Juan — who, to be clear, doesn’t call me out or reference my stuff — suggests that Maliki’s comments may be blown out of proportion:

The headlines this admission generated in US news sources about ‘US troops may stay’ are a little puzzling to me, and seem actually sensational. What al-Maliki explicitly said was that Iraq may ask for a handful of trainers to stay. He is not saying that the US military will be rolling tanks in Iraqi cities in 2012.

I’ll trust you guys to tell me if I’m being sensational, and I didn’t think I was. I would say, though, that Maliki didn’t “explicitly” say he was open to a “handful of trainers.” He said, “if Iraqi forces required further training and further support, we shall examine this at that time [after 2011] based on the needs of Iraq.” Now, my read is similar to Juan’s, meaning that Maliki certainly didn’t say that he’d be open to U.S. combat forces in Iraq after 2011.

But 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. Additionally, Maliki’s comments are likely to prompt responses from other politicians in Iraq, particularly ahead of January’s election. So, respectfully, I don’t see this as a nonstory.

Vice President Biden has arrived in Iraq to visit U.S. troops and to meet with Iraqi leaders, including President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Speaker of the Council of Representatives Ayad al-Samarrai. The Vice President will reiterate the United States’ commitment to fully implement the Security Agreement and the Strategic Framework Agreement and to carry out President Obama’s plan to draw down U.S. forces. He will discuss with Iraq’s leaders the importance of achieving the political progress that is necessary to ensure the nation’s long-term stability. This is Vice President Biden’s second trip to Iraq this year and his first as Vice President.

Biden has long experience dealing with and strategizing over Iraq’s sectarian political deadlocks. The trouble is that non-Kurdish Iraqis consider his major proposal for an Iraqi political compact — a plan to decentralize Iraq to the point of creating significant regional autonomy — to be offensive. Juan Cole had a good roundup of this last year when President Obama tapped Biden for the VP slot. Clearly, the Iraqis will deal with Biden with the respect due a high-level American emissary, but it would be interesting to see whether there’s any sub-rosa animosity toward someone they once regarded as trying to break up their country.

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