“„After promising a decisive victory over the Jaysh al-Mahdi, and ruling out negotiations with those he declared “worse than al-Qaeda”, [PM Nouri al-Maliki] appears to be settling for a deal in which JAM does not surrender its weapons and the government promises to end the arrests and raids which had been infuriating the Sadrists for months. That sounds like status quo ante, with some possibility of long-standing Sadrist complaints being addressed.