Richard Ingrams' Week: Let's savour Donald Rumsfeld's poetic side

Last year the American satirist Hart Seely published a charming little book called Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H Rumsfeld in which some of the American Defence Secretary's more cryptic sayings were reprinted in verse form, for example:

As we know
There are no knowns
There are things we know we know
We also know
There are known unknowns
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know
But there are also unknown unknowns
The ones we don't know we don't know

I hope very much that there may be a new enlarged version of Rumsfeld's poetic oeuvre. If so it might include one of his latest poems concerned with his recent visit to Iraq:

You'd fly over it
And you see people out in the fields
Doing things
And people driving their cars
Lining up for gasoline
And going about their business

We have to remember that the poet Rumsfeld is in an aeroplane in the first place because conditions from the ground are much too dangerous for him to be driven around in a car.

But he seems unaware of this. Or at any rate it is not a point that he seeks to stress. From his lofty position in the sky he can look down and reassure himself and the public at large that things in Iraq are not so bad after all.

In the same way, I imagine, you could have flown over the German countryside in 1944 and concluded that all the talk of war had been greatly exaggerated.

Behind the scenes at the MoD

There were more reports this week that our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been supplied with anything like the kind of equipment that they need. Concern especially centres on the Land Rovers used by the Army in Iraq which offer soldiers precious little protection against roadside bombs.

As usual it will be hard to point the finger at those who are responsible for the shortfall. But if I were a military man I would not be reassured by the new Defence Secretary Des Browne, another of those who has looked out of his aeroplane window when flying over Iraq and decided that things weren't so bad after all.

Also lurking at the Ministry of Defence with the specific responsibility for acquiring arms and equipment for the Armed Forces is the scarcely reassuring figure of Lord Drayson. Drayson has been lucky to have escaped the attention of the media in all the publicity about honours being doled out by Blair in exchange for donations to the Labour Party.

After a chequered career making flu vaccines in a Merseyside factory, Drayson became a generous donor to the Labour Party. In 2004, he was elevated to the peerage and given a job in the Government by Mr Blair, who presumably hoped that he would be better at buying equipment for the Army than he had been at manufacturing vaccines.

This week's scene of the so-called chaos at Heathrow didn't look to me all that different from the normal state of affairs.

The long queues at the check-in desks, the crowds of resigned-looking travellers, the lists of flights cancelled or delayed. All this looked like business as usual to anyone familiar with the nightmare that is modern air travel.

And they are talking now of additional security precautions, including the banning of water bottles - not to mention laptops and even paperback books.

But as things stand you already suffer the indignity of being frisked by airport staff and having anything like a pocket penknife taken away from you. (I was once even deprived of a child's plastic cricket bat because they said it might be a dangerous weapon.)

All this precedes the torture of the journey itself, packed into an uncomfortable hard seat with only limited legroom while endless announcements order you to "sit back, relax and enjoy your flight".

If this week's terror alert does anything to deter people from travelling by air, then it will have had at least one beneficial side effect. And fewer flights will do a little to slow down global warming - something the Government is not prepared to tackle, preferring just to tell everyone to use long-lasting lightbulbs.

theoldie@theoldie.co.uk