"...They immediately saw 9/11 as an excuse to change the rules of domestic surveillance and of prisoner interrogation--and also to change the rules of how the United States behaved abroad. Now we would undertake wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq, whether or not the UN and our NATO allies approved of them. If the facts about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction did not fit their world view, they would impose other fact. "We're an empire now," a high Bush official--almost certainly Karl Rove--told reporter Ron Suskind in 2004, "and we create our own reality," leaving the "reality-based community" struggling to keep up. Like so many other Boomers of every political stripe, the men of the Bush Administration sought to remake the world according to their vision of what it should be. And even though their assumptions were wrong and their policies disastrous--they succeeded. The wars they began in Afghanistan and Iraq still continue. The Obama Administration applied the supposed pro-democracy policy of regime change they had tried in Iraq in Libya and tried to do it again in Syria, with disastrous consequences. Guantanamo is still open for business, and Obama increased drone strikes, another aspect of our new endless war...." DK
Great passage. I would just note that this is hardly the first time such a faction has taken power and then set the rules for reality.
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