Newt Gingrich was a guest on Fox and Friends for two segments Thursday morning, live from a diner in Sioux City, Iowa, and while the first half of the interview tended to be more jokey and banal, he managed to take some pointed shots at President Obama and his administration over their handling of foreign affairs when he returned after the commercial break.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace this past weekend, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney completely evaded a question about whether the invasion of Iraq was, in hindsight, a good idea. However, in an interview with The Daily Rundown‘s Chuck Todd, Romney was definitive, telling Todd “if we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction, if somehow we had been given that information, obviously we would not have gone in.”

The last United States soldiers stationed in Iraq left for home today, marking the final chapter in the nine-year war. Over 4000 Americans died over the course of those years, as well as thousands more Iraqis. There was little fanfare to acknowledge the war’s end, and Iraqi citizens were divided on their reactions to the troop withdrawal. Some cheered that the occupation was over, others were more grateful for the U.S. presence in Iraq, but believed the war had gone on too long.

Today’s edition of The Chris Matthews Show featured a small little awards ceremony to honor the most important political moments of the year. Chris Matthews dedicated the first award to President Obama for his “Best Move” of the year. The nominees for the category were the death of Osama bin Laden, the Libyan invasion, the fulfilled promise to withdraw from Iraq, and his unifying speech to the nation following the Arizona shootings and critical injury of Gabrielle Giffords.

On Sunday morning’s Fox News Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney put on a veritable clinic on the dual pillars of his campaign: taking all sides of an issue, and taking no side of an issue. When host Chris Wallace asked him whether he would have invaded Iraq, given what we know now, Romney breakdanced around the question. He did reveal that it’s “fortunate” the troops are out of Iraq, but that President Obama was wrong to take the troops out of Iraq, but that, as president, Romney wouldn’t put troops back in Iraq.

Tonight’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher featured a passionate debate between Cornel West, a Princeton professor who has attended many of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and Ron Christie, a Republican strategist who previously worked as a staffer for Vice President Dick Cheney. The first topic of discussion after Christie came on the panel was Libya and why Republicans were not willing to give President Obama credit for carrying out the operation.

Back in 2004, in an effort to rebuild Iraq, the United States flew at least 20 planes full of money — tightly-wrapped stacks of $100 bills — into the country. In total, $12 billion was airlifted to Iraq, all in cash. This June, when the books were closing on Development Fund for Iraq, which was under the rule of the Coalitional Provisional Authority (which dissolved in 2004), it was reported that $6.6 billion of the cash was missing. The cash wasn’t America’s; it was money from seized Iraqi assets, oil sales, and surpluses. We were just, essentially, returning it to them.

While 39,000 United States soldiers are likely beyond thrilled that they won’t be planning to spend this New Years Eve in Iraq, the same won’t true for some in the media. Major news outlets that have been covering the war in Iraq since its inception aren’t quite ready to withdraw their own ranks just yet.

Last week President Obama announced plans to remove all U.S. military forces from Iraq by year’s end, effectively ending the long and still questionably effective Iraq War. Over the weekend, numerous GOP leaders like Lindsey Graham and John McCain — and even some presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann — predictably used the news to blame the Obama administration. Turns out that a rather significant detail had been overlooked by commenter and reporter alike: the withdrawal date had been agreed to by President George W. Bush. Enter Jon Stewart to make a mockery out of the story.

On Fox News Sunday this weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) continued the tradition of politicizing foreign policy by accusing President Obama of politicizing foreign policy, telling anchor Chris Wallace that “Iraq and Afghanistan is being run out of Chicago, not Washington, in terms of decisions.” Graham also beat the familiar drum that “Israel has been thrown under the bus” by the administration, falsely claiming that the President’s “standing in the state of Israel is very low,” despite the fact that 81% of Israelis approve of his policies.

Last week President Obama announced that the war in Iraq will be over in the next 70 days, and that most of the U.S. troops will be coming home, with approximately 150 staying behind to serve duties such as protecting the U.S. embassy. The announcement was met with predictably mixed results that come with today’s bitterly partisan landscape: the left saw the news in a less than celebratory way, while this morning, Fox and Friends had on Kiran Lawler as guest, who described the withdrawal as a “diplomatic failure.”

Ron Paul told David Gregory on this morning’s Meet The Press that he believed troops would ultimately never leave Iraq in response to President Obama‘s announcement that all soldiers stationed there would be coming home by year’s end. “We’ll change their names,” said Paul. “I mean, they’ve already admitted there (still) will be 15,000 but, you know, they’ve morphed the private sector with the military. The CIA and contractors, it’s a mixture.

