According to CNN:

I’m not buying it.  This is according to CNN and their “security advisers” and given the way the press responded to McCain’s visit to this market last year (you can hear them questioning the market’s safety with talk about how McCain was heavily guarded) I’m not inclined to trust them now.

Yes, McCain was heavily guarded when he visited that market last year.  But McCain is a US Senator and was, even then, a Presidential candidate.  His visit to that market was unprecedented in the Iraq war for a politician of his stature, so our military was taking no chances.  The media casts his heavy detail as proof that the market wasn’t as safe as he was claiming, but the reality is that someone like McCain making a visit of that sort in Iraq is going to get that kind of protection regardless.

This is all spin.  Iraq is improved, but nobody on the left wants to admit it.