Juan Cole, for whom I have all the respect in the world, doesn’t really think that Maliki’s comments yesterday were a legitimate story. I replied over at the Windy. The gist:

…this was (a) the first time Maliki publicly acknowledged any post-2011 U.S. troop presence and (b) he didn’t specify the size of that presence, and because (c) training/advisory missions can also be nebulous and open-ended, it struck me that I should report that story, and report it in the way that I did. I did not write and I (hopefully) didn’t imply that Maliki was opening the door to an endless occupation, because that certainly wasn’t what he said, but there’s sufficient and sufficiently-meaningful middle ground between All Troops Out and All Troops In that makes his comments worth reporting.