Transcript here.

Bremer: Mr. Secretary, I would just add a little more on the point you made about the good news.

Every day in this country there are dozens of success stories. We have now completed almost 6,000 individual reconstruction projects throughout this country. A lot of those are done by men and women of the armed services, like the men and women we saw today in the two division headquarters. We have probably spent more than $30 million just on these small (Inaudible.) projects. It's often $2,000 to fix a school's windows or something like that. And it's not just in the north. You go down to Diwania in the south or to Nasariyah, to Basra in the British sector, al Kut out in the west, and you find the same patterns. Schools are being rebuilt. We are rebuilding a thousand schools between now and when the school season starts in three weeks.

We have got all 240 hospitals in this country working now. Ninety percent of the health clinics are working. All of the universities finished the school year this summer and gave exams. Ninety-five percent of the schools were open before the end of the school year. All of this happened in basically five weeks, six weeks, in April and May. And the process goes on.

There are very good stories, and one of the stories that isn't also written about much is that 85 percent of the towns in this country now have elected town councils. Every major city has a town council. We met the elected Governor and Vice Governor of Mosul today. If you went to Basra you could meet the Governor. In Baghdad on July 9th we stood up a city council for the first time in history, elected council. Starting at the neighborhoods, there are 89 neighborhoods in Baghdad. They elected district councils, there are nine, and those people then elected 37 representatives, men and women, Shia, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, from all over Baghdad.

Democracy is on the march in this country. And it's on the march at the grassroots level where it really matters.

A final point is this week marked the third step in the path to an Iraqi sovereign government. The first step is the Governing Council being stood up on July 13th. The second step is the appointment in the middle of August by the Governing Council of a committee to prepare a Constitutional Convention. The third step is Tuesday when the Governing Council appointed a 25-member Cabinet. Ministers who now have responsibility to run the ministries, to run this government. That is democracy at the national level. It's a good news story.

Rumsfeld: And if you think about it, it happened in four or five months. Four or five months. Not four or five years. Four or five months. If one looks back at Germany, at Japan, at Bosnia or Kosovo and measures the progress that's taken place in this country in four or five months, it dwarfs any other experience that I'm aware of.