'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for Nov. 30th - Hardball with Chris Matthews - MSNBC.com

'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for Nov. 30th - Hardball with Chris Matthews - MSNBC.com:

"(Rep. Murtha) - Eighty percent of the people in Iraq want us out, 45 percent say it‘s justified to kill Americans. They even had an official communicate from the Arab world that said it‘s all right to kill Americans. We have lost the support of the Iraqi people.

For instance, if you throw a hand grenade at an American and they disappear in a crowd, the Iraqi disappears in the crowd, the Iraqis don‘t tell us about it. This is the problem we face.
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The public wants a direction. They want some leadership. And they want honesty. We‘re not getting honesty from this White House. Somebody is misleading this president to tell him that things are going well. Sixty percent unemployment, electricity is below pre-war level, energy supplies below pre-war level, oil production below pre-war level.

MURTHA: Well, let me tell you why it‘s complicated. He‘s allowing Iraqis to set the timetable. You think they want to do the fighting? They‘re going to let us do the fighting. The Iraqi government is going to let us do the fighting even though they‘ve said they want us out, and that the ones that support the United States don‘t get elected.

So we‘ve got a position where if we won‘t redeploy, as I‘m suggesting, and let the Iraqis change their own destiny, let them handle their own destiny, we‘re going to be there for 100 years. I remember one time in the closed hearing, one of the top generals said, “we‘ll be there for 25 years.” I said you saying 25 years? A lot of people think it would take that long.

The American public is not going to put it with that. It‘s not progressing, it‘s not getting better. We‘ve got to let the Iraqis handle this themselves. We‘ve got to let them handle their own destiny. Now there‘s one other thing that I need to say. This is not terrorism in Iraq. This is insurgency in Iraq. You have to separate. They keep trying to wrap them together. We had terrorism in Afghanistan."