So Supposing That we do Pull this Iraq Thing Off?
So in the last calendar year, motorcycles have killed more Marines than al Qaeda in Iraq. Brookings and Icasualties both have the number of Iraqi civilian and security force casualties as the lowest since folks have been keeping count. Sadrists are being assassinated at a decent clip, and the only real place where there's remaining Iraqi resistance is Mosul, and that probably has a lot to do with the fact that the citizenry of that city is not a big fan of either the Kurdish Regional Government of the Shi'ah Arab government of Baghdad. And, while it's a shame for the citizens of Mosul caught in the three-way crossfire, a contested Mosul probably isn't going to bring down the government of Iraq.
Suppose, then, that Obama begins pulling troops out of Iraq and it all holds together?* What will it all mean? What will it mean that the U.S. managed to win a guerrilla war with an all-volunteer army? And more importantly, what will it mean for the U.S. to have launched a war on somewhat problematic premises, but have finally prevailed at the cost of 4500 soldiers and somewhere north of 100,000 Iraqi civilians?
Prior to 9/11, the enemies of America had always assumed that the U.S. was weak, risible, and contemptible. Part of the reason that the Bush administration invaded Iraq was on the principle of "Kick somebody's a*s on your first day in prison so you don't get cornholed." But as a display of force, I'm not sure if it backfired or not, since whatever victory we get may be a heavily qualified victory. "Hooray! We've established the third most corrupt government on the planet Earth and it has managed to survive with only a minor guerrilla war in one of it's northern provinces." And there's the fact that five provinces in a country with a population a twelfth the size of ours managed to hold us down for over half a decade.
More importantly, the moral implications are somewhat unpleasant. The Gulf of Tonkin may have been a bit on the dodgy side, but it was something of an uncontested fact that North Vietnam was invading South Vietnam. The WMD thing may not have been a pack of lies, but it was definitely too readily believed by people who were looking for any sort of casus belli.
And then there's the Surge cheerleading, which tends to anger me. It's fantastic to have mostly beaten al Qaeda in Iraq and neutered the JAM, but it's a special species of chutzpah to claim vindication because you managed to successfully clean up the mess your opponents warned you would happen if you embarked upon a certain course of action.
So, assuming an Obama withdrawal and Iraq that remains intact, if only at the level of "FUBARed s*ithole," what's the significance of it all?
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*I'm assuming he'll leave a few thousand to keep an eye on Mosul and provide adult supervision to Iraqi security forces.
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For me, it's an Iraq that is a free non-theocratic representative republic that can protect itself and does not threaten its neighbors. There's too much ground to really contemplate such a thing, but if it does happen, all well and good. I just don't see that happening if Obama withdraws combat brigades too precipitously, but if it does happen, all well and good.
--"I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." -- Paris Hilton
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)It's Shiite-run and Iran-oriented. Iraq, under any other circumstances, would be considered a hostile regime.
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| parent )but that's because it won't happen, period. It was always an absurd notion.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )Wait, so that's a positive outcome now, as long as it's "intact"?
I predicted more than five years ago that post-occupation Iraq would either fragment or be united under an authoritarian strongman functionally indistinguishable from Saddam. Nothing since then has given me any reason to revise that prediction.
Iraq is relatively stable right now because we're sitting on the lid. The Surge & the payoffs to Sunni leaders "worked" in the sense that they applied more pressure to said lid, but we have no way of lowering the heat.
By the way, this:
is the sheerest nonsense. The enemies of America have been effectively deterred for the last sixty-seven years. 9/11 was not an invasion but an act of criminal violence on the part of an undeterrable stateless terror cell. (I might add that it succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its planners.)
Your comment perfectly exemplifies the "we have a big hammer, ergo everything is a nail" school of thought that got us into this mess.
--The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.
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)I have read some of Mr Friedman's writings to this effect - promoting this very meme. If we just look at the 1990s, I'm not sure this stands up to empirical evidence. Th US demonstrated considerable and consistent aggression in Kuwait/Iraq theatre through the 1990s, and also in the Balkans. US allies, such as Israel, did too.
