How many troops does the U.S. have in Iraq? According to The Daily Beast:

Officially, there are now 3,650 U.S. troops in Iraq, there primarily to help train the Iraqi national army.

But in reality, there are already about 4,450 U.S. troops in Iraq, plus another nearly 7,000 contractors supporting the American government’s operations. That includes almost 1,100 U.S. citizens working as military contractors, according to the latest Defense Department statistics.

And I think we can expect the number to increase:

“We’re looking for opportunities to do more and there will be boots on the ground and I want to be clear about that,” Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told CNBC last month. “But it’s a strategic question whether you are enabling local forces to take and hold rather than trying to substitute for them. That is a strategic intention that we have.”

The next U.S. administration has publically committed to large defense spending increases. It has already lifted a long-standing rule intended to require a civilian to head the Department of Defense. A retired general has been put in charge in homeland security. An executive from the oil industry, which is just fine with taxpayer funded boots on the ground advancing its interests in the Middle East, is going to run the State Department.

We also have boots on the ground in Afghanistan, of course, plus Syria and Libya. Of course, we have advisors in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, and are participating with Saudi Arabia in a proxy war against Iran in Yemen. In 2012 Seymour Hersh told us that U.S. Special Forces are actively involved training proxy forces inside Iran itself, a claim which official and media U.S. sources quickly shot down. I have no evidence to the contrary, yet Seymour Hersh has some past experience telling truths that the government and media find inconvenient.

I’ve rambled a bit here. But my basic thesis is that we can expect the oil industry and the military-industrial complex to be running our country’s foreign policy for the foreseeable future. They seem increasingly to be drawing us into a proxy war with Iran and Russia on one side, and the Gulf Arab states on the other side. Maybe this is the way Cold War II will unfold. There is no sign of the checks and balances we all learned about in elementary school. The only checks that matter are the ones the public writes to the IRS, and the only balances that matter are the ballooning ones on our credit card statements. This won’t change until the public feels poor and realizes why they feel poor. Well, we do feel poor but we are buying into propaganda that it is mysterious foreign and internal enemies that are the problem, and not the worsening global economic and geopolitical climate our actions are continuing to destabilize. Not to mention the actual climate.