The Year of Living Erroneously

I do not know the way," Frodo Baggins, the unlikely hero of The Lord of the Rings, declares of his mission to destroy the fateful ring of J.R.R. Tolkien's imagination. In the cinematic epic that gave us the artistic exclamation point to 2003, Frodo spoke for many. This was surely the year in which we ambled hopefully, foolishly, gamely into the dark. Some would like to ascribe the many human failings of the year to willful deception. Bush lied! But cover-ups are not as common in human history as screw-ups. This was, rather, a year in which we all got it wrong. It was the year of living erroneously.

Where, after all, are the prizes that the West's Mesopotamian adventure was designed to find? The weapons of mass destruction--the thousands of tons of unaccounted-for anthrax and botulinum toxins and all the other deadly weapons we were fighting to destroy in Iraq--have not yet been found. Yes, a great deal of Saddam's WMD infrastructure is there, and his record of deploying them is a matter of history. But the weapons themselves? We haven't found them after months of looking. Bush's fault? If it was, then the fault was shared by almost every Democrat, the U.N., the New York Times, the Clinton Administration, the British government and on and on. They all believed that Saddam's Iraq was armed to the mustache with concealed deadly weaponry. Saddam's fault? He too, it turns out, might have been mistaken, having been deceived by scientists and generals too scared to tell their tyrannical boss that the cupboard of toxic weaponry was somewhat bare. So the war that dominated the year, the war that liberated millions, the war that finally captured one of the most horrifying mass murderers in history, was at least partly built on a series of deceptions, mistakes and failures. By everyone.

It's useful to recognize this in a hubristic, technological age. We still don't know a lot. We screw up. We fail even as we succeed. We do not know everything. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pronounced, there are "known unknowns," and then there are "unknown unknowns." Some things are actually quite hard to fix because the systems behind them are intricate, complicated and created by humans. New Yorkers and the inhabitants of a whole swath of North America spent a delirious, humid night in the complete dark in August, and for hours no one had a clue why the power grid had crashed or how on earth to fix it. The glitch that guaranteed that the space shuttle Columbia would disintegrate on re-entry occurred at lift-off, and none of the rocket scientists at NASA saw it coming. A sizable proportion of military deaths in Iraq were caused not even by enemy combat but by accident, human error, friendly fire.