25 disputed city of Kirkuk. The Iraqi army was moving troops to the area. Shooting could have broken out were it not for the presence of the U.S. army in the middle. Peshmerga leaders won't talk directly to their Iraqi counterparts--they need a trusted third party in the room. What will happen next year if another such crisis erupts when U.S. troops are gone? The U.S. Embassy has an ambitious plan to deploy some 1,000 diplomats backed by 16,000 contractors to maintain a presence there and at several consulates around the country. But even if they pull this off--a feat of logistics that would be unprecedented for the State Department--there will be no replacement for the peacekeeping function that is performed by our troops. Contractors may be successful in training Iraqi forces but I have my doubts about whether they will be up to the magnitude of the task. Iraq has no fighter aircraft and no air-control system. It has only some 70 tanks and no artillery. Its army has almost no experience in combined-arms warfare, having devoted the last eight years, for understandable reasons, to counterinsurgency operations. In other words, Iraq is almost defenseless. That makes it easy prey for Iran, its historic rival. This doesn't mean that an Iranian invasion is likely. Yet Iranian bullying and influence-peddling is going on all the time, and if Iraq can't defend its borders, Tehran will have an extra element of coercive leverage. Under these circumstances, leaving Iraq entirely would be an act of folly. We are still in Kosovo, South Korea and other post-conflict zones that are far more stable. We need to be in Iraq too. We don't need to keep 50,000 troops there, but a continuing presence of 20,000 military personnel, as argued by military analysts Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, would seem to be the minimum necessary to ensure Iraq's continued progress. It would also make possible an Iraqi- American alliance that could become one of the linchpins of security HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_02