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| parent )I've nuanced my initial statement somewhat. Better, perhaps, if I were to say that it appeared that, as the examples of Beirut and Mogadishu showed, the U.S. might back down when push came to shove.
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| parent )was more a special case, where Mr Clinton was really doing the classically regarded liberal intervention thing. A Conservative Administration would probably never have done it.
Wouldn't you agree? I can't see conservatives, in the US or elsewhere, calling for similar action in Darfur, for example or Myanmar.
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| parent )But its great tragedy was that the Clinton Administration got spooked and backed down in the face of the street fighting in Mogadishu. Had Clinton held firm, the world would be a very different place today.
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| parent )I wasn't in the US then, of course, so I have no sense of attitudes.
One reads the papers of course, but our news was highly filtered and present day histories don't give a flavour for what happened.
We were under the impression here that it was right wing public pressure on Mr Clinton that made him back down, and that if he hadn't when he did, he might have lost the 1996 election.
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| parent )The great problem with the American Right is that even when they're correct in diagnosing a problem, they're kind of awful of actually following through on the implications of the problem. So they were to some extent right in indicating that a lack of credible threat of force is problematic for the U.S. in the international arena. But then, the GOP squawked bloody murder in both Somalia and Kosovo.
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| parent )Clinton inherited the Somalia deployment from Bush the Elder's administration.
--GW Bush, leading contender for worst President ever.
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| parent )I meant UNOSOM 2, rather than UNOSOM 1 ( I think Andrew used Mogadishu as a shorthand for that).
Edit: Your correction reminded me to go back and look up the numbers of the two missions. President Bush's mission - UNOSOM 1
Compare this to Mr Clinton's intervention (I use the president's names as shorthand for the whole team)
Not even comparable in terms of spend, outcomes etc.
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| parent )And would he have allowed the ramping up of US military operations that culminated in the failed Mogadishu raid which ultimately lead to the collapse of the Somalia mission?
An open question, but I find it hard to believe that Bush the Elder's administration wasn't involved in the diplomatic efforts leading up to the 26 March 1993 UNSC resolution establishing UNOSOM 2, just one month into Clinton's presidency. To me Mogadishu represents the point in time at which the idea that domestic political differences and partisanship should cease at the waters edge was decisively overturned and it was done by the modern GOP, not just a few principled individuals expressing dissent but by a whole political movement. Reagan didn't pay anything like the price for the Beirut bombing and Iran/Contra that Clinton paid for his overseas entanglements.
--GW Bush, leading contender for worst President ever.
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| parent )nt
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| parent )Not a restored Ba'ath party (or series of al Qaeda emirates). I think everyone in the world agrees that it's a pretty bad outcome, just not as awful as it could have been.
On the second point of your reply, I think that Khomeni learned the lessons of Vietnam and the Eagle Claw goatf*ck remarkably well. The Islamic Republic learned the lessons of a weak America and proceeded to parlay it into a fairly sweet deal whereby they (or their Lebanese proxies) would take hostages and we would ask very nicely to get them back and then give them weapons in exchange for said hostages. Which, to everyone's awe and surprise, led them to take more hostages.
Hell, even Slobo, who died as he lived, a buffoon, didn't actually capitulate in the Kosovo Unpleasantness until there was a threat of a ground invasion following on a couple of months of bombing.
There were a lot of actors opposed to U.S. national interests who got away with far more than they would have had they actually feared a U.S. response.
Again, this isn't to endorse the principle of "slamming some sh*tty little country against the wall to show that we mean business," it's just to note that there is some truth to the idea that there has been a very real perception of U.S. weakness out there post-1975.
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| parent )Khomeini "learned the lessons of Vietnam", but Vietnam was the product of precisely the sort of thinking that produced Iraq. For that matter, the Islamic Republic would never have existed had the United States not sponsored a coup to remove the democratically-elected Moussadeq government.
Does it ever strike you that imperialist foreign policy constitutes nothing but an elaborately self-justifying feedback loop?
--The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.
