Petraeus vs Sadr

Joe Klein picked up on something interesting in the Iraq hearings last week - a U.S.-Maliki military attack on Sadr was in the works for June before Maliki jump-started and bungled it:

An intelligence source told me that the operation had been planned for June.

That would have been extremely foolish. The U.S. would have been inserting itself into a part of Iraq that we don't know very wellthe southand taking sides against what is probably the most popular mass movement in Shi'ite Iraq. But the Petraeus battle plan apparently includes an anti-Sadrist move, which may mean a spurt of violence as widespread and vicious as the worst of the Sunni insurgency. Is that why the general wants a "pause" in the U.S. withdrawal this summer?

What could possibly be the rationale for this? Perhaps it is that Sadr's Mahdi Army is the most potent force opposed to long-term U.S. bases in Iraqand that a permanent presence has been the Bush Administration's true goal in this war.

That is, it seems to me, the main war-aim still extant: maintaining Iraq as a base for a permanent US occupying presence in the Arab-Muslim world.