Trump’s Mad Dog: Was fired by Obama, by George Friedman.
The Mad Dog was fired by President Barack Obama, rumor has it, for asking inconvenient questions. The question of bombing Iran had come up and Mattis would not let go of the issue. He demanded answers to questions ranging from how we will know if we destroyed the nuclear facilities to what we will do if the Iranians respond with non-nuclear weapons like chemical weapons. Only a mad dog would ask questions for which planners had no answers, so Mattis was fired. Obama wanted an option and Mattis’ questions made it clear the president didn’t have the option he wanted. That was intolerable. …
Mad Dog Mattis went up further in my estimation, for being sacked by Obama. Trump selected him as his secretary for Defense.
What are America’s Middle East wars really for?
The United States has been waging war in the in the Middle East for 15 years. It has been dishonest from the beginning. George W. Bush said the U.S. was at war and would bring the perpetrators to justice. In a war you kill your enemies, not arrest them. If you arrest them, you aren’t at war. Obama couldn’t decide whether to leave or stay. As a result, he mostly left, except for those that stayed. …
The greatest deception was in designating the enemy. The enemy is the one you must defeat and must be clearly identified. If the enemy was all of Islam, hang it up. There are 1.7 billion Muslims, and America won’t win that war. On the other hand, if you pretend that Islam is purely incidental to terrorism, you are lying and you know it. [Not every Muslim is] a terrorist, but almost all terrorists today are Muslims. Now if saying that will make every Muslim a terrorist, that poses a serious problem. But there is a secret that everyone knows: Muslims know that there are Muslim terrorists, that they attack the West and that the Americans are at war with them. …
In the war in the Middle East, wishful thinking ruled. That was coupled with confidence, and that was married to careless planning. A few years into it every enlisted man knew that even the definition of victory was unclear, and that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. They couldn’t even find the tunnel. But pulling out of a war that was being lost was impossible. So the pretense from the White House and Pentagon was that the war was being won. They may have been far enough away from the war intellectually that they might have thought the war was being won. I personally doubt it. …
If Mattis can force Washington to say publicly what they already know — that this is the enemy, that it cannot be all of Islam, but it is part of Islam — I fantasize that the Pentagon will magically evaporate in the face of truth, replaced by a few hundred people who have no personnel policy beyond finding the best and placing them in harm’s way.
hat-tip Chris
