![]() Yet his record as defense secretary throws that into question as well. Perhaps the only thing more celebrated than Mattis’ ostensible intellectualism is his supposed integrity. Albert Einstein famously (and perhaps apocryphally) said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” He might just as easily have been describing the career of James Mattis, who has been proven wrong again and again and again, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria. ![]() And why not? Since resigning his post, Mattis has burst through the “revolving door” of the arms industry, reclaiming his seat on the board of the fifth largest defense contractor, General Dynamics. Thanks to Mattis and company, Trump’s purported desire to withdraw from fruitless Middle Eastern wars has been stifled, the result being business as usual for the military-industrial-complex and national security state. Instead, Mattis, David Petraeus and their ilk debated whether counter-terror, advise-and-assist, or counterinsurgency was the best method to achieve an ill-defined “victory.” They effectively substituted high-level tactics for strategy. Cultishly eager to please, they failed to tell their frequently ill-informed superiors that perhaps a proposed conflict couldn’t be won, at least with the resources available or at an acceptable human cost. ![]() When given an (often absurd) mission by administration officials-be they Bush neoconservatives or Obama liberals-these generals and admirals offered “how” rather than “if” responses. As he notes in his own op-ed, “Institutions get the behaviors they reward.”īut Mattis and his entire generation of military leadership ultimately did a great disservice to their subordinates and the American people once they reached four-star rank. Indeed, it was the general’s all-too-familiar view of the “War on Terror” that likely endeared him to successive promotion boards. Can-do attitudes and compulsive optimism form the bedrock of today’s military culture, if not American society at large. None of these egregious errors in judgment have derailed Mattis’ career, of course. His career-long defense of America’s post-9/11 engagements should be the first sentence of his obituary. military forward deployment, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and the perpetual need to balance or “contain” Russia and China. Despite being hailed as a “warrior monk,” he was and remains a conventional interventionist figure-prisoner to the tired old militarist ideas of the necessity for U.S. The wildly unpopular, if not forbidden-to-be-uttered, truth is that Mattis, while an admittedly decorated Marine and a military strategist, was an abject failure. What’s worse, no one in the mainstream media appears willing to challenge the worldview presented in his essay, concurrent interviews and forthcoming book. For a military man, much less a four-star general, this is a cardinal sin. Yet absent from this personal reflection, which has earned bipartisan adulation, was any kind of out-of-the-box thinking and, more disturbingly, anything resembling a mea culpa-either for his role in the Trump administration or his complicity in America’s failing forever wars in the greater Middle East. “Tribalism must not be allowed to destroy our experiment.” “We all know that we’re better than our current politics,” he observed solemnly. Explaining his decision to resign from the administration, the retired Marine general known as “Mad Dog” eagerly declared himself “apolitical,” peppering his narrative with cheerful vignettes about his much beloved grunts. Last week, in a well-received Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis delivered a critique of Donald Trump that was as hollow as it was self-righteous. ![]()
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