Iraq Now, the web log of an Army officer currently working "in country", has some nice tidibits today:

This follow-up on what now seems to be called The Battle of Samarra:

The objective now is not to secure a convoy of Iraqi currency, but to secure the Iraqi public’s favorable perception of the truth. The battlefield is no longer the Samarra streets, but the airwaves all over the Muslim world. But the Battle of Samarra continues…

And this story of one concrete example of the word, "Ariyah", by describing what, exactly, happened when a group of detainees were released once it was decided they weren't a threat to anyone. What I found most intriguing:

[I] asked through the interpreter where in Ar Ramadi they wanted to be dropped off. The police station downtown was fine, so we instructed them that when we got there, we’d cut the plastic cuffs one at a time, and they were to simply walk away from the trucks and they were free. [emphasis added]

I wonder how happy these guys would've been getting dropped of at a police station before the war? I'm reading this a lot in the Iraqi blogs right now. The Iraqi Police (IP... from, I gather, the very large I.P. letters on their armbands) seem to be a real success story. They seem to have been transformed from an apparatus of Ba'athist enforcement to a real force of peace and order. All with a surprisingly small, almost non-existant, reputation for corruption and brutality.

Of course, since they're a success, we hear nothing about it. If they were raping villages and burning women there would be images on the front page of the NY Times every morning.

It's kinda sad that the only way you can understand the good news over there is by reading between the lines and counting the silences.