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Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has harsh words for Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy judgement in his soon-to-be-released memoir. According to the New York Times, which obtained an early copy of the memoir, Gates calls Biden “a man of integrity,” but questions his record. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates writes, according to the Times. Gates, the only high-level holdover from the Bush administration to the President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, reveals he nearly quit his post in September 2009 while Obama reviewed...

Five of Six Networks Press Unyielding Gibbs on Crediting Bush; White House Press Secretary Unleashes on Fox & Friends By Rich Noyes Created 08/31/2010 - 15:00 White House press secretary Robert Gibbs made the rounds of the six broadcast and cable morning news shows on Tuesday morning to help set the table for the President’s speech marking the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Of the six network anchors Gibbs spoke with, only CBS’s Harry Smith failed to ask whether President Obama would extend credit to President Bush for the successful surge strategy (a strategy then-Senator Obama denigrated as...

Poor President Obama, he just can't bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics, thought it would? I just don't understand why Senator Obama is being such a baby about the surge. Why can't he admit the obvious? It worked. Even as recently his Afghanistan speech last week: Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer, and all of our troops by the end of 2011. That we are doing so is a testament to...

War On Terror: Sen. John Kerry, who was so wrong about Iraq, now says our commander in Afghanistan is "reaching too far, too fast" and that a "good enough" policy should suffice. It won't. Offering his advice on how to micromanage the war against the Taliban, Kerry said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, President Obama's hand-picked general to fight what he called a "war of necessity," is wrong in saying he needs 40,000 more troops to fight and win it. Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, Kerry advocated a "good enough" policy designed not to achieve victory in al-Qaida's...

War On Terror: Sen. John Kerry, who was so wrong about Iraq, now says our commander in Afghanistan is "reaching too far, too fast" and that a "good enough" policy should suffice. It won't. Offering his advice on how to micromanage the war against the Taliban, Kerry said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, President Obama's hand-picked general to fight what he called a "war of necessity," is wrong in saying he needs 40,000 more troops to fight and win it. Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, Kerry advocated a "good enough" policy designed not to achieve victory in al-Qaida's...

War Strategy: When Bush and Petraeus proposed the surge in Iraq, Democrats demanded that the general testify before Congress. So why has the Senate blocked a similar invitation to our commander in Afghanistan? Those with memories longer than the 24-hour news cycle recall that in the dark days of the Iraq War, David Petraeus was summoned to Washington to explain the surge strategy that would eventually lead to victory in Iraq. Democrats hoped for a show trial. MoveOn.org took out a full-page ad in the New York Times labeling the commanding general of our efforts in Iraq "General Betray-us." Then...

(LAS VEGAS) - John McCain told veterans today that Barack Obama stubbornly refuses to agree that the troop surge in Iraq has worked and took legislative steps to divert funding for the effort in order to prevent progress in the Iraq war. Speaking at the Disabled American Veterans conference in Las Vegas, McCain said Obama “tried to legislate failure,” adding that “I would rather lose an election than lose a war.” “Thanks to the courage and sacrifice of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines and to brave Iraqi fighters the surge has succeeded,” said McCain. “And yet Senator Obama still...

On Sunday's This Week, ABC's George Stephanopoulos condemned John McCain for charging that “Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” Stephanopoulos, who interviewed McCain on Saturday at his Arizona ranch, declared: “I can't believe you believe that.” McCain insisted “I'm not questioning his patriotism. I'm questioning his actions. I'm questioning his lack, total lack of understanding,” leading Stephanopoulos to counter: “But that is questioning his patriotism. When you say someone would rather lose a war, a candidate, that's questioning his honor, his decency, his character.” As McCain continued to defend his assessment, Stephanopoulos...

CNN) -- With just 100 days until the election, Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama are accusing each other of shifting their positions when it comes to Iraq. Obama accused McCain of altering his stance after the senator from Arizona said 16 months would be a "pretty good timetable" for troop withdrawal, and McCain said Obama was becoming more inline with his position -- a "conditions-based" plan for withdrawal. In an interview with Newsweek, Obama was asked about what sort of U.S. troop presence he would keep in Iraq, now that he has talked with diplomatic and military leaders there....

