The U.S. troops have left Iraq, and U.S. diplomats will now be the face of America in a country that remains extremely volatile.
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, along with several consulates, will have some 15,000 workers, making it the largest U.S. diplomatic operation abroad. Those diplomats will be protected by a private army consisting of as many as 5,000 security contractors who will carry assault weapons and fly armed helicopters.
Embassy personnel will ride in armored vehicles with armed guards, who work for companies with names like Triple Canopy and Global Strategies Group.
Their convoys will be watched from above. Another company, DynCorp International, will fly helicopters equipped with heavy machine guns.
"Yes, we will have security contractors in Iraq," says Patrick Kennedy, the State Department official overseeing the security force. "But if you go back a year, the Department of Defense had around 17,000 security contractors in Iraq along with 150,000 or so armed service men and women."
Kennedy insists those security guards will be nothing like the Army and Marine Corps.
"We run. We go. We do not stand and fight," Kennedy says. "We will execute a high-speed U-turn and get as far away from the attackers as we possibly can."
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