AP Transitions
Key boilerplate is being swapped out as President-elect Barack Obama prepares to take over the Iraq war. AP:
U.S. troops have been instrumental in weakening insurgents, and the latest attacks appeared to bolster the Iraqi government’s claim that a hasty American departure could undermine the relative stability that many parts of Iraq have enjoyed since 2007. That argument is key to efforts by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to win parliament’s broad approval for the U.S.-Iraqi pact.
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 acknowledgements of success, usually buried, were routine during a key period when Democrats were pushing Bush for withdrawal.
There was also a time, more recently, when AP’s boilerplate was happy to credit the Sunni Awakening for the reduction in violence, but only reluctantly admitted that George Bush’s surge strategy had anything to do with it, pinning that on military claims. The AP was never this enthusiastic for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq, and now the message is very clear that premature withdrawal is a bad idea. Popularity is no longer a strategic concern, or even mentioned. They didn’t much care for the war or see much use in it when it was hard, bloody and belonged to George Bush. But now that, despite their best skepticism, it is being won and their guy owns it, there seems to be a growing concern about losing and respect for what a free Iraq means.
It’s possible, I suppose, that individual AP scribblers were simply myopic, unable to see beyond the violence and given to despair, and that they only managed to develop greater clarity of thought, strategic understanding, long-term views once the greater bloodletting had been by so much hard work and sacrifice brought to an end. But to believe that would require one to ignore a great deal of evidence of individual and insitutional antipathy for George Bush and American soldiers, and adultation for Barack Obama and the terrorists of Iraq.
Prior Iraq War APbliography:
Lazy, Stupid or Willfully Ignorant?
Sprechen Sie Deutsches Mit Einer Tauben Welt
AP Analysis: War is Hard, We’re Depressed (Can We Leave Now?)
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:06 pm on Monday, November 24, 2008
4 Responses to “AP Transitions”
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November 24th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
So, AP has a “strange new respect” for the war effort in Iraq, eh? Predictable…
November 25th, 2008 at 2:48 am
[...] Transitions AP Transitions [...]
November 25th, 2008 at 7:49 am
[...] AP: You know, leaving Iraq early just might be a bad idea Filed under: Iraq, Obama, media bias — crushliberalism @ 8:49 am From Ace: Ah. Now that Barack Obama carries the responsibility for carrying the war to ultimate victory, it seems that victory is almost at hand and shouldn’t be unthinkingly squandered. [...]
November 25th, 2008 at 11:17 am
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 11/25/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.