Sorry about that

'Where are WMD?/What a kick if he has none/Sorry about that.' Also: 7 other things worth a click.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq back in 2003, one of the top military intelligence officers on the ground was a colonel named Steve Rotkoff.

Rotkoff had a sense of history. Even as troops were fighting their way north (my little brother among them), Rotkoff wondered what it would be like to look back 15 or 20 years later (a/k/a, “now”).

He tried keeping a war journal, but he had almost no time. So, he wrote a single haiku each day—the minimum commitment necessary to document some what it all felt like.

Here’s a Rotkoff haiku from May 2003, after yet another fruitless day of searching for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction:

Where are WMD?

What a kick if he has none.

Sorry about that

Not that bad

This vignette comes from a book called State of Denial that I helped Bob Woodward write back in 2006.

I’m probably still not supposed to say how we happened to learn what was written in the diary. But that haiku has stuck with me. For nearly a decade and a half, it’s been kind of a personal joke.