Last US troops leave Iraq

[Channel72]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16234723

The last convoy of US troops to leave Iraq has entered Kuwait, nearly nine years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The final column of about 100 armoured vehicles carrying 500 soldiers crossed the southern Iraqi desert overnight.

At the peak of the operation there were 170,000 US troops and more than 500 bases in Iraq.

Nearly 4,500 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the US-led campaign began in 2003.

The operation has cost Washington nearly $1 trillion (£643bn).

Analysis

US troops have trained up Iraqi security forces which, if they stick together, can arguably contain the internal security situation, still stubbornly jammed at a level of violence which kills on average around 350 people every month.

But security has to be rooted in political stability, and that's only one of many challenges immediately facing Iraq.

Even as the final US troops were heading for the border, a political crisis was erupting in Baghdad, with deputies from Ayyad Allawi's Iraqiyya block pulling out of parliament.

There is turmoil in two mainly Sunni provinces, which want to declare themselves autonomous regions like the Kurds in the north. There's also a widespread conviction that with the Americans gone, Iranian influence will spread.

While most Iraqis believe it was high time for the Americans to go, many are deeply worried about the challenges that lie ahead.

US forces ended combat missions in Iraq in 2010 and had already handed over much of their security role.

"(It's) a good feeling... knowing this is going to be the last mission out of here," said Private First Class Martin Lamb, part of the final "tactical road march" out of Iraq.

"Part of history, you know - we're the last ones out."

As the last of the armoured vehicles crossed the border, a gate was closed behind them and US and Kuwaiti soldiers gathered there to shake hands and pose for pictures.

The only US military presence left in Iraq now is 157 soldiers responsible for training at the US embassy, as well as a small contingent of marines protecting the diplomatic mission.

The low-key US exit was in stark contact to the blaze of aerial bombardment Washington unleashed against Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Tribute

US President Barack Obama marked the end of the war earlier in the week, meeting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

He announced in October that all US troops would leave Iraq by the end of 2011, a date previously agreed by former President George W Bush in 2008.
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The US troops left Iraq for the last time, crossing into Kuwait

In a recent speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, President Obama paid tribute to the soldiers who had served in Iraq.

He acknowledged that the war had been controversial, but told returning troops they were leaving behind "a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq".

However, correspondents say there are concerns in Washington that Iraq lacks robust political structures or an ability to defend its borders.

There are also fears that Iraq could be plunged back into sectarian bloodletting, or be unduly influenced by Iran.

Washington had wanted to keep a small training and counter-terrorism presence in Iraq, but US officials were unable to strike a deal with Baghdad on legal issues including immunity for troops.

Well... 9 years and 1 trillion dollars later, it's finally more or less over. And what a mess it's been. At this point, I'm past the false pretenses that started this whole thing; going forward, the only thing keeping our 1-trillion dollar investment in democracy from deteriorating into utter chaos is... what, exactly?

[The Romulan Republic]

Well that's done. I fear for what will happen to Iraq from here on out, and I can't say I would prefer Sadam in power, but I can't deny a certain relief that its over, and considering it was built on false pretences, it should never have happened in the first place.

[Thanas]

How many paid-by-US mercenaries still remain there?

[weemadando]

A shitload is the short answer. In the five figures range IIRC.

[Barlestone]

How many paid-by-US mercenaries still remain there?

About 5,000, according to NPR, and 11,000 other people under State Dept. besides.

As the final U.S. troops leave Iraq, they leave behind the largest U.S. Embassy in the world.

There will be about 16,000 people working for the State Department at the embassy in Baghdad and consulates elsewhere in Iraq.

At least 5,000 of those in Iraq will be private security contractors, and there are lots of questions about whether the State Department is ready to run such a big operation in such a volatile country.

At the State Department in Washington, Undersecretary for Management Pat Kennedy has been getting contracts and other logistics in order for the embassy.

"This is something, clearly, that the State Department has never done before," Kennedy says.

Large Support Network

The Defense Department is lending some people and military equipment, but it is the State Department that will be in charge of the imposing embassy in Baghdad and the consulates. Most of those 16,000 people will actually be contractors providing security and what Kennedy calls "life support."
The core numbers of diplomats in Baghdad and ... in Basra, Kirkuk and Irbil are on a par with what you might find in another large U.S. Embassy in a Paris, a Tokyo or a Bangkok," says Kennedy.

