From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On Nouri al-Maliki—

FRED BARNES: Well, it’s a tough speech [he just gave]. I liked the word he kept using about storming places. You know, he used it repeatedly, that’s a good sign. Brit, this would be just talk . . . if things weren’t happening. But we know now he has moved on the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr. He’s arrested one of his top officials. They’ve got something like 400 people. That’s a good sign. And he’s . . . begun bringing Iraqi troops into the city.
MORT KONDRACKE: And Sadr has told his fighters to hide their weapons, not carry them around the way they used to and Maliki said that the purpose of this is to get people to give up their arms so that the — only the government will basically be in possession of arms.
Maliki’s also talking about reconciliation. Now, what’s really important here is that the media which has covered the downslide in Iraq, covered the upside if there is one. If there’s progress and it gets reported in the American papers as robustly as the failures have been, maybe it can sustain the effort that . . . General Petraeus is in charge of.
MARA LIASSON: I’m not surprised that these things are happening. What we want to see is that the Mahdi Army doesn’t just fade away into the woodwork, they actually do give over their arms. Now, they’re trying to negotiate with the U.S. forces to say well don’t come into Sadr City and we won’t walk around with our weapons. Well, that means they’re waiting to fight another day, so the Sunnis are dispatched of by the Americans.
BARNES: The other thing that’s been reported is that al Qaeda . . . is starting to go pull out its people out of Baghdad. Well look, that’s a good sign. It doesn’t mean al Qaeda is dead, they may try to come back, but the first job here is to secure the capital city. You can’t do anything, you can’t have any political solution until you do that, the more al Qaeda people who leave or are killed, the better.