22: 21st Century United States

After the invasion, U.S. forces remained in Iraq for eight years before withdrawing in 2011, only to return in 2014 to fight a new terrorist threat from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)

Since 2017, the United States has retained a limited military presence in Iraq, mostly to train, advise, and support local forces which continue to perform counterterrorism operations. While ISIS no longer holds territory, it repeatedly has demonstrated an ability to resurge, temporarily taking control of towns and villages, or carrying out successful attacks against the ISF.

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."

The equal protection issue arose because different localities within Florida were using different specific standards to determine whether to count a ballot as having a valid vote. Some localities, for example, required a chad to be punctured so that light could pass through it in order for it to count as a vote — a position known colloquially as the “sunshine” standard. Other localities, by contrast, were willing to count a chad even if it was only dimpled and thus would fail the “sunshine” standard. Even within the same locality, moreover, different recount teams were applying different standards.

All seven of the justices who saw validity to Bush’s equal protection claim also recognized that there necessarily would be limits to the scope of the equal protection principle on which that claim relied. The issue of whether it would violate equal protection for different localities within a state to use different types of voting technologies arose during oral argument and, however that issue might be resolved, it pointed to the proverbial slippery slope. What about different polling hours in different localities in the same election? Different numbers of voting machines, or poll workers, per capita for the voting population of each locality in the state? Different length of wait times? And so on. It was inevitable that there would be difficult line-drawing issues, no matter how the court ruled on any particular set of facts. Which is precisely why the court’s opinion included the warning: “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.”