Tom Harkin: “I also wish to speak for a few minutes about the mess in Iraq. Last week, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi came to Washington…”

“I also wish to speak for a few minutes about the mess in Iraq. Last week, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi came to Washington to join in President Bush's campaign of relentless happy talk about the war in Iraq. President Bush says: We're making progress. We're making progress. Meanwhile, back in the real world--the world that American soldiers confront on the ground in Iraq--the chaos gets worse and worse. Entire regions and many provincial capitals are under the insurgents' control. Virtually every day we see car bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, beheadings. As we learned last week, the CIA has produced a formal National Intelligence Estimate that says that, at best, the current level of violence will continue and, at worst, Iraq will plunge into a civil war. As Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged yesterday, it is getting worse in Iraq. But amazingly, President Bush insists that this mess in Iraq has made us safer, and the President and his political allies have been relentless in using the war on terror for their own electoral purposes.”