Politics  

Rumsfeld: Iraq Just As Safe As U.S., Europe

Rummy unscripted. Talking about how you can have elections without complete peace, compares security in Iraq favorably with the United States. No problem, elections can go on.

From today's DoD media availability (which I tracked down after hearing this comment on an Air America's news broadcast):

We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year.  Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What's the difference? We just didn't see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night. It happens here in this city, in every major city in the world. Across Europe, across the Middle East, people are being killed. People do bad things to each other.  The idea that we'd have to stay there till that place was peaceful -- as I think you said, or something like that -- and everyone goes happily on their way, or whatever you said.  We'll check the transcript.

[UPDATE] Cool, a link from Atrios!