AMERICANS filed their income taxes yesterday, swearing that “under penalties of perjury...to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are true, correct, and complete.” 
 
 Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that his return may be none of the above. Yesterday his office released (via Twitter) a letter to the Internal Revenue Service in which he says: “I have absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate.” (See below.) 
 
 “The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated, that I know I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested and therefore I cannot and do not know, and I suspect a great many Americans cannot know, whether or not their tax returns are accurate,” Mr Rumsfeld wrote. 
 
 Mr Rumsfeld was wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but in this case he is clearly right. The American tax code is a "known unknown", in Rummiespeak. It is 70,000 pages long and might as well be written in Klingon. Few Americans have a clue whether they are complying with it. Some 90% of them (including Mr Rumsfeld) pay a tax accountant or use commercial software to help navigate it (see Economist articles here and here and here and here and here, among others). There are proposals to simplify the code (see article here). But don’t hold your breath. ||||| The title of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ’s new memoir, “Known and Unknown,” comes from a remark he made about whether Iraq had supplied or was willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me,” he quipped in 2002, “because, as we know, there are known 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.” 
 
 Mr. Rumsfeld’s memoir plays a fast and loose game of dodge ball with what are now “known knowns” and “known unknowns” about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The tedious, self-serving volume is filled with efforts to blame others — most notably the C.I.A., the State Department and the Coalition Provisional Authority (in particular George Tenet, Colin L. Powell, Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer III) — for misjudgments made in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the failure to contain an insurgency there that metastasized for years. It is a book that suffers from many of the same flaws that led the administration into what George Packer of The New Yorker has called “a needlessly deadly” undertaking — that is, cherry-picked data, unexamined assumptions and an unwillingness to re-examine past decisions. 
 
 Not only does Mr. Rumsfeld frequently assume a smug, know-it-all tone — he says he warned President George W. Bush to “tone down any triumphalist rhetoric” in his end-of-major combat-operations speech, made on May 1, 2003, in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner — but he also displays a tendency, familiar to viewers of his news conferences, to make bold assertions with no pretense of substantiation. 
 
 Of a war that has already cost the United States more than $700 billion and claimed more than 4,400 American lives, Mr. Rumsfeld writes: “Knowing what we later learned and recognizing the costs, there is not a persuasive argument to be made that the United States would be in a stronger strategic position or that Iraq and the Middle East would be better off if Saddam were still in power. In short, ridding the region of Saddam’s brutal regime has created a more stable and secure world.” 
 
 And of the argument that the war in Iraq diverted troops and resources from Afghanistan, leading to the resurgence there of the Taliban, Mr. Rumsfeld simply declares, “It was precisely during the toughest period in the Iraq war that Afghanistan, with coalition help, took some of its most promising steps toward a free and better future.” 
 
 Although most of this book is written in flat-footed prose (largely devoid of colorful Rummyisms), this former Secretary of Defense tends to be tart — even snide — in his depictions of colleagues, with the notable exception of his old friend, Dick Cheney, whom he worked with back in the Ford administration and whom he says he thought could serve George W. Bush as both vice president and defense secretary. 
 
 Mr. Rumsfeld makes it clear that his relationship with the president’s father, George Herbert Walker Bush, was chilly, going so far as to imply that the elder Bush lied about the circumstances of becoming director of Central Intelligence under President Gerald Ford. He contends that “the media image” of Mr. Powell “battling the forces of unilateralism and conservatism may have been beneficial to Powell in some circles, but it did not jibe with reality,” that as secretary of state, in fact, Mr. Powell “tended not to speak out” at meetings “in strong opposition to the views of the president or of his colleagues.” And he describes Senator John McCain as “a man with a hair-trigger temper and a propensity to fashion and shift his positions to appeal to the media.” 
 
 In the course of “Known and Unknown” Mr. Rumsfeld tells the reader he regrets not resigning in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal (which he blames on “a small group of prison guards who ran amok in the absence of adequate supervision”). He says that he offered to resign twice but that President Bush pressed him to stay on. He also acknowledges that some of his more cavalier remarks — “stuff happens,” he said of the looting and lack of law and order in post-invasion Baghdad — were “a mistake.” For the most part, however, he sidesteps or stonewalls allegations, in the words of his biographer, the Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham, that he became the very “personification of the arrogance and misjudgments of the Bush administration,” from its embrace of idées fixes and impatience with dissenting viewpoints to its inability to correct course. 
 
