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Biden administration right now, and they definitely, many members of them definitely sound, including the president at some points, sound like they are on the defensive, probably with good reason. they're getting a lot of criticism. but you can't conflate criticism over the decision to withdraw, which is one thing, with criticism over the actual how we carried out that withdrawal. and that sounded to me like what our national security advisor just did. to a certain extent that's what president biden sometimes does. when you hear them talking about we needed to -- the chattering classes who say...

He's telling the american people. he's a man who hates war. that's what we heard today. >> i also think, i just have to add, rick stengel, that he is someone who is in line with where the majority of the american people are on this war in afghanistan and there has not been majority public support -- this war has been fought by the whole country. the whole country did not go to war, the military fought this war and paid the price. i want to bring into our coverage national security advisor jake sullivan. i don't know if you heard any of our reaction and i won't ask you to address any of it, but...

Be low risk. they knew and they said at the time that this could be -- you're going to be in exchange for that, unlike korea or germany where we have 25,000 troops, you know, you'd have much fewer in afghanistan but the trade-off for that is going to be you're going to lose some troops every year for a long period of time. so there was no this is going to be a low risk situation because you're in -- you're in a war zone. but you have to differentiate that from the whole how this withdrawal was actually carried out. and when you look at how president biden makes a decision, he says we are going...

People died, including thousands and thousands of frenchmen, and that country is still not healed. those are disastrous withdrawals. we don't know what the extent of a truly disastrous withdrawal would have been. the counterfactuals are just immense. i mean i think when this is looked back on, people will say, yep, he got us out of there. a terrible tragedy that 13 american servicemen and women died. we got 100,000 people out. when we left vietnam in 1975, you could argue that every member, every citizen of south vietnam worked for the americans during that war and we took a few thousand peopl...

But that's just some historical perspective. to your actual first question -- >> no, you know what, let's stay with the -- let me just give you another chance to address something else that we've all talked about already and that is this idea that he's leveling up, that he's being honest. lawrence o'donnell said that was the most stunningly honest speech by an american president about what we were doing there, how we got there and the need to leave. is that your feeling? >> here's what i would say, and paul made the distinction between the -- and helene did too, between the rightness of the po...