50,000 "Advisors" are remaining past the 2010 exit and there has been no mention of the 85,000 or so mercenaries still there. No mention that I've heard of the fate of the numerous mega-fortresses the Empire built in Iraq which will undoubtedly require thousands of soldiers garrisoned and aggressively defending the bases from the ire of the locals under perpetual foreign military occupation.
It seems like the American Empire is going to try the same ultimately failed strategy that the British Empire did. Prop up a puppet ruler who supports the Empire's most key interests (Influence over Oil Regions), train and lead a native army to protect him, maintain a few combat brigades with heavy air support in country to smash serious uprisings against the hegemon or its vassal.
This seems to be the most likely scenario and is NOT the U.S. Military getting out of Iraq. Transferring troops from Iraq to that ongoing crime and fiasco called the War in Afghanistan is no better, but the Imperator's other war deserves its own diaries.
Somewhere between half a million and a million Iraqis have died in the War in Iraq, around half a million children died from the U.S. embargo before the War. Any Iraqi who doesn't see our last three Presidents as mass murderers, blood soaked villains, is insane. Any American who doesn't seem them in the light of their crimes, is willfully blind.
More innocent blood has been spilled by the American Emperors then every serial killer, gang and mafia combined. There is no ideology, no series of justifications and reasons that can excuse crimes of such number and evil. Yet not one will know justice, instead they are nigh worshiped, or scorned for not being a more artful propagandist, for not controlling our country more, or not controlling us the "right way", or not killing more prolifically, or even more so, for being part of the blue team or the red team.
If there was several foreign bases dominating the landscape of your state, a foreign military garrison of thousands and tens of thousands of mercenaries murdering and kidnapping friends, neighbors, countrymen and family members in night raids, bombings, and checkpoints. If they were directing native police departments to do the same as "advisors", would you believe that you were free of foreign military occupation? If this is the situation in Iraq after 2011, will we believe they are free of the Empire's military domination?