Political Quotes

“tonight I wish to spend a few minutes talking about a couple of issues; number one, the progress and the commitment and the hope that I have observed in Iraq in two different trips, two different opportunities I have had to travel to Iraq, once in August and going back in September; and then I want to talk a little bit about the statement today by Dr. David Kay on the interim progress of the Iraqi Survey Group. The Iraqi Survey Group is the group that is working in Iraq and doing the search and the delineation of exactly what the WMD, the weapons of mass destruction, program consisted of in Iraq before and during the Operation Iraqi Freedom. First, let me talk about my trip to Iraq in August and in September. You fly into a city of 5.7 million people and then you fly over Baghdad for half an hour or 40 minutes to get kind of an observation as to exactly what is going on in Baghdad. Remember, I did this in the middle of August. The first observation was that this was not a country and that this was not a city that was destroyed by war and mired in turmoil. Sometimes that is the impression that we get from watching the nightly news. Aside from a few small pockets of destruction in Baghdad, the city appeared to be functioning close to a normal city in the Middle East. There were cars, buses and trucks on the streets. There were people on the streets. The stores were open. Commerce was going on in Baghdad.”