Yesterday, President Obama announced that the war in Iraq was finally, officially, coming to an end by the end of the year. America’s troops would leave the nation to their own devices, with only contractors and civil workers left behind. On last night’s “Rewrite” segment, Lawrence O’Donnell took the opportunity to see where the President was when we first launched the war– at a speech, as a state senator, criticizing President Bush for his “dumb war.”

Speaking from the White House today, President Obama announced that the war in Iraq will be over in the next 70 days, and that most of the U.S. troops will be coming home. “Today I can say that our troops in Iraq will definitely be home for the holidays,” President Obama announced in the White House briefing room, “the long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year.”

Halfway through the Obama tenure, his predecessors are still running into trouble about their legacies in interviews. This week, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sat down with Al Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara to talk about the Bush legacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and found Foukara’s questions so infuriating that he flat out refused to answer them, instead decrying Foukara for “haranguing.”

On Thursday night’s The Factor, host Bill O’Reilly invited guest Liz Cheney onto the show while lamenting the fact that her father and co-author Dick Cheney doesn’t seem to like him very much. “What am I, chopped liver?” asked an amused Ms. Cheney. O’Reilly then got right down to the nitty gritty, asking Cheney how her father and former President George H. Bush could have possibly “missed” the danger posed by the sub prime mortgage fiasco.

On Monday’s Morning Joe, panelist Tavis Smiley caused a minor uproar when he pointed out that a key difference between Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush is that “one of those guys lied to the American people.” Host Joe Scarborough, guest Jon Meacham, and even Mika Brzezinski pushed back on the idea that Bush “lied,” laying the blame for bad WMD intel at the feet of CIA Director George Tenet, and Smiley eventually got lost in the semantic weeds.

While defending the United States’ current military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, Senator John McCain acknowledged that most Americans are not in favor of further military intervention in the Middle East, and discussed how changing mores in the region have affected the influence of terrorist groups.

Fox News’s Bret Baier broke news this afternoon that the Obama administration is looking to draw American troop numbers in Iraq down to 3,000 by the end of this year. According to Fox’s sources, this number is significantly less than than the military personnel had expected, and, notedly, less than they believe they need. ”We can’t [...]

If Wikileaks began as a mission to enter history for releasing the largest number of sensitive federal documents in history, it may have achieved that this week, at the cost of their own reputations and, potentially, a number of lives. The group released the entirety of its U.S. dispatch archive suspected to have been delivered to them by current military prisoner Bradley Manning– a release that was prompted by a Guardian editor publishing the password to an encrypted file holding some of the documents in his book, and threatens to put many lives across the world in danger.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is, much to the prolonged chagrin of Chris Hayes, continuing on his media blitz in promotion of his memoir. That included a visit to Today, where Cheney told host Matt Lauer that, despite what detractors might say, the war in Iraq was “sound policy.” Lauer kicked things off with a very odd question: Does Cheney think there’s something about his demeanor that has people calling him “divisive”? (The correct response is: “Huh?”) Things became more interesting from there.

While the main focus on the Sunday news shows today was Hurricane Irene and the government response to the storm, on Face the Nation today, Colin Powell weighed in on the “explosive” new memoir being released by former Vice President Dick Cheney, and responded to many of the charges the former vice president leveled against him.

Rep. Paul Ryan took the House floor today to rail against what he considered “accounting tricks and budget gimmicks” by those attempting to carve out a budget that reduced spending. Among those, he explained, were the supposed “cuts” to defense spending that cut from predicted future spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he argued were not any different than repealing a bill proposing to “cover the moon with yogurt.”

Bill O’Reilly introduced his first guest of tonight’s show emphasizing the bizarre position she now found herself in: “does it make you queasy that you are now in agreement with some on the far left about Afghanistan?” Naturally, when put that way, Ann Coulter was spooked, though “even a broken clock is right twice a day,” and argued that Democrats now wanted to stay in Afghanistan only because it “is not in America’s national security interest.”

In a discussion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his suggestions at a NATO meeting in Brussels that America’s European allies should be sharing more of the risks and costs of of conflicts–or the U.S. might one day decide the burden-sharing arrangement was no longer in American interests–Fox News anchor Shepard Smith vented about the extraordinary number of commitments U.S. forces are already engaged in. “We’ve got Afghanistan, which seems to be war without end. We’ve got Iraq, which is clearly war without end. We have our third “not war” now in Libya, and we have our fourth not even yet war in Syria, yet we’re there,” Smith said, asking “isn’t there a time when you say ‘enough already, fight your own fight?’”