Until a new one erupts, but so imperfectly.

War seems to demand some response--opinion, analysis, insight--lest it seem that we’re uncaring or detached from events so consequential. But if there is anything we can say with any certainty about war, it’s that nobody outside the inner circle knows anything, and the inner circle’s knowledge is partial, contingent, and prone to the interpretive distortions of group-think.

The other thing we can say with certainty is the primary task of those in charge of the war is perception management, to shape-shift the fog of war into narratives supported by images and statistics that lend an air of factual certainty to something that was as carefully curated as an advert campaign designed to persuade us to buy into whatever story of the war suits those in charge.

Since nobody has a truly comprehensive grasp of what’s going on--and what passes for comprehension has been filtered, either purposefully for perception management, or by the biases born of previous experience--any opinion, analysis, or insight is a claim for some measure of certainty that dismisses the inherent contingencies of fast-moving events that depend to some irreducible degree on where one is standing.

War fighting, perception management, analysis and policy-making are professions that are fraught with biases, group-think, blind spots and all the unknowns, from the known-unknowns to the unknown-unknowns, and everything in between. One of the few certainties is that no one involved is anxious to publicly admit they made a mistake.

Charles Hugh Smith