Apparently, Maliki is getting cocky...

Baghdad: Iraq's prime minister said Saturday that the government has defeated terrorism in the country, a sign of growing confidence after recent crackdowns against Sunni extremists and Shiite militias.[...]

"They were intending to besiege Baghdad and control it,"
Al Maliki said. "But thanks to the will of the tribes,
security forces, army and all Iraqis, we defeated them."

He was speaking at ceremonies marking the fifth
anniversary of the 2003 assassination of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Al Hakim, a leading opponent of Saddam Hussain.

Sure you have, Maliki! What's this?

Gunmen on a motorcycle assassinated an official of Iraq's biggest Shiite party Friday in the southern city of Basra, police said.

Sheik Salim al-Dirraji was gunned down in the Hayania district, which had been a stronghold of the Mahdi Army of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr until a security crackdown last spring.

Al-Dirraji was a local official of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the leading rival of al-Sadr's party within the Shiite community.

I guess the Sadrists didn't cotton to the notion of him tooling around on their turf. It seems that Maliki has set his sites on Diyala province now...!

I will give you the “framework”, and you will track the dots to decode the story:

Out of the sudden and for the last few months, violence started again in Diyala. Although news reports stated that “Armed Councils” an equivalent to the “Awakening Councils” are behind these new conflicts, as Diyala police chief said to AlHayat:

The security operation is related to the disband of the “Armed Councils”, they still exist in Diyala and the surrounding villages.

In their Statement here, the major armed faction in Diyala denies any relation with the new violence wave in the province [in earlier statement they even denied that the faction present in Diyala].

The image above is a screenshot from reported by an eyewitness saying that Iraqi army is moving towards Diyala from two directions: 1- from Baghdad 2- from Kirkuk, which suggests that a military campaign on its way in the province.

I wonder if this military campaign has anything to do with Diyala’s tribal chiefs announcement today in AlHayat that they refuse to give away Diyala’s two cities [Jalwla'a and Sa'adiya] to Kurdistan?

We saw the same scenario in Mosul also.

Personally I think Maliki is getting a little too big for his britches, I guess only time will tell...

I think Naomi Klein provides the best analysis on the royal screwing Iraq is about get from Big Oil...

Big Oil's Iraq deals are the greatest stick-up in history

The country's invaders should be paying billions in reparations not using the war as a reason to pillage its richest resource[...]

One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of backroom arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oilfields, accounting for half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq's oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under the control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign corporations will keep 75% of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25% for their Iraqi partners.

That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anti-colonial struggles.

According to Greg Muttitt, a London-based oil expert, the assumption up until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop new fields in Iraq - not to take over those which are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. "The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company," he told me. "This is a total reversal of that policy, giving the Iraq National Oil Company a mere 25% instead of the planned 100%."

That is highway robbery! Flat out outrageous! Well, I'm sure Darth and Shrub just declared "mission accomplished!"

In offbeat news, Betrayus's masterpiece is now available in Arabic, or at least partially translated...

...At Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, I learned that the Counterinsurgency Center has translated that manual into Arabic so that soldiers advising their Iraqi counterparts could read from the same material. On the left, the manual appears in Arabic; the right in English. To look at it, you can almost see two counterparts sitting side by side explaining what they take from the words before them.

I, probably more than almost any other military reporter on Earth, was geeked to discover the manual came in Arabic as I speak Arabic. I quickly flipped through the pages thinking I would learn some new relevant Arabic words. As it turned out, I learned what I always suspected: the U.S. military is a language all to its own.

Now, to be fair, Arabic has about 100,000 words whereas English is comprised of roughly 1 million words. So it is often difficult to translate from one language to another. There is no Arabic word for counterinsurgency. On the cover, the Arabic translation roughly reads as "anti-revolution." Anti is written in Arabic by the way while revolution is in Kurdish.

But there are bigger picture problems. There is no way to translate the military's plethora of acronyms, so they appear in English in the midst of all this Arabic. Oh the poor Iraqi Army captain who has to figure out what COIN, HMMV, SOPs, TTP and OIF means.

Most amusing, the power point diagrams peppered throughout are not translated. They too appear in English. I cannot underestimate how significant power point is to the military. Everything, and I mean everything, has at some point been put into a power point presentation. In fact, I am convinced one could thread enough existing power point presentations to describe in great detail both U.S. military history and its current plans and strategies. Whether any civilian would ever understand it is something else.

I've come to despise the 'power point' presentations! I do agree that Army acronyms is a complete language unto itself...!