IRAQ - Apr 24 - Car Bombs Kill At Least 9 Civilians In Baghdad.

Insurgents unleash a wave of car bombs across Baghdad, killing at least 9 people and wounding 76 in attacks against the back gate of Mustansiriya University, two police patrols and a busy central Baghdad intersection at rush hour. All of the dead were civilians. Three police officers and four Interior Ministry commandos were among the wounded. In some measure, the violence was reminiscent of a year ago, when Sunni Arab insurgents made coordinated car bomb attacks across the capital and killed scores of Iraqis in a clear attempt to destabilize and intimidate Iraq's infant interim government. The PM-designate at the time, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was in a struggle to name a cabinet, a harbinger of what many Iraqi officials came to describe as his weak and uncharismatic leadership that became almost powerless to deal with a sophisticated insurgency and growing sectarian fighting. Perhaps in an effort to stem any repetition of the sense of precariousness that dominated Baghdad last April, the new PM-designate, Jawad al-Maliki, confidently predicted Monday in a broadcast on state-run television that he would have a new cabinet in place in just 15 days, half the time accorded him under the new Constitution. Maliki was a longtime deputy to Jaafari in the Islamic Dawa Party, one of the most important parties within the Shiite alliance. While Maliki is known as a hard-nosed negotiator and experienced inside political player, he is a novice political leader. Moreover, he has the job partly because the Sunni Arab political leadership - furious one year ago over being shut out of the new Jaafari government after boycotting the elections - this time turned out in force at the polls and joined with Kurds and other leaders to force Jaafari out of his job. American officials in Baghdad - whose success in Iraq hangs partly on whether the new government can be a unifying leadership in a way Jaafari's never even seemed to attempt - have spent the past two days suggesting that for all the two men's political and policy similarities, Maliki's forcefulness and bolder style could make the difference. But even if the distinction between the two is accurate, just how far it will get Maliki remains to be seen. Perhaps his most delicate and important task over the next few weeks is choosing an interior minister, who would oversee the police units and commandos widely accused by Sunni Arabs of kidnapping, torturing and murdering hundreds of young men and fueling the sectarian tensions that have brought Iraq to the brink of civil war. On Monday, though, the latest sectarian crime appeared to be violence from the Sunni-led insurgency against the Interior Ministry's own forces. The corpses of 15 young men, tortured and riddled with bullets, were found in the back of two abandoned trucks in the heavily insurgent region of Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. The men had been recruits, the official said, preparing to serve in a special Interior Ministry force trying to bring calm to Ramadi, one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq. In an interview Monday with CNN, Maliki said he would work toward "national reconciliation on the basis of national dialogue and common interests" among Iraq's rival ethnic and religious communities. He also promised to "cleanse our society" of terrorism, combat corruption and disband militias controlled by political parties and integrate them into the armed forces and the police. "I'm confident that the militias, and there are more than 11 militias, must be disarmed", Maliki was quoted by The Associated Press as saying. "There's no difference between one militia and others". Meanwhile, in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, the court trying Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity heard testimony from a team of experts saying that signatures of the former president and six co-defendants on documents linking them to the killing of 148 Shiites in the 1980s were genuine, Reuters reported. Saddam and his half brother Barzan al-Tikriti have refused to give samples of their writing but both have said there was no crime in prosecuting the 148 from the village of Dujail because the villagers were accused of trying to kill Saddam. The trial was adjourned until May 15. Bush defends invasion President George W. Bush said Monday that the US had made some missteps in Iraq but that his decision to send in American troops to topple Saddam was the right call, The Associated Press reported from Irvine, California. "On the big decisions of sending the troops in, I'd have done it again", Bush told a questioner after giving a speech on immigration. Bush also said a new democracy was arising in Iraq where there once was tyranny.