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By Michael WeissPosted Friday, May 25, 2007, at 5:47 PM ET

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Good news is bad news: Time magazine columnist Joe Klein says that al-Qaida has been all but routed in Anbar Province, once its Sunni stronghold in Iraq, thanks to coalition efforts to make tribal alliances. Too bad for Klein that lefty blogs, however, are denouncing him for reporting that denotes good news in the war.

Salon's lefty Glenn Greenwald thinks Klein is just a megaphone for pro-administration propaganda: "As always, the very idea of granting anonymity to government sources to do nothing other than repeat pro-government claims is both manipulative and moronic on its face. What possible journalistic value could there ever be in cloaking someone with anonymity in order to say something that Tony Snow would happily say, and does say, every day from the White House Press Briefing Room?"

Iraq war supporter Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit argues that Time and Klein have merely caught up with the conventional wisdom among military bloggers: "[T]o me the big news about the Time story was that Time was finally catching up with what warbloggers on the scene -- Michael Yon, J.d. Johannes, Bing West, etc. -- have been reporting for quite a while. Instead of criticizing Time for straying (if only a bit) off the current Democratic message, people should, if anything, be criticizing it for taking so long to get to the story."

Liberal Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly's The Political Animal says: "[I]f Klein deserves any abuse here, it's not for trusting anonymous government sources, it's for trying to spice up his column by repeating common knowledge as if he had dug it up himself. This tribal U-turn against AQI predates the surge by many months, of course, and mainly shows that the U.S. presence isn't really necessary in order to fight them. The tribal sheikhs consider AQI a threat, and left to their own devices they'll get rid of them on their own. That leaves us in the position not of staying in Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda, but of staying in order to moderate a communal civil war, a task we're singularly unsuited for."