A few stories to give you a sense of the glorious new Iraq. First, from The Washington Post, a story you may already have seen:

Shiites Told: Leave Home Or Be Killed

Salim Rashid, 34, a Shiite laborer in an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab village 20 miles north of Baghdad, received his eviction notice Friday from a man at the door with a rocket launcher.

"It's 6 p.m.," Rashid recounted the masked man saying then, as retaliatory violence between Shiites and Sunnis exploded across wide swaths of central Iraq. "We want you out of here by 8 p.m. tomorrow. If we find you here, we will kill you."

Walking, hitchhiking and hiring cars, the Rashid clan and many of the 25 other families evicted from the town of Mishada had made their way by Tuesday to a youth center in Baghdad's heavily Shiite neighborhood of Shoula. There, other people forced from their homes were already sharing space on donated mattresses.

With sectarian violence rampant since last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, the families have become symbols of an emerging trend in Iraq: the expulsion of Shiites from Sunni towns....

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, here's how you survive:

LOOK in the pockets of Iraqis whose jobs take them around Baghdad every day and you are likely to find a clutch of passes and identity cards, one for every police, military or militia checkpoint they may run into.

"“This one is says I'm Badr, this one I show to police, and I have the American press pass and my ordinary ID. I applied for a Mehdi Army pass on Friday but it hasn’t arrived yet," said one Iraqi driver working for a foreign media organisation. "I am Sunni so these passes mean I don't get in trouble with anyone while I’m out and about."

The sheer proliferation of armed groups -- some official, some unofficial and some that operate in the murky middle ground -- underscores the lawlessness of Iraq, where neither US forces who invaded in 2003 nor the Iraqi armed forces they trained have been able to impose their authority on the whole country....

And in the south, a bomb killed two British soldiers in Al Amarah. Al Amarah was the setting for a video, shot two years ago and recently released, that showed British soldiers kicking and punching locals. (Other, earlier parts of the video showed the locals hurling homemade bombs at the troops.) But securing Al Amarah -- which even gave Saddam trouble -- has never been an easy job for the Brits:

AL AMARAH is a particularly difficult and violent place to police. With an estimated population of about 400,000, it has a history of rule by rival sheikhs, each with their own private armies....

When British troops took over from United States forces at the end of the war, they attempted to work with the sheikhs to establish ground rules for local government. Initial attempts appeared to be successful and it was possible for soldiers to move about the town without helmets or body armour. But the situation quickly deteriorated as old rivalries came to the fore and British attempts to maintain the peace saw them become the target of attack.

As in other parts of Iraq, frustrations over unemployment and the failure to restore essential services played a part and, since early 2004, British troops have been involved in heavy fighting in and around the town....

The Black Watch and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders have also come under sustained attack during their deployments in the town, with supporters of the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al Sadr blamed for instigating much of the violence.

Amarah's physical location, close to the Iran border, also complicates the security picture, with British commanders convinced that Iranian forces are actively involved in supporting insurgents.

Rose petals. It was all supposed to be rose petals.