Maliki pushes forward as his masters tell him to...

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that its sources in the Iraqi government are saying that there are some secret paragraphs to the agreement between the Bush administration and the al-Maliki government in Iraq to act against militia leaders. The article suggests that the model of the US raid on an Iranian liason office in Irbil might be deployed against Mahdi Army leaders and against Sunni Arab guerrilla commanders. That is, such raids would be small, targeted, quick and involve kidnapping suspected wrongdoers.

The article also quotes US ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, as saying that al-Maliki promised Bush that he would confront the [Shiite] Mahdi Army.