When you arrive in Baghdad, you're in a C-130. You do a corkscrew landing to make it more difficult for an enemy ground-to-air launched missile to take you down. When you land, you immediately have body armor placed on you. You are hustled quickly into a Black Hawk helicopter. In the helicopter, there are two brave young soldiers with 30-caliber machine guns hanging out the bays of those doors. You travel from the Red Zone to the Green Zone. The Green Zone is the supposed safe zone. You travel roughly 150 miles per hour, not a whole lot over 100 feet off the ground so as not to provide those on the ground with a profile
... You get off the Black Hawk in the Green Zone, which has redundant great cement blocks and walls to keep it secure. You are hustled in your armor into a beefed up Chevy van....
In short, I did not come away with the impression that the insurgency was, as the Vice President of the United States suggeested, in its last throes. And unlike the President of the United States, I am not, quote, "pleased with the progress," end of quote, we're making as I recently saw it.
These are just two in a long litany of rosy assessments, misleading statements, premature declarations of victory that we've heard from the administration on Iraq. The disconnect between the administration's rhetoric and the reality there on the ground has opened not just a credibility gap but a creditability chasm. Standing right in the middle of that chasm are 139,000 American troops, some of them, some of them on their third tour.
This disconnect, I believe, is fueling cynicism that is undermining the single most important weapon we need to give our troops to be able to do their job, and that is the unyielding support of the American people. That support is waning. One recent poll showed that 60 percent support withdrawing some or all of our troops from Iraq now. Another shows 52 percent of the public doesn't believe the war in Iraq has made them any safer. And listen to some of the ascertains made by some conservative Republican congressman. You'll hear that drumbeat grow.
http://www.brookings.edu/comm/events/20050621_biden.pdf
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