[Bumped up by pastordan]
[promoted by BooMan]
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
This historic exchange between Ron Suskind and a Bush aide, published last fall in the New York Times Magazine and well-excerpted here, alerted those of us who still live in the world of consensual reality, to just how far off the rails the White House had gone.
Like Icarus watching the wax drip from his magnificent wings, the reality of gravity is becoming apparent even in Bushworld. Stubborn “facts on the ground” in Iraq are becoming impossible to ignore. Today’s front page of the Washington Post announces that the, “Administration Is Shedding ‘Unreality’ That Dominated Invasion…”
— more reality below the fold —
Here are some of the stunning insights shared by the Post in the article entitled “U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq.” [Emphases throughout are mine.]
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
“What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”
Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite the chaos that followed the invasion and the escalating insurgency. “Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we’re helping Iraqis succeed,” President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.
We’re helping them succeed. My, how gracious, considering that we are the ones who shocked and awed them into their current straits. I’m glad to hear that they are taking control of their country. Do they really have a choice?
The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.
But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq’s future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women’s rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. officials and Iraq analysts say.
The implications of this are seriously underplayed in this article. It’s a stunning blow, bigger than the failure to find WMD, in terms of the neo-con agenda.
Attacks on U.S. convoys by insurgents using roadside bombs have doubled over the past year, Army Brig. Gen. Yves Fontaine said Friday. Convoys ferrying food, fuel, water, arms and equipment from Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey are attacked about 30 times a week, Fontaine said.
“There has been a realistic reassessment of what it is possible to achieve in the short term and fashion a partial exit strategy,” Yaphe said. “This change is dictated not just by events on the ground but by unrealistic expectations at the start.”
Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.
So, the whole, “insurgency is in it’s final throes” thing… um… oops, never mind.
The United States had high hopes of quick, big-budget fixes for the electrical power system that would show Iraqis tangible benefits from the ouster of Hussein. But inadequate training for Iraqi staff, regional rivalries restricting the power flow to Baghdad, inadequate fuel for electrical generators and attacks on the infrastructure have contributed to the worst summer of electrical shortages in the capital.
Water is also a “tough, tough” situation in a desert country, said a U.S. official in Baghdad familiar with reconstruction issues. Pumping stations depend on electricity, and engineers now say the system has hundreds of thousands of leaks.
“The most thoroughly dashed expectation was the ability to build a robust self-sustaining economy. We’re nowhere near that. State industries, electricity are all below what they were before we got there,” said Wayne White, former head of the State Department’s Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle East Institute. “The administration says Saddam ran down the country. But most damage was from looting [after the invasion], which took down state industries, large private manufacturing, the national electric” system.
Umm… Could someone just send these people some solar cells. Sun, they got! Or is that too reality-based. Besides, Halliburton doesn’t do solar equipment, now does it.
Most of the Post article relies on anonymous sources, and I fully expect the White House to publicly back away from its revelations. For those reality naysayers, Frank Rich has some good advice. From today’s New York Times, a must-read column, “Someone Tell the President the War Is Over.”
LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. “We will stay the course,” he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?
In other words, it’s time for even bubble-boy to wake up and smell reality.
