What Rumsfeld Got Right

From The Atlantic:

In 1962, a Harvard economics professor named Thomas C. Schelling wrote an introduction to Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. In a few hundred words, Schelling, a future Nobel Prize winner, delivered a tour de force about the failure to anticipate events. “We were so busy thinking through some ‘obvious’ Japanese moves,” he writes,

that we neglected to hedge against the choice that they actually made … There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable … Furthermore, we made the terrible mistake … of forgetting that a fine deterrent can make a superb target.

Schelling’s introduction so impressed Donald H. Rumsfeld that he memorized parts of it and, as others have reported, regularly handed it out before the Pearl Harbor–level attack of 9/11. In his subsequent planning for the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld took Schelling’s precepts to heart, thought pessimistically about all sorts of dire scenarios, and got the best possible result.

Read more ....

Update: Donald Rumsfeld Goes Green

My Comment: In the next five to 10 years, historians will start to evaluate the Iraq War .... what was done right and what was done wrong. This long article from the Atlantic is the first of many that will be printed in the next few years.

For those who are curious on where I stand .... I will always remember Donald Rumsfeld on 9/11. He was the right man in the right place in the right time on that day.