Last month, a strangely neocon AP acknowledged that the United States has an interest in a stable Iraq “which will remain a strategic and important country even after the last of the 140,000 American soldiers have gone home.”

With war coverage that has rarely been more informative or insightful than a recounting of bomb blasts and death tolls, the Associated Press has a long history of praising the resilience of terrorists in Iraq, and using every explosion as a “grim reminder” to question and disparage the security gains that U.S. military officials “maintained” and “insisted” were taking place in what was routinely refered to as an “unpopular war.” The litany of hopelessness and grudging acknowledgments of success, usually buried, were routine during a key period when Democrats were pushing Bush for withdrawal.