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| parent )Vietnam was the product of precisely the sort of thinking that produced Iraq.
Not to open up a whole 'nother can of worms, but Vietnam was less about the thinking of "showing strength" and more about trying to prevent a communist nation from taking over another country (which, granted, was kind of an ersatz country to begin with).
That international diplomacy requires a threat of force is pretty uncontroversial. "Soft power" is absolutely necessary because unless the U.S. had a draft, there just aren't enough bodies to go around to beat the whole world into submission, but soft power without the threat of force is almost useless.
Which was, in a way, proved in the run up to the current Iraq mess. It was only in the face of an actual invasion that Hussein quit d*cking around and said, "No, really, I haven't had WMD's since the mid-90's." Whereas when there was not a threat of his being toppled, but only the threat of some Tomahawks, he spent most of the 90's making things really, really difficult of UNSCOM.
The great failure of Iraq were the moral horror of basically starting a war to frighten the enemies of America and the fact that the Bush administration was almost willfully incompetent in refusing to listen to voices in the intelligence community who said that it was probably going to be a great big mess.
So here's a question for you: Why did it take a few months of bombing and the threat of ground invasion to finally make Slobo back down if not for the fact that based on the lessons of Vietnam, Beirut, and Mogadishu he figured that he could wait out the US?
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| parent )The US having a draft would not produce enough bodies to beat the world into submission. Nothing, short of nuclear armageddon, would beat the world into submission. As long as our foreign policy is premised on "Well, we'd like to beat the world into submission, but since we can't do that... we pick, um, you, yeah you over there", we will have catastrophe after catastrophe, each begetting the next.
Saddam finally acceded to investigations and we confirmed that he didn't have WMDs, then we invaded him anyway. I'm not sure I'm clear on what lesson you'd have me or the world draw from that episode.
Andrew, other countries are going to do things we don't like, things that threaten (or potentially threaten) our interests. That is as much a given as the fact that other people are going to do things I, personally, don't like. The solution to this problem is long-established and well-understood. The solution is the rule of law. Conservatives believe that the rule of law is inapplicable on an international level, which is precisely the same logic they previously applied to conflicts between families, tribes, clans, classes, and city-states. They have always been proven wrong. Eventually they will be proven wrong about nations -- either that or we will annihilate ourselves as a species.
So your question is the wrong one; it's a classic forest/trees problem, like I pointed above above re: the Iranian hostage crisis. Foreign-policy conservatives accuse liberals of naivete, but it's you who are being naive. Your inference is that there is some level of demonstrated "toughness" that would have prevented the genocide in the Balkans or the taking of hostages by Iran. This is like a prison inmate believing that he can be tough enough that no one will ever mess with him. It's a chimera. The only thing that could have prevented the horrors in Serbia is the surety of justice, and that's what we need to be working toward.
We have two choices: the law of the jungle or the law of civilization. Only one of them works. I'm not sure how much more blood needs to be spilled to convince everyone of that, but I hope it's not too much.
--The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.
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| parent )an international level?"
Why would you say that? I would have thought that, intellectually speaking, conservatives would want to create and hold on to an international order that would discourage change. If we look at the post-war congresses, after Waterloo, WW1, WW2, Bretton Woods etc - they were pretty much dominated by traditional conservatives. Iraq was a aberrant conservative action (not that Mr Bush and his team were being particularly conservative when they launched the war).
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| parent )Conservatism as articulated in late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century America hates the idea of international law. Besides, the League of Nations and the UN are closer to the basis for what I have in mind than postwar palavers between victors.
Of course I do believe that international law is fundamentally compatible with conservatism, but I recognize that most current conservatives don't agree with me.
--The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.
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| parent )Wouldn't you agree? Consensus framers in general tend to be - not disturbing the status quo as far as possible, reinforcing the existing order, dealing in platitudes as far as possible etc.
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| parent )The great tragedy of a lot of thinking on the right is seeing international relations in terms of force instead of law. Which is foolish. But law without force to back it up tends to breed contempt for the law. If there's a bad neighborhood and the cops come in every now and then and arbitrarily shoot people to show them that they mean business, then you're no going to solve anything. But if there's a bad neighborhood and law enforcement is rare and ineffectual, it will be almost as problematic.