The price tag for all of this will run about $3.5 billion a year. So far, Kennedy says, Congress has helped.

"They have provided us with funding in separate accounts," he says, "in order to ensure we can carry out our activities in Iraq and Afghanistan so it does not drain away resources for the other 165 or so countries that we have embassies in."

One of Kennedy's predecessors, Grant Green, says there are some big questions hanging over this mission.

"What is going to be the will of our country and our Congress to support our activities there in the out years?" Green says. "Once the troops are really gone completely, other than security cooperation folks, but once they are completely gone, this turns into just another diplomatic post. And until there are some tragic events there, I think it is off the radar screen."

Congressional Skepticism

Already, some in Congress are questioning the need for such a large diplomatic presence in Iraq. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont and a key member of the Appropriations Committee, calls it a behemoth of an embassy that costs more than U.S. missions to key allies and trading partners.

"Just as it was a horrible mistake on the part of the United States to go to war in Iraq to begin with, the size of this embassy and the cost of supporting this embassy just continues that mistake," Leahy says.

If money dries up, the U.S. may have to cut back on consulates or personnel.

Green, who was on the commission that studied wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that could mean less oversight in a country where U.S. security contractors already have a terrible image for a deadly shooting in 2007, when Blackwater security guards killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad.

"Are they going to have enough oversight? Probably not, but they are going to have to do the best they can with what they've got," he says.

"It's just not on the security side," he continues. "We need people to oversee those life support contracts — the dining facilities and construction and delivery of water and fuel and food and all of those things that will be done by contractors. We may not lose lives if those contractors come up short, but we can certainly waste a lot of money.

Kennedy, the current undersecretary for management, says he thinks there will be enough oversight. And as for the size, he thinks it is worth it.

"The U.S.-Iraq relationship is incredibly important. This is a democracy in the Middle East," he says. "Is it perfect? No. A lot of people think our system isn't perfect either. But this is a major oil producer, a friend of the United States, a potential market for American goods and now, I think, a very important symbol in the Middle East of what democracy in the Middle East could be."

[Shroom Man 777]

"Is it perfect? No. A lot of people think our system isn't perfect either. But this is a major oil producer, a friend of the United States, a potential market for American goods and now, I think, a very important symbol in the Middle East of what democracy in the Middle East could be."

God, these are the ugliest words I've read today. It's also a great example of how differently things can look from another perspective. In the eyes of a highly patriotic combat-loving American, these words would be lovely things. To anyone else, the guy who said that just made himself look like a giant asshole with what he just said.

[madd0ct0r]

Replace Middle East with South East Aisa and you've got the Phillipines or South Vietnam twenty years ago.

[PeZook]

"The U.S.-Iraq relationship is incredibly important. This is a democracy in the Middle East," he says. "Is it perfect? No. A lot of people think our system isn't perfect either. But this is a major oil producer, a friend of the United States, a potential market for American goods and now, I think, a very important symbol in the Middle East of what democracy in the Middle East could be."

Congratulations to the US on a job well done! The greatest nation in the world had truly paved the way, wrote the book as you may say, on how to show the light to those poor unenlightened peoples of the Middle East who never knew the tender touch of freedom and democracy. That's the way you solve the world's problems, folks. The US sacrificed so much, but it was all in the name of the greater good. It's definitely 1 trillion well spent, as now the Iraqis will be able to enjoy the fine products of US industry, the inalienable right of all human beings that America will defend to its last dollar.

America is truly the greatest nation ever, out to help the common man realize his full potential.

[Shroom Man 777]

Only terrorizers and homobortionists have shame. These freedom-loving patriots don't feel any shame, for they have done no wrong, and have nothing to feel ashamed about! So say it loud, say it proud! For truth! For justice! For the American way! USA!

[Thanas]

Those 1 million Iraqis sacrificed their lives willingly in pursuit of the greater cause.

As to a functioning democracy within Iraq, by what standards? I guess Cuba is a functioning democracy as well...oh wait, they are not on the right side.