 Mr. Rumsfeld contests the observation (widely made by military officers, journalists, other administration insiders and members of the Coalition Provisional Authority) that his preoccupation with executing the Iraq war with a light, fast force had crippling consequences for the military’s ability to secure Iraq — to establish law and order, seal the country’s borders and guard armament caches. “Too many troops could hurt our ability to win Iraqi confidence,” he writes, “and it could translate into more casualties, because more troops would mean more targets for our enemies.” In addition he repeatedly disputes some of his colleagues’ neo-con ideas of exporting democracy and nation building, contending that “American sacrifice” has given Afghans and Iraqis the “opportunity to build better” societies, but that these “are not our broken societies to fix.” 
 
 Mr. Rumsfeld blames “intelligence shortcomings” for failing “to highlight the dangers of an insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, despite reporting from Bob Woodward that the White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were needed to quell the insurgency there. This underscores what Mr. Woodward has called the “state of denial” the administration increasingly came to inhabit as violence in Iraq snowballed. (It would continue to do so, until the surge was implemented after Mr. Rumsfeld’s departure from office in late 2006.) 
 
 Mr. Rumsfeld asserts that the strategy of “moving responsibility to the Iraqi security forces as quickly” as possible “seemed promising” until the Samarra bombing in February 2006, despite myriad news reports about Iraq’s deteriorating situation; despite a 2005 report by Philip Zelikow, a State Department counselor, which described Iraq as “a failed state shadowed by constant violence”; and despite what Mr. Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority , has said were his repeated entreaties for more troops. 
 
 For all the copious spin in this volume, Mr. Rumsfeld wittingly or unwittingly ratifies several aspects of the Bush administration described in earlier books and news reports: namely that toxic in-fighting between the Pentagon and State Department undermined the handling of the war in Iraq; and that the decision-making process within the Bush White House and the National Security Council was often fuzzy, if not downright dysfunctional. 
 
 Mr. Rumsfeld writes that “while the pesident and I had many discussions about the war preparations, I do not recall his ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision.” As for the momentous decision to disband the Iraqi Amy announced in May 2003 (a move, critics say, that contributed to the security vacuum in Iraq, put several hundred thousand armed Iraqis on the street with no jobs and no salaries, and fatally fueled the insurgency), Mr. Rumsfeld says National Security Council members did not register an objection to the decision, adding: “My impression was that President Bush wanted Bremer to have considerable freedom of action. However, it is now clear that the N.S.C. should have deliberated the decision more fully.” 
 
 At the same time this book makes it clear that Iraq was on the mind of at least some Bush administration members from very early on. Mr. Rumsfeld writes that months before 9/11 — in July 2001, to be exact — he sent a memo to Mr. Cheney, Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice asking “that we hold a principals committee meeting to discuss Iraq.” He says he “argued that we would be better off developing a policy well ahead of events that could overtake us.” He also reveals that only 15 days after the Sept. 11 attacks President Bush asked him to join him in the Oval Office alone, and requested that “I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq,” though he “did not get the impression the president had made up his mind on the merits of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime” at that point. 
 
 It was important that the request not leak out: “Because I had been reviewing the various war plans regularly,” Mr. Rumsfeld adds, “I knew no one would think it out of the ordinary for me to request a briefing on our existing options on Iraq. As a precaution, however, I asked for briefings to cover several contingencies in various parts of the world.” 
 
 Keeping some things “unknown” is even invoked in these pages as one of the explanations for why there wasn’t better planning for a post-invasion Iraq: “Further complicating matters prior to the war was an undercurrent of concern about the wisdom of even conducting large-scale planning. This could signal that America considered war inevitable and derail President Bush’s diplomatic efforts, which continued almost until the day the war began.”
– Can't make heads or tails of your taxes? Well don't feel too bad, because at least one former secretary of defense can't either. Donald Rumsfeld sent his tax returns the IRS along with a cheeky letter informing them that he has "absolutely no idea" whether they're accurate. Rumsfeld posted the letter to Facebook and Twitter, adding that he sends a similar letter every year. "This note is to alert you folks that I know that I do not know whether or not my tax returns are accurate, which is a sad commentary on governance," he wrote. "The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated that I know that I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested." We'd make a "known unknown" joke here, but the Economist beat us to it.