Wright, Robin, and Ellen Knickmeyer. “U.S. lowers sights on what can be achieved in Iraq.” Washington Post, August 14, 2005.

Summary: It has finally registered on some officials in the Republican administration that our occupation in Iraq is not meeting any of the goals to which it was originally directed and is, in fact, a miserable failure. Despite, or perhaps because of, all of the money we've spent and all of the lives we've sacrificed, electricity, water, public health, public safety, and oil production are all worse than under Saddam. So the administration is now busily lowering the standard of success:

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.” ...

Ironically, [the former head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence group] said, the initial ambitions may have complicated the U.S. mission: “In order to get out earlier, expectations are going to have to be lower, even much lower. The higher your expectation, the longer you have to stay. Getting out is going to be a more important consideration than the original goals were. They were unrealistic.”

Hmm. Only three years have passed since the heady days in which the administration was confident that it could create reality all by itself, as recounted by Ron Suskind in his article “Without a doubt” (New York Times magazine, October 17, 2004):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

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.”

Personally, I'm happy to welcome these reprobate imperialists back into the reality-based community as soon as they have completed their war-crimes sentences.