The failure of Iraq was in that a lot of folks in the White House were thinking along the lines of force absent law.
But that doesn't change the fact that law absent force is also extremely problematic.
That's why Bush the Wiser was so good at international relations. Kuwait is not a province of Iraq and Manuel Noriega is rotting in jail precisely because GHWB understood that international law depends both on force and sound principles of law. Bush I made it abundantly clear that messing with the United States would at best result in the destruction of your army and air force, and at worst result in you standing in the dock like a common criminal. But he did it within the confines of international law.
The great tragedy of his son was that he so profoundly failed to understood why his father had succeeded.
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| parent )because I substantially agree with your post. Law certainly requires the threat of force to back it up, and I think your analogy about the cops & troubled communities is a good one. I wouldn't call GHWB a foreign-policy genius, but he was an order of magnitude more sane than his progeny.
I think the great tragedy of GWB is that he didn't even understand how his father had succeeded. He surrounded himself with people who believe only in the law of the jungle, and began to fully subscribe to their views in the wake of 9/11. GWB is, at bottom, a weak and uncertain man. Helluva campaigner, though, more's the pity.
--The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.
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| parent )I think the main remaining flaw in your thinking, Andrew, is that you believe somehow the US can change so that things like barracks bombings, probing attacks, hostage crises, etc. *don't* pressure our political system.
Well it's not going to happen. We *are* a paper tiger in that limited sense. What it boils down to in practical terms is that we cannot enter into military conflicts unless the US public broadly can be convinced to support them. Countries are going to continue taking advantage of that fact to chisel away little morsels for themselves here and there.
But this is as it should be. If there's no compelling interest for the US public to be involved in a war, why, we shouldn't be involved in that war. If there *is* a compelling interest, no amount of harassment or terrorism will override that interest.
What we cannot do is conduct foreign policy as if we're Prussia.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )That particular obsession of some in the US, the perceived need to "kick somebody's a88 on your first day in prison" is about as reality-based as whatever comic book or exploitation film it first came from. As a leading principle of US foreign policy, not just an aspect but the driving force of Cheneyism, it has been an unmitigated disaster.
It is a doctrine that leads practitioners to try and fit every foreign policy situation into the same mold. "North Korea isn't cooperating? They must think we're weak. Let's get some!" "Spain isn't cooperating, idem." It used to be the kind of philosophy adopted by belligerent cranks around the bar or office. Much to my dismay, it has somehow become actual US policy. General Ripper lives.
A policy pragmatist will look at a specific situation using all tools at his or her disposal, and gauge likely outcomes before taking action. Exactly what did *not* happen in the lead up to the Iraq invasion.
The truth is, the world doesn't think we're weak, risible, and contemptible. They think we're overbearing, violent, dangerous ideological naifs who export our domestic politics in the form of small but deadly military adventures. We keep proving them right.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )I don't know how you can ask about the significance of Iraq without putting Iran into the picture. Iran is a large and resource rich nation, sharing a long border with Iraq and a long history of cultural exchange.
The significance of the war, in its starkest terms, is that the US replaced a Western oriented dictator, Saddam Hussein - a man whose final wish, denied, was to be executed in the attire of an American business man, with a popularly elected government headed by pro Iranian Islamists.
I would have thought that the significance of this fact was beyond dispute.
As a bonus, I can expound upon the significance of Afghanistan. The war there should eventually put rest to the adage, apparently still widely believed in the West,
the ally of my enemy is my ally
The enemy is the Taliban and their closest ally is their neighbour Pakistan, a nation showered with American military aid.
The significance of both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan goes beyond the lines drawn around them on maps. I think it would be helpful to keep this in mind when discussing these issues.
--Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime. Saint-Just
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)Saddam & Co removed.
I'll leave it to others to decide if the effort was good value for money.
