The Rest is History is doing a multi-part series on the Iranian Revolution. I have listened to the first episode, covering the fall of the Shah and the US’s complete failure even to anticipate the revolution. Literally days before the fall, Jimmy Carter went to Tehran for a celebration, and he gave a speech proclaiming that the Shah was a stable presence, an advocate for human rights (which the Shah most decidedly was not), and that the Shah would rule for decades. This was also the consensus behind the scenes in American diplomatic and spy circles. Nobody saw the Iranian revolution coming, right up until the moment it was happening.

I look at that, and I look at similar failures with the fall of the USSR and 9/11, and I’m tempted to think, well, the CIA and State Department are bumbling clowns — completely useless!

But what I’m not seeing is occasions when diplomats and spies headed off catastrophe, and did so deftly enough that it never even made the news.

Nobody remembers the planes that don’t crash.

Anti-vaxxers look around and say we don’t have tuberculosis or measles or polio anymore, so those vaccines are useless! Even dangerous! But what anti-vaxxers don’t see is that vaccines are the reason we don’t have those diseases.