The Iraqi defense minister wants a return on his investment. As Abdul Qader Obeidi tells the Los Angeles Times‘ Liz Sly, Iraq’s purchases of American weapons platforms compel an advisory presence beyond 2011, SOFA or no SOFA:

“It’s inevitable,” he said. “We have equipment such as tanks, aircraft, naval equipment, and it’s all coming from the United States. They won’t be fully ready until 2016, so how are we going to train on them? By mail? We will need the help of specialists and experts and trainers and those people are going to need life support and force protection.”

Otherwise, he added, “all the expenses I paid for … will be in vain.”

Obeidi added that he doesn’t think the U.S. needs post-2011 basing privileges in Iraq. (General Zebari, the Iraqi chief of staff, wants the U.S. military to have three or four bases.) Nor is he so concerned about Iraq’s ability to defend its borders — a different potential rationale for a post-2011 military presence — despite not having a mature air force or large armored corps.

I can feel my friend Eli Lake chuckling. But is this so problematic, from the perspective of leaving Iraq? From a domestic U.S. perspective, it feels intuitive that a small liaison staff remaining in Iraq at Iraqi behest after 2011 would be more controversial symbolically than substantively. We have military liaisons pretty much everywhere we sell weaponry. That’s a far cry from dominating Iraq militarily, as we’ve done since 2003. The Strategic Framework Agreement negotiated a long-term diplomatic arrangement between the U.S. and Iraq. A new market for U.S. materiel, while hardly the most altruistic of pursuits, is part of that future arrangement.

On the other hand, this unexplored paraphrase has implications for quite an expanded post-2011 U.S. role in Iraq:

In addition, Iraq will continue to need help with intelligence gathering after 2011, and the fledgling Iraqi air force will require U.S. assistance at least until 2020, the date by which Iraq aims to achieve the capability to defend its airspace, Obeidi said.

Now: If I ran a private security company, I’d invest a lot of money in hiring the kind of experts who can provide the technical expertise in American military hardware to its foreign customers, allowing the U.S. the ability to reap its foreign-military-sales cash without the burden of keeping people in countries the public doesn’t want to see the American flag fly.