Negotiations succeeding to avoid Sadr City showdown?

In today’s NYT Sabrina Tavernise has a really interesting article about the mayor of Sadr City, Rahim al-Daraji, who says he is authorized to speak on behalf of field commanders for the Sadrist Jaish al-Mahdi. Daraji, she writes,

has approached Western military officials and laid out a plan to avoid armed confrontation…

Daraji reportedly forwarded the proposal to the Americans through Lt. Gen. Graeme Lamb, a British officer who is the deputy commanding general in Iraq, with whom he’s met twice in the past couple of weeks.
Tavernise writes:

Mr. Daraji said in an interview that [Jaish al-Mahdi] field commanders would forbid their foot soldiers to carry guns in public if the American military and the Iraqi government met several basic demands, mostly involving ways to ensure better security for Sadr City. He is communicating with the commanders through a Shiite politician who is close to them.
“The task is to eliminate the armed presence in Sadr City,” he said. “To confiscate illegal weapons,” carried openly by militia members in public places.
The talks appeared to have been the first between an intermediary for the Mahdi militia and a senior commander from the American effort…
Even so, it was far from clear whether Mr. Daraji, who said he was not related to Abdel Hadi al-Daraji, the former spokesman for Mr. Sadr who was arrested on murder charges last week, was even able to speak for the sprawling, grass-roots militia, which, according to American military estimates, numbers at least 7,000 in Baghdad alone.
Saleh al-Agheli, a member of Parliament from Mr. Sadr’s political bloc, said the bloc’s political committee had “blessed and supported” the effort by Mr. Daraji.

She added this:

The American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, confirmed that meetings had taken place and said that Mr. Daraji had told representatives from the American Embassy and from the military that local residents would not challenge weapons searches by American soldiers.
“He said all the right things at this point,” Mr. Khalilzad said, but added that it was too soon to tell if the offer would lead to anything more concrete.

Back to Daraji, Tavernise wrote that he:

said he represented 14 political and military groups in Sadr City. He said local residents, including Mahdi Army commanders, wanted to find ways to work with the Americans to avoid any large-scale confrontation. Commanders would tell militiamen to keep their weapons off the streets, he said, if Americans agreed to certain demands.
Some of the actions Mr. Daraji said he had requested in exchange for the promises from the militias seemed likely to draw stony stares from American military officials, namely to stop conducting raids in Sadr City and to release a number of those who had been arrested.
But other demands — to provide jobs for Sadr City residents, to bring in new construction projects and to triple the number of police stations there — seemed more realistic.
[An unnamed source of hers who’s a] government official, who works as an aide to Mr. Maliki, said he trusted Mr. Daraji.
“There is an honesty with this man,” said the official. “The chances for success are higher than before.”