In a chaotic world starved for leadership, I thought we had
a solid leader in Jim Mattis. Indeed,
when he resigned as Secretary of Defense in December, 2018 over troop
withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, I, along with many, felt a sense of
loss. The conventional narrative was
that Mattis brought respect and a sober timbre to an administration that seemed
to be at sea on the world stage.
We were wrong. Dead
wrong. And let me explain how my views
on Mattis did a 180 degree turn.
It turns out that Mattis
had a carefully cultivated public image.
He seemed to be a warrior from another era, almost Patton-like. In a time when we have mostly fought wars to
a stalemate or an inconclusive outcome, his pithy quotes captured our longing
for a simpler time:
“I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my
eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you
all.”
“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill
everybody you meet.”
“There are some people who think you have to hate them in
order to shoot them. I don’t think you
do. It’s just business.”
How could he not stir up the warrior spirit in you?
So I eagerly signed up to hear him speak last September at
the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. And as I do with most of these
events, I brought my notebook with to take notes in case that I want to blog
about it. I’m glad I did.
Mattis spent a good deal of time in his opening remarks
about his leaving the administration his post administration duty. He simply said that he had left over “policy
differences,” which was the appropriate thing to say. But Mattis went on to outline the set of
principles for leaving. He said he did
not want to talk about his personal relationship with Trump. More importantly, he emphasized his “Duty of
Silence” and said that there is a long held tradition in the military about not
passing political judgments. He said that the country is dealing with difficult
issues, that he had a “duty of quiet” to allow the administration to continue. He asserted, “It is vital not to give our
adversaries the appearance of weakness.”
That was the backdrop of Mattis’s betrayal of President
Trump a few weeks ago, when he renounced Trump in a most harshly written
statement. Breaking his “duty of
silence,” Mattis considered Trump a “threat to the Constitution.” As the barbarians were literally at the gates
of the White House and threatening to overrun the place, Mattis wrote off the
mob, saying “we must not get distracted by a small number of lawbreakers.” He apparently did not see---or chose not to
see--- the people throwing bricks and Molotov Cocktails at police and the
hundreds that smashed small businesses and storefronts in cities across the
United States. He did not see the
storekeeper murdered by the mob or the security guard killed in Oakland. Instead, Mattis chose to excoriate his former
boss by stating, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does
not try to unite the American people—he does not even pretend to try.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m disinclined to try to unite
with folks that would throw bricks at cops, no matter what their beef, or burn
and loot the stores of small shopkeepers.
Mattis’s statement doesn’t even sound like it was written by
him. It sounds like it was written by
some editor at the Washington Post or the New York Times.
But this is not the only lapse in judgment by Mattis. He himself admitted that he did not persuade
the right people of his plan to close on Osama bin Laden and that led to his
escape at Tora Bora (with terrible consequences for which we are still
paying). As a commander in Iraq, he made
a terrible judgment in ordering the bombing of a “safe house” that turned out
to be a wedding party, killing 42 innocents.
Mattis was also on the board of directors of the notorious Theranos, the
company run by Elizabeth Holmes and her lover, Sonny Balwani. Not only was Mattis on the board while Holmes
and Balwani were perpetuating the fraud described in John Carryrou’s book, Bad
Blood, Mattis actively pushed to have the fraudulent equipment adopted by the
military. Like former Secretary of State
George Shultz, Mattis was star struck by the charismatic Holmes. While the board of directors has not been
named as a defendant, Mattis apparently did not take a very skeptical posture
as a board member and as a representative of the military with respect to
Holmes and her company.
I am loathe to criticize someone that has spent a career
serving the country. But his last
scalding of President Trump caused me to re-evaluate my views of Mattis and
when I added up the string of awful lapses in judgment, I conclude that his PR
has outrun his performance, especially when I realized that his self proclaimed "duty of silence" had a rather short expiration date.
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