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)in Second World countries. It might be possible to find a more lengthy, expensive, bloody, and circuitous way to accomplish a relatively simple task. I can't think of one.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )on a similar "regime change" mission any time soon? I seriously doubt it. Our finances are strained to the breaking point, likewise military capabilities, and most of all our political capital is depleted. Other countries are going to be a lot more cautious about throwing in with Brand USA, and will look for alternatives when available. Brand Bush is toast domestically, as is the 1% Doctrine, preemtption, nation-building, etc. Those who think we'll have wherewithal to mount a land assault on Iran in the next 5 years are dreaming.
So the Iraq War has "accomplished" exposing the rank stupidity of the Cheneyite tendency in US foreign policy. Not exactly a giant leap forward.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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)Zedari is worthless. He'll be gone soon, watch and see. When he's gone, there will be hell to pay. Pakistan's firing on coalition forces here and there. Already, brush fire incidents are breaking out. If Pakistan looks like it's going under, we'll intervene, very likely with Chinese assistance, to secure Pakistan's nukes.
China is developing a very serious case of the ass with Pakistan, there's always been firing back and forth up north. China knows the Taliban is also training Uighur fighters. In a sense, China has the same problem with the Taliban we do.
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| parent )your title is too suggestive--pull what off? Start a war on false premises to prove how big our international di*k is? Beat three different ethnic, cultural and religious groups into groggy submission so that they all stop fighting long enough for us to mark our "victorious" getaway and slip out under cover of darkness?
--Honestly, there is nothing to "pull off" here. Just like Vietnam there is nothing to win, victory is ephemeral and elusive, with no meaning other than what shallow politicians try to craft for a message as they exit. Just like Vietnam, too, Iraq will prove to be a fundamental failure of judgment and leadership, costly in lives (both for and against), in dollars, in national distraction, in world view, in all aspects of an international disaster. We will recover from this debacle but not for generations and the unintended consequences of our pointless aggression will hurt this nation long into the future. Sadly, we will not learn from this unbelievably fundamental mistake.
All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz and I'm fine.
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)to have been pulled off. However, the gradual stabilisation of the situation is very good news, in spite of what the "the worse, the better" crowd might say.
As for metrics of victory, there can be many, outside of the conventional numbers. The contrasts, parallels, and lessons vis a vis Vietnam are pretty interesting. Unlike in Vietnam, Iraqi sympathisers and collaborators with the US are probably not going to be left in the lurch (see the article I linked to in another thread about the fate of an ex South Vietnamese general in the US) so that is a good message to go out.
OTOH the Iraqi refugee situation is unclear.
My feeling is that it will take a considerable amount of persuasion to get the refugees to return. Of course they will probably find their homes taken up by occupiers, and jobs hard to get.
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| parent )for a lasting American presence in the north, probably both in Mosul and Kirkuk.
Which is probably just as well, even though this war was completely FUBARed. Mosul and the area is a little Bosnia.
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)we coulda had that without all the rest of it.
That is, if we'd had any imagination.
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| parent )make clear is what "victory" is going to look like. Will it be a friendly Western-style democracy? A stable coalition of Shiites and Sunnis? A new dictatorship but with the country's current borders intact?
All of the blathering I hear from the McCain campaign about "victory" is meaningless without that definition made clear.
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)is because the definition of victory has changed so much. I remember when it was Iraq being an ally of Israel(!) and allowing us to reduce our presence in the ME by being a bulwark against Iran(!!). Lately it's just a place where the government functions more or less and there aren't too many car bombs going off. So I understand your confusion and I think most honest people would admit that they share it.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )IA is in and out of Kurdish territory, and has been since the No-Fly Zone was first established.
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| parent )only exist as an autonomous region because of our active support. Absent that, they will be folded into the Shia majority state and not allowed to make their own foreign policy.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )and the IA is selling them arms, too, but the Kurds do their own fighting and dying. There's no way they would ever be folded into a Shiite state. They survived Seljuk and Mongol and Ottoman predations, they own those mountains. Nobody's ever been able to wipe them out. Centuries of oppression has bred some tough dudes and dude-ettes up there.
