This op-ed piece by Jim Hoagland at the Washington Post is the sort of reporting I'd like to see more of:

Traveling on a U.S. military transportation network that spans Iraq's insular, fragmented regions, I found in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Salahaddin and Kirkuk and elsewhere a still uneven mosaic of American-Iraqi cooperation that must now be rapidly extended. This nascent cooperation was evident across the region north of Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle, and in the Shiite south. Outside the Sunni triangle, as the area where most Sunnis live has come to be known, Iraq is much calmer than I expected from daily dispatches and television accounts that rarely treat sustained progress as news. The joint American-British occupation authority is making real progress in handing over responsibility to local authorities.

...

American generals in the north recognize their most urgent challenge far better than the occupation authorities in Baghdad. "We don't want other American troops to replace us," an Army one-star general from the 4th Infantry Division said at a background briefing in Kirkuk. "Turning things over to another U.S. military unit doesn't solve the problem here. We have to turn over to Iraqis."

Authorized to spend money confiscated from Hussein's regime on repairing schools, digging wells and other community projects, these commanders are agents of change. Many of them talk with genuine enthusiasm and confidence of winning "hearts and minds," a term I thought I would never hear employed seriously again after the disaster of Vietnam.

...

The 101st has spent $6.5 million on 1,398 projects so far in a spurt of unabashed nation-building that has cost U.S. taxpayers nothing. The Commanders Emergency Response Funds that Petraeus has tapped into come from $1.7 billion in Baathist regime assets seized in U.S. banks and $795 million in Hussein's cash seized by American soldiers.

(Emphasis added)