Obama has said that all troops will be removed from Iraq by 1/1/2012. It looks like the Administration is waffling on this point, as Panetta is talking about leaving 3-4,000 troops there. The military wants 3-4 times as many. Perhaps, Obama is looking at having some troops there as a sop to the military, but a senior military man had this to say about the number of troops to be left in Iraq, “I think we’re doing this backwards. We should be talking about what missions we want to do, and then decide how many troops we’ll need.”
Irrespective of the number of troops, you have to realize that we now are living in the world of the professional army. Soldiers no longer do all the work of fighting our wars. The CIA has its hand in all over the world. And we still have our battalions of private security companies.
I doubt that we will close our embassy in Iraq. It is our largest in the world and will house not only diplomats but more security contractors. The embassy will also house an Office of Security Cooperation that, like similar ones in countries like Egypt, would be staffed by civilians and military personnel overseeing the training and equipping of Iraq’s security forces.
Sixty-six years later we still have troops in Germany and Japan. It's unlikely that we'll have troops in Iraq anywhere near that long, as our empire will be over long before then.
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