[PeZook]

Those 1 million Iraqis sacrificed their lives willingly in pursuit of the greater cause.

As to a functioning democracy within Iraq, by what standards? I guess Cuba is a functioning democracy as well...oh wait, they are not on the right side.

It's only a functioning democracy if the people elect a government friendly to the US, since democracy only has one function. Therefore if the elections go in the other direction, democracy becomes non-functional and has to be fixed by any means necessary.

[weemadando]

That's if the bastion of democracy (TM) let's it get to the point of free and fair elections. Better a friendly post coup despot than an elected govt that might tell us "no".

[dragon]

Well one of my old army buddies is still there, so not all soliders have left. Granted him and his team are busy repairing stuff in some villiage they're engineers. Don't know what or where as he couldn't say due to opsec.

So more accurate to say last combat troops.

[Channel72]

Sigh. Despite the initial false pretenses and the absurd cost in money and human lives, ultimately this war will be vindicated or condemned mostly by how this all pans out over the next decade or so.

If we ask the question "is the removal of a particularly brutal dictator worth $1,000,000,000,000 and 100,000 human lives?", the answer is pretty clearly "NO", especially considering that this dictator wasn't much of a threat outside his own borders. But none of that matters anymore. If Iraq develops into a stable, functioning democracy over the next decade or so, the war will be vindicated even though many of the factors which lead to Iraq's future prosperity are probably totally up to chance.

[Lord Zentei]

I'm not really sure what difference it makes whether the dictator is operating within his own borders or not, if the death toll of his regime exceeds that of the invasion (especially since the invasion's death toll was also within these same borders). More to the point: the death toll of the Saddam Hussein regime was not mostly within his own borders, just ask Iran and Kuwait.

Now, doubtless someone will point out that the Iran-Iraq war was one where the US wasn't entirely innocent, and that's an entirely fair point. Not to mention that the invasion was bungled so spectacularly that the cost (both in blood and treasure) rose to be many times what it needed to have been.

But had the war not been so mismanaged, had it not been sold on such false pretenses and had GWB bothered to put together an alliance the way his father did, I daresay most of us would be looking at this whole war rather differently. Sadly, that scenario will forever remain in the realm of "what if".

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not really sure what difference it makes whether the dictator is operating within his own borders or not, if the death toll of his regime exceeds that of the invasion (especially since the invasion's death toll was also within these same borders).

The trouble lies in the number of imponderables. We can not know how many people a given war will get killed, or what the political ramifications are. War is antinomian.

We can guess, we can predict, we can beg, borrow, threaten, and steal in order to bring about the result we desire. But we can't make it happen on a predictable, reliable timetable.

So talking about "the death toll of the invasion" as a fact potentially known before the fact is pure absurdity.

More to the point: the death toll of the Saddam Hussein regime was not mostly within his own borders, just ask Iran and Kuwait.

Then the problem becomes one of sunk costs. We couldn't resurrect the dead of the Iran-Iraq War by toppling Saddam in 2003, and post-1991 Saddam lacked the resources to fight such a war again. So you cannot use fear of such a war to justify a war of regime change.

But had the war not been so mismanaged, had it not been sold on such false pretenses and had GWB bothered to put together an alliance the way his father did, I daresay most of us would be looking at this whole war rather differently. Sadly, that scenario will forever remain in the realm of "what if".

If Bush had proceeded to wage the war on an honest and intelligent basis, knowing in advance what it might really cost and refusing to lie to prospective allies about his goals... I doubt the war would have been fought at all. Did Bush really intend a decade-long occupation, with thousands of Americans dead and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, at a cost of a trillion dollars or more? Would anyone have signed on with him if he had been honest about the dangers and costs on that scale? If Saddam had not been painted as a rogue madman due to obtain his nuclear arsenal any day now?

I would like to think not.

[LadyTevar]

I will simply say that there are a lot of families having a fantastic Xmas this year, as their family returns home.

[Lord Zentei]

I'm not really sure what difference it makes whether the dictator is operating within his own borders or not, if the death toll of his regime exceeds that of the invasion (especially since the invasion's death toll was also within these same borders).

The trouble lies in the number of imponderables. We can not know how many people a given war will get killed, or what the political ramifications are. War is antinomian.