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| parent )but it takes more than that to hold and run a country, especially with Turkey and Iran dead set against any kind of autonomous Kurdistan. Without the implicit threat of US intervention, I just don't see them making a go of it by themselves.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )If they're selling arms to the Kurds I'd love to see a cite -- not that I wouldn't buy it, just didn't know it had been reported.
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| parent )over here
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| parent )Ever since Hersh said the US would bomb Iran "tomorrow" more than a year ago, his credibility has been even more open to question than normal. Quotes from "unnamed sources speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature blah blah" are common on intel subjects, so stories sourced that way ultimately boil down to the credibility of the author, and Hersh squandered his long ago.
Here the story is based on that perennial Hersh fictive plot device, the "senior CIA official", who tells us that the Israeli presence in Kurdistan is "widely known in the American intelligence community." OK, if that's true, it should be easy to come up with something of more substance, eh, Sy?
The other source, Intel Brief, is run by a widely published, often-interviewed guy (Cannistraro) and someone who last held a real job in the area more than twenty-five years ago. Looks like after 9/11 Cannostraro predicted with certainty that Osama Bin Laden will hit between Thanksgiving and Christmas, between next Thursday, 22 November, and 25 December." His target: either the US or the Pope. OK, he's got prdicting stuff that never happens in common with Hersh, I guess.
I don't disbelieve the Israelis meddling in Kurdistan or anywhere else in the world they see some potential benefit, thumbing their noses at the US in the process (IIRC Pollard is still doing hard time at the Florence CO Supermax for spying on us). Their rep in the govt. security business (at least here) is one of arrogant a-holes who think they outrank everyone and have the right to order US personnel around - as if Lillehammer and similar Mossad screwups never happened. Or the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was a genuine mistake. So if they saw an advantage to spying, dirty tricks or anything else in the area, sure, they'd do it without a qualm about how it might affect this country or our relations with Turkey. I just don't think Hersh is the go-to guy on this stuff. anymore, if he ever was.
Here's something Mossad related I found at FAS that might interest you, though it's sort of O/T.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )Shows what you know! Seymour Hersh said that THREE years ago!
On another note, I always thought he should change his last name to "Butts". :(
--I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
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| parent )There's a large Kurdish community in Israel, for there were (and still are) a few Jews up in the north of Iraq. Israel sells arms to anyone, pretty much, and in this case, I do believe Israel has a large intelligence presence in Iraq, if only to keep an eye on Iran.
While Israel won't do any press conferences, detailing their operations or arms sales to the Kurds, Barzani has been in and out of Israel for a very long time.
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| parent )I don't think the GOP ticket has any clear idea of what "victory" in Iraq means, which would be why they're reduced to meaningless platitudes.
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| parent )...was achieved in 2004, with George W. Bush's reelection. Defeat in Iraq took place in 2006 with the midterms and will be completed in 2009 under an Obama Administration (by definition).
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )I suspect the answer depends on the perspective, and I don't mean ideological.
For example, it will probably be good news for Iraquis who are born in the next 10 years. They will probably have a normal society to grow up in, thanks to US money and blood.
For the average American, citizen and taxpayer, it's hard to see this as anything other than a disaster. When you look at the billions (maybe trillions?) we will have spent, the tens of thousands of American casualties, the political capital spent, what did we get in return for all of that?
For Washington, the lesson will be similar to Vietnam, no more adventures for another generation.
--This place is my vacation.
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)For Washington, the lesson will be similar to Vietnam, no more adventures for another generation.
There are two big differences between then and now. One is that there's precious little danger of al-Douri and al-Masri marching into the Green Zone in triumph.
More important, though, is that from about 1975 to the late 80's there was something of a "seal" on the use of U.S. troops. I remember being in elementary school and how big a shock it was when the U.S. bombed Libya, because to some extent, there was the idea that Reagan had "broken the seal" as it were.
Today, as long as troops remain in Afghanistan, the seal is broken and the genie out of the bottle.
We can, however, at least hope that Washington learns that if you're going to conquer a country, you had better have a very, very good reason for doing so.
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