If you can't say anything good....

....then shut up!. The AP is trying really hard to paint the worst picture of Iraq that they can. So they have this to say about the present situation in Iraq.

The recapture of Fallujah (search) has not broken the insurgents' will to fight and may not pay the big dividend U.S. planners had hoped — to improve security enough to hold national elections in Sunni Muslim (search) areas of central Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi assessments.

Instead, the battle for control of the Sunni city 40 miles west of Baghdad has sharpened divisions among Iraq's major ethnic and religious groups, fueled anti-American sentiment and stoked the 18-month-old Sunni insurgency.

Those grim assessments, expressed privately by some U.S. military officials and by some private experts on Iraq, raise doubts as to whether the January election will produce a government with sufficient legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the country's powerful Sunni Muslim minority.

Notice how the "some..military officials" and "some private experts" are not named? This is a trick that reporters use to provide "credibility" to their negative view of the story they are "reporting". They haven't actually spoken to any "experts" or "officials".

Keep this in mind when you read stories like this, and you'll be a lot more aware of when the wool is being pulled over your eyes.