Pentagon adamantly insisted that the war would be a relatively cheap one. Roughly $50 billion is all it would take to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, it said.

A new web project called The Center for Public Integrity, which focuses on ethics and integrity, concludes in a recent study that the Bush administration deliberately lied about Iraq, in order to get public support for going to war with Iraq.

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The nationally televised Republican You Tube Debate that aired last night felt more like a boxing match from all the verbal uppercuts that the candidates were throwing out to one another. In midst of all the chaos Sen. John McCain let three words slip out that luckily only a few people heard ,"Failure in Iraq".

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says Pentagon funding shortfalls resulting from congressional debate about the conduct of the Iraq war could result in difficulty supplying the troops and significant layoffs in his department.

The Democrat-dominated U.S. House of Representatives has voted for the withdrawal of the country's troops from Iraq by December 2008, linking the pullout to $50 billion in war funds.

American Roman Catholics were urging lawmakers to stop the violence in Iraq and end partisan bickering.

President Bush rallied U.S. troops in the southern state of South Carolina Friday. VOA White House Correspondent Scott Stearns reports, some of those new soldiers are headed for Iraq.

President Bush has sent an emergency request to the U.S. Congress for an extra $46 billion in expedited funds for Iraq, Afghanistan and other national security needs. VOA White House correspondent Paula Wolfson reports the money is in addition to the $145 billion in war-related spending included in his original 2008 budget.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was mainly aimed at controlling the Gulf state's oil reserves.

British lawmakers will have the final decision on sending troops to war, Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the ruling Labour Party's annual conference on Monday.

The U.S. Senate has rejected, by a 28 to 70 vote, a Democratic-sponsored measure to withdraw troops from Iraq and cut funding for the war. The measure, proposed as an amendment to a defense bill, called for most U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq by next June and cutting off financing for military operations.