Tony Snow: Bush Disagrees With Gates, Says We Are 'Winning'

Tony Snow: Bush Disagrees With Gates, Says We Are 'Winning': "At today's meeting with reporters at the White House, the major topics for Press Secretary Tony Snow, as expected, were the pending release of the Iraq Study Group's report -- and today's surprise, the admission by Robert Gates, at his confirmation hearings as new Pentagon chief, that the U.S., indeed, is not winning the war in Iraq.

Snow said that, as far as he knows, the president has not backed away from his recent statement that the U.S. is actually 'winning' in Iraq. He also suggested that Gates, elsewhere in his testimony, seemed to say that maybe we weren't losing and we weren't winning. And he charged that the press was being too negative about all this: 'What I think is demoralizing is a constant effort to try to portray this as a losing mission,' he said.

He was also pushed on the question of the Iraq conflict turning into a civil war -- which he seriously questioned. 'Well, I think one of the dangers is that civil war had been used in a political context,' he said. 'It's interesting -- what intervened other than an election to get people to change the label?'

A reporter shot back: 'The violence got worse, I suppose.'"