Battle Over War Funds Escalates

A look back at the retiring defense secretary's career

(NEWSER) - With Robert Gates, who has served eight presidents over four decades, about to retire, the Washington Post looks back at how Gates operated in the Pentagon. He’s been “careful, conservative, and consensus-oriented,” writes Greg Jaffe, and he’s “earned a reputation as the most ruthlessly efficient defense secretary in decades.” So what can we learn from his tenure?

• Buy time. Defense Department reviews following troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan gave Presidents Bush and Obama a sense of the military’s trajectory—and they bought time against critics calling for quick drawdowns.

Bradley Manning only worked on Iraq war

(NEWSER) - Who could've given nearly 1 million classified Afghanistan war documents to WikiLeaks? The military is taking a close look at Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst already charged with leaking documents to the site. Manning would be a perfect suspect, except for one fact: He was stationed in Iraq and had no access to Afghanistan documents. Nonetheless, investigators are examining his computers to see if he could have hacked other military computers to gain the files, the Wall Street Journal reports. More»

Critics say Friedman, others, are whitewashing the war

(NEWSER) - Scribes all over the place are using Sunday's election in Iraq to declare a victory in the US war there, and that has critics seething that they're just trying to justify their original support for a misguided and costly adventure. Several take aim at Tom Friedman for the column today in which he argues that while the war "should have and could have" been better executed, "George W. Bush's gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right." The price was high, he writes in the New York Times, but "democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq." More»

In memoir, Bush aide regrets not defending war to public harder

(AP) - Karl Rove says in a new memoir that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq badly damaged the Bush administration's credibility and led to dwindling public support for the war. The former White House political adviser blames himself for not pushing back against claims that President Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made. The president, he adds, did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons. More»

'Operation Iraqi Freedom' history as most troops head home

(NEWSER) - The Obama administration has rebranded the Iraq War as it prepares to pull out most American troops. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" will become "Operation New Dawn" as of Sept. 1, when US troop levels are supposed to fall to around 50,000, the Washington Post reports. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the new name will signal that America's combat role in Iraq is drawing to a close. More»