We can guess, we can predict, we can beg, borrow, threaten, and steal in order to bring about the result we desire. But we can't make it happen on a predictable, reliable timetable.

So talking about "the death toll of the invasion" as a fact potentially known before the fact is pure absurdity.

If that were true, then no military action could ever be planned. Obviously it's hard to predict what the cost of a war will be, but it's silly to dismiss any attempts to make such an assessment as impossible.

More to the point: the death toll of the Saddam Hussein regime was not mostly within his own borders, just ask Iran and Kuwait.

Then the problem becomes one of sunk costs. We couldn't resurrect the dead of the Iran-Iraq War by toppling Saddam in 2003, and post-1991 Saddam lacked the resources to fight such a war again. So you cannot use fear of such a war to justify a war of regime change.

That was not the point. If the fact that the past death toll of Saddam's regime was confined to his own borders was an argument against an invasion, then that argument is flawed. Never mind that such an argument is repugnant on its face in any case.

But had the war not been so mismanaged, had it not been sold on such false pretenses and had GWB bothered to put together an alliance the way his father did, I daresay most of us would be looking at this whole war rather differently. Sadly, that scenario will forever remain in the realm of "what if".

If Bush had proceeded to wage the war on an honest and intelligent basis, knowing in advance what it might really cost and refusing to lie to prospective allies about his goals... I doubt the war would have been fought at all. Did Bush really intend a decade-long occupation, with thousands of Americans dead and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, at a cost of a trillion dollars or more? Would anyone have signed on with him if he had been honest about the dangers and costs on that scale? If Saddam had not been painted as a rogue madman due to obtain his nuclear arsenal any day now?

I would like to think not.

As I pointed out, the war was mismanaged. The incompetence of the Bush administration in not preparing for the occupation or the possibility of sectarian violence belies the notion that the outcome was inevitable.

[Simon_Jester]

If that were true, then no military action could ever be planned. Obviously it's hard to predict what the cost of a war will be, but it's silly to dismiss any attempts to make such an assessment as impossible.

The problem is that you can plan, but you can't plan the outcome of a war before it starts to any real degree of precision. If war was that predictable, no one would need to fight it; the side that was going to lose would be able to do the math as well as you can and give up rather than get slaughtered.

So when one is trying to do utilitarian calculations about war ("are the utils we gain from fighting more than the utils we lose from fighting?"), a reasonable person will include a large error bar.

Maybe it will take a hundred thousand men to occupy the country. Maybe three times that. Maybe it will take a few hundred casualties because there will be minimal guerilla opposition, or maybe ten times that. Maybe the guerillas will fight relatively cleanly and give up quickly and civilian casualties will be low, or maybe not. None of these things can be assessed from outside the country before the shooting begins, because how the hell do you take into account the determination and resources of a guerilla force that doesn't exist yet?

My argument is that Bush utterly failed to apply this error bar, and that anyone who tries to go to war without first thinking about the error bars on their estimate of what happens is being absurd. And when error bars are factored in, deciding to fight over some finely calculated utilitarian principle will be folly, because it's very hard to predict the amount of damage the war will do. Only if the suffering caused by the war is obviously much worse than the worst foreseeable outcomes of the war would such a war be justified... and in the case of Iraq, I don't think that condition was met.

The problem with making utilitarian calculations about war is one of the reasons people keep going around trying to work out "just war theory" and international law and rigorous definitions of casus belli. Having well defined principles such as "fight if invaded" and "do not invade another country to interfere in its internal politics" helps avoid cases where rulers go to war because they expect the war to kill 20% fewer people than peace would... and then turning out to have been wrong about the casualty rate of the war by a factor of two.

More to the point: the death toll of the Saddam Hussein regime was not mostly within his own borders, just ask Iran and Kuwait.

Then the problem becomes one of sunk costs. We couldn't resurrect the dead of the Iran-Iraq War by toppling Saddam in 2003, and post-1991 Saddam lacked the resources to fight such a war again. So you cannot use fear of such a war to justify a war of regime change.

That was not the point. If the fact that the past death toll of Saddam's regime was confined to his own borders was an argument against an invasion, then that argument is flawed. Never mind that such an argument is repugnant on its face in any case.

