You’ll hear many politicians speak as though the U.S. has concluded it’s war in Iraq. Not true:
The post-U.S.-withdrawal history of Iraq has had more than its share of debacles as well, most notably the collapse of the U.S. signature police-training program, a multibillion-dollar program the Iraqis said they didn’t want…
Meanwhile, despite the roughly $6 billion a year operating cost of the massive and heavily fortified embassy, diplomatic relations with Iraq have suffered as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki consolidates power — by among other things, exiling the country’s vice president to Turkey and sentencing him to death.
The State Department is consolidating its operations and reducing the number of people it employs in Iraq — from 16,000 at the beginning of the year, to about 14,000 now, to less than 11,500 by the end of 2013, a State Department official told HuffPost. But because so many foreign service officers and contractors are falling back to the embassy itself, construction on the $750 million compound actually continues, in order to make room for them and maintain the embassy’s self-contained infrastructure.
[Emphasis added]. The next time you are wondering why we can’t afford to hire enough teachers for our public schools, consider that $6 Billion per year equates to more than $16 Million dollars per day, which (at $50,000 per teacher) is enough to hire 120,000 teachers.
