It now appears that, as expected religious leaders in Iraq have told Sadr that he does not have to disband the Mahdi militia.

This is not a surprising outcome. Any “disbanding” would only eliminate the already tenuous chain of command, and you would end up with dozens of smaller groups.

Meanwhile, the The Grauniad^* appears to have gotten its hands on the status of forces agreement between Bush and Iraq.

It’s technically “temporary”, though it has no expiration date (kind of like the Billion Year Sea Org contracts), and it, “contains no limits on numbers of US forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term US security agreements with other countries.”

^*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”