General Discussion

In the early 2000s, U.S. president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair both falsely asserted that Saddam's weapons programs were still active and large stockpiles of WMD were hidden in Iraq. Inspections by the UN to resolve the status of unresolved disarmament questions restarted between November 2002 and March 2003, under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which demanded Hussein provide "immediate, unconditional and active cooperation" to UN and IAEA inspections. The United States asserted that Hussein's lack of cooperation was a breach of Resolution 1441, but failed to convince the United Nations Security Council to pass a new resolution authorizing the use of force. Despite this, Bush asserted peaceful measures could not disarm Iraq and launched the Iraq War. A year later, the U.S. Senate released its Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq which concluded that many of the pre-war statements about Iraqi WMD were not supported by the underlying intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

In a 2004 article appearing in the New York Times Magazine, Suskind wrote:

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.' [...] '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'.

International relations scholar Fred Halliday writes that the phrase reality-based community (in contrast to faith-based community) was used "for those who did not share [the Bush administration's] international goals and aspirations". Suskind has maintained his refusal to name the speaker, but the source of the quotation was widely speculated to be Bush's senior advisor Karl Rove.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community