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In the summer of 2002, during the lead up to the Iraq War, a White House official expressed displeasure about with article written by journalist Ron Suskind in Esquire. He asserted people like Suskind were trapped ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which the official defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”

Suskind murmured something about enlightenment principles grounded in scientific empiricism, but the official cut him off, saying, ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore…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.” [emphasis added by author].

This is a revealing statement about the mentality in the Bush White House prior to the Iraq War.

Think about it: in effect, the official is claiming the mind of a decider, who is tasked with making decisions to cope with the constraints of the real world, has the power to create a new reality over and over again. Therefore the decider need not be worried about matching his actions against those constraints, or even observing those constraints, before making his decisions.

Arrogant? To be sure. Unusual inside the Beltway? Not really, based on my experience in the Pentagon. But this outlook also reflects an incredibly stupid and dangerous way to orient one’s decision cycle to events in the real world.

It is trite to say that madness occurs when the mind governing decisions and actions becomes systemically disconnected from the real world.

But in the Versailles on the Potomac, where madness has risen to a high art form, reinforced by pseudo science, ideology, and greed, all neatly packaged in compelling PowerPoint briefings, transformative visions, and amplified by an adoring mainstream media, it is difficult to know what the real world really is.

Now, with this working appreciation of Madness in mind, let’s put these abstract ideas into action with regard to the America’s Iraq debacle.

Job One, gathering the data has just been made much easier. I urge you to read carefully The Iraq War Ten Years After: Declassified Documents Show Failed Intelligence, Policy Ad Hockery, and Propaganda-Driven Decision Making and the links to the official documents it cites. This compilation of official documents illustrates the “information” that was used by U.S. decision makers to justify (to themselves and others) and to plan the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. These documents have been made accessible to anyone with an internet connection by invaluable National Security Archive of George Washington University.

After spending trillions of dollars, killing hundreds of thousands of (approaching perhaps a million) Iraqis, suffering over 4,000 US combat-related deaths, and tens of thousands of wounded and stressed-out veterans — not to mention placing a huge indelible stain on our national honor — interested readers can use this archive to take a tour down memory lane to understand the evolving Orientation that led to the Iraq horror story. http://nation.time.com/2013/03/22/iraq-invasion-anniversary-inside-the
-deciders-head/]
The article in the National Security Archive referenced above was just released at the ten-year anniversary, and lays out quite clearly in detail and with declassified documents that "the U.S. invasion of Iraq turned out to be a textbook case of flawed assumptions, wrong-headed intelligence, propaganda manipulation, and administrative ad hockery".

I challenge anyone who still harbors the belief that the Iraq war was anything but a lie, a redirection of the emotions surrounding 9/11 to a target virtually unrelated to that attack, for reasons which had nothing to do with the welfare or security of the American people.

Anyone willing to take up that challenge will have to refute the material provided by the declassified documents presented by the National Security Archive at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB418/

Excerpts I challenge anyone to disprove:

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A bullet-pointed set of notes discussed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, in late 2001 shows the Pentagon already diverting focus and energy from the Afghan campaign less than three months after the U.S. and its allies entered that country.

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George Bush wanted military action to be justified by linking Iraq to terrorism and WMD; to that end "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,"

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A full-bore public relations campaign underway at the same time ramped up a climate of anticipation and even fear, with Vice President Cheney telling U.S. military veterans that the U.S. would need to use "every tool" for a threat lurking in more than 60 countries, declaring flatly that Iraq was actively pursuing offensive nuclear weapons, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was planning their use against friends of America and the U.S. itself.

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The PR blitz won enthusiastic support from many.... Perhaps most aggressive was the famous neoconservative Iraq lobby, whose Project for a New American Century had begun campaigning for U.S. direct military action against Iraq in the 1990s.

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The documents show that misconceptions about Iraq were useful to the Bush administration as enablers for the decision to invade.... The administration had high hopes for Iraq's oil resources, as myriad planning documents show. Among other expectations, the oil sector was to be back in operation within a few months and with its revenues the Iraqi people were expected to pay for their country's own invasion and reconstruction under U.S. authority.

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My challenge: Prove any of the above to be wrong.