Bombshell!

Or at least it would be a bombshell if it was reported in the MSM, in which I do not include the Asia Times.

Gareth Porter is reporting that Maliki's attack on Basra was done to head off a joint US/British attack on the same city.

He also confirms Blog Simple's assertion that Cheney pressured Maliki about the attack:

When Vice President Dick Cheney, who had previously played the "bad cop" in the George W Bush administration's relations with Maliki, visited Baghdad in mid-March, one of his objectives was to get Maliki to go along with the Petraeus plan to eliminate the commanding position of Muqtada's forces in Basra. Maliki has told Iraqi officials that Cheney put pressure on him to go along with the Basra operation, according one Iraqi source.

Now it seems that Maliki, our good bud is being looked at suspiciously by the US:

When the Basra operation became an obvious disaster, however, Washington officials began to question Maliki's motives. On the third day of the operation, as Bush administration officials were reassessing what they described as "a rapidly deteriorating situation in southern Iraq", one official told the Washington Post's Peter Baker they were comparing conspiracy theories about why Maliki had acted so precipitously.

Although that comment was not explained, it clearly implied that Maliki was deliberately undermining the US objective of eliminating the Mahdi Army by using US and British troops.

Stranger and stranger.