Not That We Know Of
Karoline Leavitt and the Unknown Knowns of the Iran War
“Not that we know of.”
Five words. Spoken from the White House podium last week when a reporter asked whether U.S. strikes had hit a girls’ school in Minab, Iran. More than 175 girls, Iran’s Foreign Minister said, were killed when the building came down. The answer the United States gave was five words.
Every semester I teach a graduate course on the philosophy of education, and every semester the same problem surfaces: not what people do not know, but what they already know and have decided to ignore. I recognized the five words immediately.
In February 2002, Donald Rumsfeld stood before reporters and offered what he clearly believed was an epistemology of war. There are, he said, known knowns — things we know we know. There are known unknowns — things we know we don’t know. And then there are unknown unknowns — things we don’t know we don’t know.
The press laughed. Philosophers did not.
Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, took Rumsfeld seriously enough to write about him at length. His argument was simple: Rumsfeld had identified three categories but missed the fourth, and the most important. The unknown known: what we know, but choose not to acknowledge. It is the knowledge we have already absorbed and set aside because acknowledging it would cost us what we are not prepared to pay.
Žižek located this fourth category in the logic of ideology, not ignorance, but willed unknowing: the official shrug, the institutionalized blank face, the bureaucratic five words spoken by someone who knows, or who knows enough, but has decided that knowing does not obligate them to act, to answer, or to grieve.
Twenty-four years after Rumsfeld, Karoline Leavitt is standing at a podium. The unknown knowns are everywhere.
I. Known Known: Iran Has Children
Start with what no one disputes. Iran has a population of roughly 90 million people. It has schools. It has children who attend them. The United States and Israel have, in the past week, struck more than 2,000 targets inside Iran. These are not contested facts. They are known knowns, acknowledged from the White House podium.
Two thousand targets. The word does its work. It implies precision. It implies that each of those 2,000 targets was a missile launcher, a naval vessel, a nuclear facility. It does not ask us to imagine what else was nearby. It does not ask us to count.
Iran’s Foreign Minister posted an aerial photograph. Rows of graves. More than 175 girls, he said, were killed when a strike hit an elementary school in Minab.
When asked directly whether U.S. strikes had hit a girls’ school, Leavitt said:
That answer is not a known unknown. The administration knows bombs kill children in their proximity. That is knowledge so basic it precedes intelligence briefings. What Leavitt performed, at the podium, was the conversion of a known known into an unknown known: knowledge acknowledged just enough to avoid a lie, and denied just enough to avoid responsibility.
The investigation, we are told, is ongoing. The girls are already buried.
II. Known Unknown: The Imminent Threat
A known unknown is an admission of the limits of knowledge. “We do not yet know the full civilian casualty count” could be a known unknown, if offered in good faith. “We do not know what Iran will do next” is a legitimate known unknown in any conflict.
The known unknown the administration has constructed around the justification for this war is a shield, not an admission.
When a reporter asked Leavitt to identify the imminent threat that legally required the United States to strike first, she replied:
“I reject the premise of your question.”
Rejecting the premise is not the same as answering it. The premise (that a president requires a coherent legal justification to take the country to war) is constitutional bedrock, not media invention. What Leavitt rejected was not a flawed assumption. She rejected the obligation to answer.
And when pressed further on what intelligence drove the decision to strike, she offered this:
The legal threshold for war is a feeling. Not a classified briefing. Not a formal intelligence assessment. Not a finding transmitted to congressional leadership under the War Powers Act. A feeling.
The maneuver is the known unknown turned inside out. The administration does not claim ignorance. It claims intuition. It has converted the question of justification (a known unknown it is obligated to address) into pre-rational, pre-legal, pre-accountable intuition. You cannot subpoena a feeling. You cannot hold a feeling in contempt. What you can do (what this administration has done) is answer a question about dead children with five words.
III. Unknown Unknown: What Victory Looks Like
This conflict has unknown unknowns. No one knows how Iran will respond in the coming weeks. No one knows whether the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei stabilizes the Middle East or plunges it into crisis.
These are the unknown unknowns, and they are the ones no one in this administration is asking about.
When Leavitt was asked whether this is a regime-change war, she said:
“The goals of this operation have been made clear.”
They have not. The stated military objectives are tactical, not strategic: destroy ballistic missiles, annihilate the navy, end the nuclear pathway. They describe what to hit, not what winning looks like afterward. An administration accountable for the unknown unknowns of a war in Iran would be asking: what comes after the regime? Who fills the vacuum? What do we owe the Iranian people we have just bombed into a political transition they did not choose?
These questions were not asked at the podium. Not that we know of.
IV. Unknown Known: The Asymmetry We Have Already Accepted
When six American service members were killed in an Iranian drone strike, Leavitt spoke of dignified transfers, of heroes, of the very best among us. The president will attend the ceremony at Dover. The names are known. The grief is performed at the highest level of government.
When more than 175 Iranian girls are reported dead in a strike on their school, the answer is five words and a pivot to condemning the regime.
The asymmetry is not a lapse. The unknown known embedded in it is this: everyone in that briefing room (Leavitt included) knows that Iranian children are as dead as American soldiers. They know that “not that we know of” is not a denial. They know that an investigation that begins after the graves are dug is not the same as an investigation that might have prevented them.
They know. The knowledge is there, absorbed into the machinery of official language, processed into evasion, and returned to the public as institutional uncertainty.
The asymmetry is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies a gap between what someone believes and what they say. What Žižek describes is worse than hypocrisy: a social arrangement in which everyone agrees, without saying so, to perform a shared unknowing, because the alternative (acknowledging what we know) would require a moral vocabulary the system has not budgeted for.
Identity Over Accountability
When internal dissent within the MAGA coalition over the war grew, Leavitt offered this:
“I would just remind people X is not real life.”
The identity pivot is the unknown known made explicit, for once, though not in the way Leavitt intends. The move from justification to identity is only available to an administration that has already decided it does not need to justify. The war is legitimate because Trump ordered it. Trump is legitimate because he leads the movement. The movement is legitimate because it is America First. America First means, apparently, striking Iran on a feeling, declaring 2,000 targets a resounding success, and answering questions about dead schoolgirls with five words.
What We Already Know
Žižek's point about Rumsfeld was that he was honest about the wrong things and dishonest about the right ones. He named the epistemological categories and then used them to avoid the one that mattered most.
Karoline Leavitt is not Rumsfeld. She is less philosophical and more combative. But the structure is the same. The briefings of this past week have not been a failure of knowledge. They have been a performance of managed unknowing: knowing deployed selectively, knowledge withheld strategically, and the fourth category left unnamed because naming it would require a capacity this administration has refused to demonstrate: the willingness to be accountable for what it already knows.
Bombs fall on cities. Cities have schools. Schools have children.
We know.
Žižek's discussion of the unknown known appears in The Plague of Fantasies (1997) and Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004).