As of today, the toughest—and best—interview that Donald Rumsfeld has endured through a press tour promoting his new Churchillian iPhone game comes not from a hard-hitting journalist, but from the brilliant Stephen Colbert.

After a brief discussion of another prominent Donald (Rumsfeld marveled at the crowds Trump and Bernie Sanders are attracting) they moved to the place Colbert wanted to go all along: how presidents and their staff make decisions, and how one decision, in particular, happened.

"When the decision was made to go into Iraq in 2003," begins Colbert, "The situation that we have now, which is a chaotic Iraq and Syria, with the control of ISIS and the chaos following the Arab Spring in the area as well—is the situation we have now, was it ever considered to be an outcome? Was it a worst-case scenario, or a beyond-worst-case scenario?"

Rumsfeld's answer is familiar.

"I think the disorder in the entire region, and the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shia, is something that generally people had not anticipated."

Of course, the intra-faith conflict between Islam's two primary factions is a battle that has raged for 1,000 years. Plenty of observers—including operatives in U.S. intelligence agencies—predicted that toppling Saddam Hussein would likely lead to sectarian conflict in Iraq. High-level officials in the Bush White House (like Paul Wolfowitz) were absolutely convinced that there was no threat of Sunni-Shia violence. They were, of course, dead wrong.

It brings to mind the words of Mark Twain: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

That notion—the danger of misplaced confidence in what you know—arose later in the interview.

"That leads me to your most famous saying," says Colbert, "That there are known-knowns, things we know we know—and tell me if I get this wrong, because I know this is your baby. There are known-unknowns, things we know that we don't know. And there are also unknown-unknowns—"



"They're the ones that get you," Rumsfeld says.



"But in this case," Colbert continues, "Isn't the one that got us something that—there's a fourth option, that no one ever talks about, which is the unknown-knowns. Which is the things that we know, and then we choose not to know them, or not let other people know we know."









It looks like Colbert has developed a taste for Twain-ish thinking, but he lands on something slightly different: Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration were operating on intelligence that they knew was uncertain and filled with caveats, but they presented it to the American people as air-tight. Rumsfeld's response?

"The president had available to him intelligence from all elements of the government. And the national security council members had that information. It was all shared, it was all supplied. And it's never certain. If it were a fact, it wouldn't be called intelligence."

That statement is amazing by itself, but it also, unwittingly, drives home Colbert's point. If the information was uncertain, why wasn't it presented to the American people that way?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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