My argument is that if you are to use a death toll as a reason to invade a country, you must use a death toll that is expected to happen in the future, not one that already happened in the past and which you did not resist at the time.

Because arguing "we killed fifty thousand of your people because your dictator had already killed a hundred thousand of someone else's people" only makes sense if the killing is expected to continue- if you are in fact saving lives. Since no amount of bloodshed or regime change will bring back the dead, starting a new war with new piles of corpses in response to the old piles of corpses simply ensures a higher death count in the end.

So the Iran-Iraq War cannot be used as justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, because Saddam was not threatening to launch another Iran-Iraq War in the future. Nor was the US even pretending that its goal was to bring Saddam to justice for crimes committed during the Iran-Iraq War.

If you want to use some other projected death toll that has not already happened to justify fighting a war, go right ahead. But to kill thousands of people in response to a past atrocity, when the vast majority of the new victims had nothing to do with the old crime, is grotesque.

As I pointed out, the war was mismanaged. The incompetence of the Bush administration in not preparing for the occupation or the possibility of sectarian violence belies the notion that the outcome was inevitable.

My point is a team of managers competent to manage the war correctly might never have fought it at all. This is a fully rational response to finding out that an optional war is expensive: "I could topple your dictatorship, but it would cost fifty thousand dead and five hundred billion dollars to do it; it's not worth the price."

Moreover, had this team of managers been honest and up front about what they expected to happen during the war, fewer people would have signed on. Because there would have been no lies about weapons of mass destruction, no blithe overconfidence that it would be a complete walkover, none of the things that historically made it so easy for Bush to get his war.

[Thanas]

A team of competent managers would not have come to pre-ordained conclusions and sacked people who disagreed with them. That was the real cardinal sin and when it should have been obvious that this was a war of mistakes and aggression.

[Lord Zentei]

The problem is that you can plan, but you can't plan the outcome of a war before it starts to any real degree of precision. If war was that predictable, no one would need to fight it; the side that was going to lose would be able to do the math as well as you can and give up rather than get slaughtered.

That doesn't make any sense. Obviously you can still have a situation where people find it politically preferable to fight than to cave. While the best laid plans may go awry, that doesn't negate the utility of planning.

Maybe it will take a hundred thousand men to occupy the country. Maybe three times that. Maybe it will take a few hundred casualties because there will be minimal guerilla opposition, or maybe ten times that. Maybe the guerillas will fight relatively cleanly and give up quickly and civilian casualties will be low, or maybe not. None of these things can be assessed from outside the country before the shooting begins, because how the hell do you take into account the determination and resources of a guerilla force that doesn't exist yet?

Same thing you do whenever you're faced with a situation with high degree of uncertainty: you plan for the worst, and hope for the best. The initial invasion plans had called for 340000 to 380000 troops, less than half of that were sent. It was assumed that the local population would greet the invasion forces as liberators and that there would be no sectarian violence, laughable given the history of insurrections in the country, not least of which among those ethnic/religious groups which the invasion was ostensibly meant to rescue. Moreover, the idea that the command/control infrastructure in Iraq would remain intact was known to be bogus by several in the administration (including Colin Powell) but these were ignored by the gung-ho idealists.

My argument is that Bush utterly failed to apply this error bar, and that anyone who tries to go to war without first thinking about the error bars on their estimate of what happens is being absurd. And when error bars are factored in, deciding to fight over some finely calculated utilitarian principle will be folly, because it's very hard to predict the amount of damage the war will do. Only if the suffering caused by the war is obviously much worse than the worst foreseeable outcomes of the war would such a war be justified... and in the case of Iraq, I don't think that condition was met.

I agree with the first part of this paragraph, but not so much the second. Obviously there's uncertainty, but not so much that one cannot tell whether an intervention is called for. Incidentally, since the embargo was placed on Iraq, an estimated half million people had died under the regime, iirc. But I'm entirely open to the possibility that it was an impossible war - but merely looking at the events which transpired there isn't enough, given the levels of incompetence.

The problem with making utilitarian calculations about war is one of the reasons people keep going around trying to work out "just war theory" and international law and rigorous definitions of casus belli. Having well defined principles such as "fight if invaded" and "do not invade another country to interfere in its internal politics" helps avoid cases where rulers go to war because they expect the war to kill 20% fewer people than peace would... and then turning out to have been wrong about the casualty rate of the war by a factor of two.

