In preparation for a longer post, and after realizing I’ve retrieved this gem a half-dozen times over 4 years, sharing without further comment:

“It was one of those moments when no one really knows what the hell is going on.  History works that way more often than we’d like to think.  It’s comforting to believe that a group of powerful people sit around a table in secret and lay out the options, weigh the facts, and decide on a course of action which then unfolds according to their design. If only history were a sinister conspiracy! More often, we can’t say why events of the most momentous consequence ever happened…The people in charge make decisions based on the politics of the moment, or on an ideology that bears little relation to human reality, or on sheer ignorance compounded by wishful thinking —on anything but solid information.  Or they don’t make a decision at all—events gallop ahead and decision makers stumble to keep up. Then they spend the rest of their lives pretending that they knew what they were doing all along, and justifying to themselves something that made no sense in the first place.”

— George Packer, Our Man p. 49-50