> Yet a growing group of intelligence analysts persisted with their complaints. For some, who have served at CENTCOM for more than a decade, scars remained from

> Yet a growing group of intelligence analysts persisted with their complaints. For some, who have served at CENTCOM for more than a decade, scars remained from the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, when poorly written intelligence reports suggesting Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, when it did not, formed the basis of the George W. Bush administration’s case for war. I'm reminded of the quote from Karl Rove dismissing the "reality-based community" as subordinate and inferior to "history's actors" which shape reality according to their whims. Of course the mindset goes back a lot further than that, and more than the American government is guilty of it, but in the US intelligence community it seems to have gotten a real shot in the arm during the Bush administration. Unfortunately, like many other terrible precedents set during that Presidency, our current President has done little to reverse it. If we've really gotten to the point where anyone in Washington can question whether "solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality" as though there is even a debate to be had there, without being laughed out of the city, then the real mystery of American government is how it manages to function as well as it does. This is a meme that needs to be rooted out and thoroughly destroyed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community