The United States said Tuesday that it planned to downsize its embassy in Iraq, the largest US diplomatic mission in the world, in hopes of saving money after the end of the war.
The New York Times, quoting unnamed officials, said the United States would slash the 16,000-strong staff by up to half in a sign of declining influence and quality of life after US troops left in late 2011.
It seems a world away when the Obama administration assumed we didn't need a military presence in Iraq after last year and that we could rely on the State Department to achieve all the missions the military should have carried out.
This administration will lose Iraq and heave a huge sigh of relief when they do, convinced it proves their point that Iraq was unwinnable.
UPDATE: The reduction is related to a recent story that Iraq wants to get rid of private security companies, which our embassy has to rely on. Without harder-to-bribe private security contractors, our embassy personnel would be at risk.
In a very narrow sense, reducing our personnel makes sense under the conditions we find ourselves in. But the bigger picture is that we shouldn't have had to make this decision in the first place. We needed to keep a significant ground combat force presence in Iraq after 2011 to provide a safety net to support rule of law. We also wouldn't have needed to rely on so many private security personnel if we had our own troops in Iraq.
Failing to get Iraqis to agree to troop presence conditions that are acceptable to us was a major failure of our supposedly "smart" diplomacy wielded by a president with the middle name "Hussein" who lived in a Moslem country in his early childhood, which supposedly made him more credible in the Moslem world.
