Words of wisdom from surprising sources

From Understanding Wood Finishing comes this little nugget of wisdom:

The real reason for secrecy is the necessity of concealing the fact that there is nothing to conceal.

I wonder if historians will look back onto our age and note that the war on terror was won, as much as it could be won by mid 2002 and we just kept on going. That would explain the decision to go into Iraq, that is to say the short term problem was solved for a while, so why not work on the long term problem?

Update – I mis-phrased this. It should read more like “we solved the problem, and then tried working on the condition with no avail.”