(1) propagandadists who say things have been fantastic since the liberation; ‘iraq the model’ is supposedly in this class (but you can read for yourself). more generally, bloggers lose credibility when they are funded to travel in the USA to give speech about the rosy situation in Iraq today. AP, Reuters and McClatchy are filing reports about daily death tolls and none of that would appear in the propagandastic blogs.

(2) There are also those who say that nothing good whatsoever has come out of the American occupation and that the current government is a puppet regime. An example might be Riverbend (”Baghdad Burning”). Well, it is hard to blog when electricity comes on two hours a day and a woman cannot get a job (Riverbend used to be an IT worker but nobody will hire a woman nowadays).

(3) Then you have the third class who refuse to discuss politics, but will adhere strictly to the depictions of daily life in Iraq in these abnormal times.

Should the AP reporter be skeptical about ‘Iraq the Model’? There is plenty of people out there who would agree with that assessment. The only issue is whether that had any place in this news report.