdad is ransacked by looters: well, “stuff happens.” Would it have been better if the US had not started a war on the false premise of Saddam’s WMD? “Time will tell.” And each time that Cheshire cat grin.
****
Errol Morris has always been interested in how we perceive, and so often distort, reality. In the introduction to his fascinating book, Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography), he explains some of the reasons why. Morris’s father, a distinguished war veteran and medical doctor, suddenly died of a heart attack when Morris was not yet two years old. His mother and elder brother dealt with this sudden blow by never talking about it. Since Morris grew up with no memory of his father, this left a kind of black hole—his father remained a mystery. All he had to remember him by were a few photographs: “In a sense, the photographs both gave me my father and took him away. Photographs put his image in front of me, but they also acutely reminded me of his absence… Who was he? I have no idea. I have the photographs, but I can only imagine who he actually was.” This and his defective eyesight, the result of corrective eye surgery during his childhood that didn’t work, instilled a strong dose of visual scepticism. Morris never trusts what he sees. First sight is almost always deceptive. Photographs can be interpreted in many ways. Things are rarely what they seem. No wonder Morris started off his career as a private detective. He is a born sleuth. In his book, Morris applies his scepticism to photographs of the Crimean War, to the infamous torture photographs snapped on a soldier’s digital camera at Abu Ghraib prison and to images of the American Civil War. The same forensic interest in probing the visual and verbal surface of things marks all of his films. In one of the most celebrated of these, The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris investigates, through interviews and re-enactments, a murder case in Texas. In his trademark technique, Morris gets the interviewee to address the viewer by looking directly into the camera. The way Morris unpicked the version of the case that convinced a jury to convict a man to death was so persuasive that the sentence was overturned before the movie was even released. Hidden realities behind the Abu Ghraib torture pictures are the theme of another Morris film, Standard Operating Procedure (2008). The photographs don’t tell the whole story. In a way, they skewed our view of what really went on in that terrible prison by distracting us from acts that were far worse than bullying naked men. In 2010, Morris made Tabloid, a film about the alleged kidnapping and rape of a Mormon missionary by a former beauty queen. What really occurred is tangled up in a web of lies and distortions, encouraged by the British tabloid press. Morris avoids epiphanies, however. Truth always remains elusive in his films. He leaves room for mystery, not because all truth is relative, but because the Rashomon effect—contradictory interpretations of the same events by different viewers—is part of the human condition. There appears to be a moment of truth in The Fog of War. In one famous scene, Robert McNamara’s eyes fill with tears when he recalls his time in government. This is sometimes cited as a “gotcha” moment, as though Morris managed to rip off the mask of McNamara’s lies and evasions. In fact, however, McNamara doesn’t cry for the victims of the Vietnam War, but for his beloved president, John F Kennedy. Why McNamara did what he did—helping to drag his country deeper into a ghastly conflict—remains unfathomable. Where Rumsfeld used memos to insulate him from the consequences of his actions, McNamara used statistics. He was a brilliant statistician and was able to compute how many firebombs it would take to destroy Tokyo in 1945, killing about 100,000 people in one night, and how the US might win a war of attrition in Vietnam. But the haunted quality of McNamara also humanises him. In the film he says: “What I’m crying out for is for people, all people, to stare reality in the face. And the reality is we’ve killed 160m human beings in conflict in the 20th century.” Rumsfeld was involved in the Vietnam War as well, even though he was not directly responsible for the carnage. He was Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army and US helicopters made their final dash to the ocean after the violent deaths of almost four million people. Morris asks Rumsfeld what lessons he had drawn from this war. Well, Rumsfeld replies, “some things don’t work out. That didn’t.” To say that Rumsfeld does not appear to be haunted by anything he did is to understate his case. He does not appear even to be the slightest bit fazed. There is no “gotcha” moment in the movie because there may not have been anything to get. In Morris’s own words: “He’s a mystery to me, and in many ways, he remains a mystery to me—except for the possibility that there might not be a mystery.” Donald Rumsfeld is clearly not a stupid man. He always was a smooth, efficient operator, an office politician of the first order, someone consumed with ambition. He might well have a more formidable brain than most of his colleagues, or indeed his bosses in the Oval Office. But he comes across in the movie as a superficial man, not given to any self-reflection, let alone feelings of anguish or guilt. In Morris’s words, he appears to be “suffering from a severe case of IDD, or Irony Deficiency Disorder. He is the least Jewish person I have ever met.” This might explain why he seems to be oblivious to the contradictions in his own statements. When Morris puts it to him that highly dubious interrogation techniques, used against prisoners at Guantánamo and justified by Rumsfeld, migrated to Abu Ghraib—in other words that abuses condoned by the US government in Guantánamo resulted in the horrific scenes in Iraq—Rumsfeld categorically denies this. He quotes the report on prisoner abuses by an independent panel led by James Schlesinger, the Defence Secretary under Richard Nixon, which supposedly exonerated Rumsfeld, or indeed anyone in the Bush administration, from this charge. Morris then reads the Schlesinger report back to him. It says the exact opposite. Without twitching a muscle, Rumsfeld says: “Well, I’d agree with that.” The best-known, and some would say notorious, analysis of one man’s lack of imagination is Hannah Arendt’s account of Adolf Eichmann, whose trial she covered in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt claimed that Eichmann, the technocrat in charge of the mass killing of European Jews, was a “banal” man whose imagination did not reach beyond his ambition to rise up the career ladder. He did not become the organiser of a genocide because he believed in racialist ideology; it was simply the way to get on. He was not a demonic figure, a man of radical evil. He just didn’t think, particularly, about the fate of others. Mass murder, in the case of Eichmann, was a radical failure of imagination. Arendt had picked a poor example to make a plausible case that you don’t have to be a demon to be responsible for terrible acts. Eichmann was a fanatical Nazi, who really did believe that every last Jewish man, woman and child had to be exterminated. What Eichmann did cannot be usefully compared to the deeds of Donald Rumsfeld. There is no sign that Rumsfeld’s actions were dictated by malice or bloodlust. But his lack of imagination borders on the fanatic. A cynic can be flexible, since all he believes in are the basest of human motives. But the fanatic cannot be held back in his quest to make reality conform to a blind faith. He cannot afford to be hindered by second thoughts, or self-reflection. There is something fanatical about Rumsfeld’s belief in the providence of American power. Like many American nationalists nurtured during the Cold War, he appears to see the US as the force of light in a world of evil. This doesn’t mean that he thinks America is a flawless society, but that the use of US military might against the forces of evil, whether they be communists or Islamists or Saddam Hussein, is by definition a duty blessed by God. It is certainly disturbing, not to say lethal for countless people, that such a man, ably assisted by such cronies as Richard Cheney and backed by an insecure and not very knowledgeable president, could have wielded so much power over a number of years. The saving grace, if that is the right phrase, is that Rumsfeld is not a German, born in 1906, poisoned by a homicidal ideology and led by a vicious dictator, but a cordial midwesterner, born in 1932, who rose to the top of a political system that at least affords its citizens the opportunity to vote the rascals out. Ian Buruma’s most recent book is “Year Zero: A History of 1945” (Atlantic)
