Stable Iraq Bolsters American Power in Mideast

As a rule, I don't use sources from the Associated Press (for obvious reasons), but their article on Iraq's role in stabilizing American power in the Middle East is noteworthy, "Stable Iraq Could Influence Mideast" (alternative link here):

Iraq is likely to play a significant role in America's Middle East policy for decades — even as the Pentagon scales down military operations here and ramps them up in Afghanistan.

The Middle East has long confounded forecasters, and the rosy predictions from the Bush administration that Iraq would emerge as a beacon of Western-style democracy in the Arab world have been long discredited.

However unlikely it may seem today, a relatively stable Iraq would have all the cards necessary to emerge as a major player in the Persian Gulf, where Saudi Arabia and Iran are competing for leadership.

Jules Crittenden's blown away, frankly, at AP's confirmation of the basic neoconservative argument on Iraq all along:

The news agency that more terrorists prefer you’ll recall was rather late to the surge table, if not nearly as fashionably late as Obama. The Associated Press and the scribbler of this particular analysis, Robert H. Reid, were still neck deep in body counts and failure-mongering when al-Qaeda was out of Anbar and on the run in Diyala in mid-2007. AP’s Baghdad bureauistas were asiduously scribbling everything they could to avoid or obscure the terrible truth of the surge’s growing success. But despite its shortcomings, Reid’s latest analysis does a relatively good job of laying out our vital interests in Iraq.

I'll update when we see the terrorist-enabling Newshoggers cover this story - it's going to be tough to clinch the argument that the Bush administration "paid for" this narrative.