WASHINGTON – The House has passed a $662 billion defense bill after the White House dropped a veto threat over provisions on handling terrorist suspects.

The vote Wednesday evening was 283-136.

President Obama plans to announce Friday that all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011, a senior administration official told Fox News.

The president is to speak at about 12:45 p.m. EDT after completing a secure video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"This will allow us to say definitively that the Iraq war is over, and that the partnership between the U.S. and Iraq will be a normal one between two sovereign nations," a White House official said. "During their conversation, President Obama and PM Maliki strongly agreed that this is the best way forward for both countries."

Obama's announcement would close off the possibility of maintaining a U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond a Dec. 31 withdrawal deadline set in 2008...

The Obama administration has decided to drop the number of U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of the year down to 3,000, marking a major downgrade in force strength, multiple sources familiar with the inner workings and decisions on U.S. troop movements in Iraq told Fox News.

Senior commanders are said to be livid at the decision, which has already been signed off by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

The generals on the ground had requested that the number of troops remaining in Iraq at the end of the year reach about 27,000. But, there was major pushback about "the cost and the political optics" of that decision that the number was then reduced to 10,000.

Commanders said they could possibly make that work "in extremis," in other words, meaning they would be pushing it to make that number work security-wise and manpower-wise.

UNITED NATIONS | The U.S. delegation has walked out of the U.N. speech of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after he said some in the world have speculated that Americans were actually behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks, staged in an attempt to assure Israel's survival.

He did not explain the logic of that statement that was made as he attacked the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...

"With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States by 2015," says a new 12 page unclassified report prepared by the Department of Defense on the Iran Military Threat.

The report says Iran's military strategy is designed to defend against external or "hard" threats from the United States and Israel. "Iran's nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility to develop nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy," according to the report.

Iran continues being a disruptive force inside Iraq, it alleges...

(CNSNews.com) – As a candidate for president, Barack Obama decried the financial toll that the Iraq war was taking on the economy, but Obama’s proposed spending on welfare through 2010 will eclipse Bush’s war spending by more than $260 billion.

“Because of the Bush-McCain policies, our debt has ballooned,” then-Sen. Barack Obama told a Charleston, W.V., crowd in March 2008. “This is creating problems in our fragile economy. And that kind of debt also places an unfair burden on our children and grandchildren, who will have to repay it.”

During the entire administration of George W. Bush, the Iraq war cost a total of $622 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service...

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says Iran has chosen to scale back much of its most troubling interference in Iraq, and she credits the strength of U.S. pressure.

Rice told The Associated Press in an interview Monday that she doesn't think the Iranians are acting out of goodwill. She says Iran is finding it harder to operate inside next-door Iraq, and claimed that a turning point was last spring's rout of Iranian-backed forces in the southern city of Basra...

While U.S. combat casualties in Iraq were at an all-time low in November 2008 – five reported combat deaths -- coverage of the war was sparse in The New York Times and The Washington Post compared with previous election cycles, an analysis of the Nexis news database shows.
 
In The New York Times, four front-page stories mentioned Iraq in the headline in November 2008 compared with 13 in November 2006, the last time a national election was held -- a drop of 70 percent. Most of those front-page stories in The New York Times concerned a security pact between U.S. and Iraqi officials...

The troop surge in Iraq has “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” Sen. Barack
Obama conceded in an interview with Bill O'Reilly that aired on the Fox News
Channel Thursday night...

Five years after bombings forced the United Nations to pull out of Iraq, the world body is back. It announced plans Wednesday to help Iraq rebuild and create jobs following complaints the government has been unable or unwilling to spend its oil riches.

An agreement signed by the U.N. and the Iraqi government outlined a series of steps to help the Iraqis improve spending. The U.N. will also aid in the funding of reconstruction, development and humanitarian projects...