For much of the past seven years, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have waged a clandestine operation inside the White House. It has involved thousands of military personnel, private presidential letters and meetings that were kept off their public calendars or sometimes left the news media in the dark.

Their mission: to comfort the families of soldiers who died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to lift the spirits of those wounded in the service of their country.

On Monday, the president is set to make a more common public trip – with reporters in tow – to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, home to many of the wounded and a symbol of controversy earlier in his presidency over the quality of care the veterans were receiving.

GIVING SUPPORT: Vice President Dick Cheney, an avid fly-fisherman, practices his cast with wounded troops from Walter Reed Army Medical Center during one of the half-dozen barbecues he’s hosted at his Naval Observatory home. (White House photo)

But the size and scope of Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Cheney’s private endeavors to meet with wounded soliders and families of the fallen far exceed anything that has been witnessed publicly, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials familiar with the effort.

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Republican White House contender Mike Huckabee refused to apologize Sunday after a rival accused him of insulting President George W. Bush by describing his foreign policy as “arrogant.”

Huckabee butted heads with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney after publishing a foreign policy paper calling for American foreign policy to change its “tone and attitude, open up, and reach out.”

“The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad,” the former Arkansas governor wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs.

“My administration will recognize that the United States’ main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists,” said Huckabee.

Romney, who has seen Huckabee surge past him in opinion polls with just three weeks until the first nominating contest in Iowa on January 3, expressed outrage at his rivals criticism of the Republican president.

“That’s an insult to the president, and Mike Huckabee should apologize to the president,” Romney told NBC television.

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I guess Bush wants to give both the House and Senate to the Libs next November.

“President Bush refused to rule out a military strike against Iran Tuesday, though he confirmed the latest National Intelligence Estimate showed the Islamic state had halted a weapons program.”

WAR