There is some irony in the fact that Democrats, after years of deriding Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a hopeless bungler and conniving Shiite sectarian, are now treating as sacrosanct his suggestion that Iraq will be ready to assume responsibility for its own security by 2010. Naturally this is because his position seems to support that of Barack Obama. A little skepticism is in order here. The prime minister has political motives for what he's saying -- whatever that is. An anonymous Iraqi official told the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, "Maliki thinks that Obama is most likely to win in...

Senator Obama refuses to be boxed in between what he considers two “false choices”, either:1) …On such and such date, come Hell or high water we’ve gotten our troops out, and be blind to anything that happens in intermediate months2) …completely defer to whatever the commanders on the ground say (because his military and strategic knowledge is better than theirs)LINKBy dismissing out of hand the absoluteness of a calender date by which all Americans will be out of Iraq, Senator Obama has just capitulated the political left’s dogma for the past six years (a debate that started in 2002 before...

Hello everyone - tried to post a blog earlier but I am afraid that it got lost in the system - perhaps it was eaten by that dog!Anyway, to be brief, was trying to say tonight on air that I welcome the Obama trip overseas - and hope it sets a precedent for all future candidates. At the same time, as an old-fashioned institutionalist who was strongly shaped by working in the White House, I believe that whether a President is right or wrong on policy, we have only one President at a time and he must be the chief negotiator...

Barack Obama on his “Most Excellent World Tour” (The Iraq Stop) defends his position that the surge in Iraq did not work. In an interview on ABC (All Barack Channel) Obama would not acknowledge that the surge in Iraq has been successful. (Video Included)

One of the big topics of the day on the cable news channels is Drudge Report's story about the New York Times rejecting Sen. John McCain's proposed Op-Ed about Iraq. Fox News has Carl Cameron reporting the story, MSNBC's Chris Matthews talked about it on Hardball and Howard Kurtz gave his take last hour on CNN: "One irony of the internet age: the rejected piece will probably wind up getting far more attention by the controversy whipped up by Matt Drudge then if the New York Times had just gone ahead and published it," said Kurtz. We hear prime time...

The nation's top military officer Wednesday declared the security situation in Iraq "remarkably better," so good in fact that he expects to recommend more U.S. troop reductions this fall if conditions hold. Just back from a tour of two war fronts - Iraq and the Afghanistan-Pakistan region - Adm. Michael G. Mullen said he expected to witness improvements in Baghdad and across Iraq, but was surprised by how well a 17-month-old U.S. troop surge has worked. "I won't go so far as to say that progress in Iraq, from a military perspective, has reached a tipping point or it is...

14 July 2008The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the...

More on the we've won front from Michael Totten:I’m reluctant to say “the war has ended,” as he did, but everything else he wrote is undoubtedly true. The war in Iraq is all but over right now, and it will be officially over if the current trends in violence continue their downward slide. That is a mathematical fact. Over the past few days al Qaeda has detonated several car bombs in Diyala. So, how is the war "over"? Totten goes on to say that the violence may never actually peter off to nothing in Iraq, but reminds us that violence...

A funny thing happened over on the Barack Obama campaign website in the last few days. The parts that stressed his opposition to the 2007 troop surge and his statement that more troops would make no difference in a civil war have somehow disappeared. John McCain and Obama have been going at it heavily in recent days over the benefits of the surge. The Arizona senator, who advocated the surge for years before the Bush administration employed it, says the resulting reduction in violence is proof it worked with progress on 15 of 18 political benchmarks and Obama's plan to...

Sen. John McCain on Monday accused his Democratic presidential rival of flip-flopping on the war in Iraq, as a pair of new polls showed the Republican's strategy of painting Sen. Barack Obama as politically expedient is beginning to take hold with voters. As Mr. Obama repositions himself for the general election after exclusively targeting the Democratic base of committed liberals, it leaves some voters on the left feeling he is abandoning them on their top issue - Iraq - and has independents questioning his veracity. "If a perception takes hold that a candidate is flip-flopping on core convictions, that will...

WASHINGTON (AFP) — After months vowing to get US troops home from Iraq, Barack Obama has succumbed to the war's political entanglements, struggling to explain his plan in the light of recent security gains. More than five years after the US invasion, the Iraq war is now enmeshing not only the Bush administration which started it, but both men fighting to inherit it, Democratic White House hopeful Obama and Republican John McCain. Obama is torn between a vow to end the war, which underpinned his win over Democratic foe Hillary Clinton and Republican claims his plan invites US humiliation, would...