I'm all in favor of that. I did mention the fact that the war had been sold dishonestly - though I find it morally dubious that one should ignore any amount of internal horror simply on the principle of not interfering with internal politics.

My argument is that if you are to use a death toll as a reason to invade a country, you must use a death toll that is expected to happen in the future, not one that already happened in the past and which you did not resist at the time.

Quite so. Either those who languish under his rule under a continuation of the sanctions, or perhaps his neighbors if he gets rehabilitated and the sanctions get lifted. Probably some kind of international monitoring would be needed to keep him in line.

Because arguing "we killed fifty thousand of your people because your dictator had already killed a hundred thousand of someone else's people" only makes sense if the killing is expected to continue- if you are in fact saving lives. Since no amount of bloodshed or regime change will bring back the dead, starting a new war with new piles of corpses in response to the old piles of corpses simply ensures a higher death count in the end.

So the Iran-Iraq War cannot be used as justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, because Saddam was not threatening to launch another Iran-Iraq War in the future. Nor was the US even pretending that its goal was to bring Saddam to justice for crimes committed during the Iran-Iraq War.

If you want to use some other projected death toll that has not already happened to justify fighting a war, go right ahead. But to kill thousands of people in response to a past atrocity, when the vast majority of the new victims had nothing to do with the old crime, is grotesque.

I was not justifying the 2003 invasion based on the Iran-Iraq war. I was pointing out that the claim that the victims of Saddam Hussein were limited to his borders was incorrect.

My point is a team of managers competent to manage the war correctly might never have fought it at all. This is a fully rational response to finding out that an optional war is expensive: "I could topple your dictatorship, but it would cost fifty thousand dead and five hundred billion dollars to do it; it's not worth the price."

Moreover, had this team of managers been honest and up front about what they expected to happen during the war, fewer people would have signed on. Because there would have been no lies about weapons of mass destruction, no blithe overconfidence that it would be a complete walkover, none of the things that historically made it so easy for Bush to get his war.

That is entirely true, and I doubt anyone here would dispute it.

[Ziggy Stardust]

A team of competent managers would not have come to pre-ordained conclusions and sacked people who disagreed with them. That was the real cardinal sin and when it should have been obvious that this was a war of mistakes and aggression.

This. It really is astounding how cartoonish the Bush administration acted in the lead-up to and early stages of the Iraq War, and what a chain reaction of horrible things that it sparked. I mean, the War on Terror would have caused all sorts of misery and grief anyway, but if the Iraq situation had been handled even remotely competently (or, more important, ethically) ... well, the world would probably be a better place.

[General Mung Beans]

Those 1 million Iraqis sacrificed their lives willingly in pursuit of the greater cause.

So you take the million number seriously when practically every other source says its around 100,000? And the vast majority of those deaths were caused in inter-Iraqi conflict not by Americans.

As to a functioning democracy within Iraq, by what standards? I guess Cuba is a functioning democracy as well...oh wait, they are not on the right side.

Cuba has no real political opposition, you could at least have said Venezuela or Bolivia.

[Thanas]

Those 1 million Iraqis sacrificed their lives willingly in pursuit of the greater cause.

So you take the million number seriously when practically every other source says its around 100,000? And the vast majority of those deaths were caused in inter-Iraqi conflict not by Americans.

Read the Lancet study, which is practically the only objective study done on the subject.

Cuba has no real political opposition, you could at least have said Venezuela or Bolivia.

Or Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan...or any other nation the US likes so much.

[General Mung Beans]

Those 1 million Iraqis sacrificed their lives willingly in pursuit of the greater cause.

So you take the million number seriously when practically every other source says its around 100,000? And the vast majority of those deaths were caused in inter-Iraqi conflict not by Americans.

Read the Lancet study, which is practically the only objective study done on the subject.

Cuba has no real political opposition, you could at least have said Venezuela or Bolivia.

Or Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan...or any other nation the US likes so much.

Not all authoritarian countries are equal. Iraq for example is turning out a one party democracy like Venezuela or Mexico until recently.