Not a...great day in Iraq...not good at all.

In Iraq the thunder of explosives were heard from Baghdad's Green Zone

Where Prime Minister al-Maliki and Secretary-General (of the UN) Ban Ki-Moon were in a news conference when a mortar struck some 30 yards from their site. Causing the Secretary-General ducked a bit, and Maliki...acted like this happens to him everyday.

to Diyala Province.

Early in the morning on Thursday, before dawn, some 200 Sunni Arab guerrillas in Muqdadiya (Diyala Province) stormed a jail and freed 33 prisoners, many of them guerrillas. I can't think of another recent operation that involved a company-sized fighting force. Thirty persons died in the fighting. One wire service reported, "Insurgents battled Iraqi and US reinforcements, set fire to the police station, courthouse and 20 police vehicles before making their escape." If they accomplished all that after US reinforcements arrived, imagine what they could have accomplished if no US and Iraqi troops had come out to confront them.

Not a good day.