Not so well, according to quote in a Sunday Washington Post piece saying that the Bush administration is “significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq”:
“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.”
It’s sickly wonderful how that confirms and deflates this legendary quote from Ron Suskind’s seminal “Without a Doubt“, published in October 2004 in the The New York Times Magazine.
The [senior adviser to Bush] 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.”
Emphases mine. Recognition that empiricism may indeed trump empire? This once, theirs.
