A Wise, Outspoken Marine

FIASCO, by Thomas Ricks, introduced me to Marine Corps General James Mattis, esteemed by his peers as the finest soldier our country has produced since the Korean War. The portrait of the politically incorrect General Mattis, drawn by Ricks, brought to mind one of my heroes, Joseph W. Stilwell, esteemed by his contemporaries as "the fightingest General in the United States Army."

General Stilwell often exasperated his civilian overlords with his caustic remarks. Frequently, he was cautioned to to stop referring to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, El Supremo in China, as "the Peanut." Finally, the G-mo wore out FDR's patience. A firm message (a "hot bundle of paprika," according to Stilwell) was dispatched to the G-mo insisting he implement reforms to "increase the combat efficiency of the Chinese Army." General Stilwell memorialized the event with a poem:

I've waited long for vengeance, at last I've had my chance.
I've looked the Peanut in the eye and kicked him in the pants.
The old harpoon was ready, with aim and timing true,
I sank it to the handle and stung him through and through.
The little bastard shivered and lost the power of speech.
His face turned green and quivered as he struggled not to screech.
For all my weary battles, for all my hours of woe,
At last I've had my innings and laid the Peanut low.
I know I've still to suffer and run a weary race,
But, Oh! The blessed pleasure, I've wrecked the Peanut's face.

General Mattis looks like General Stilwell. And he sounds like him, too. The protocol boys had to do back flips trying to anesthecize these remarks in San Diego in February 2005.

It's fun to shoot people. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. I like brawling. You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they don't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.

About the fighting in Iraq, General Mattis said it is "almost embarrassing intellectually." Then, he warned,

Don't patronize this enemy. They mean business. They mean every word they say. Don't imagine an enemy somewhere in the future, and you're going to transform so you can fight him. They're killing us now. Their will is not broken. They mean it.

Naturally, the press focused on the colorful bellicosity and political INcorrectness of the "fun to shoot people" part of this quote. The underlying wisdom and criticism of the Bush blood for oil policy went by unnoticed.

The only objective worth achieving in this confrontation with Islamic Fundamentalism is the end of purdah, getting women out into the sunshine. So far, that aspiration, dressed up as a War for Democracy, has been swallowed up in the pretext for an oil grab. Or, it has been lost sight of in a shallow game of opportunism.
During the Soviet regime in Afghanistan, 55% of government employees were women. Unfortunately, for those semi-emancipated women, we saw an opportunity to use the Islamic Fundamentalist rebels to get even with the Russians for their meddling in Vietnam. Our clients won - and the Berlin Wall came crashing down on the women of Afghanistan. They were pink-slipped, sent home and forced back behind the Veil. Those who persisted in modern ways were marched to the new soccer stadium and executed in front of 30,000 cheering men.

We had a chance to redeem ourselves for this crime against the women of Afghanistan. Instead, we left the job half-finished and rushed off to invade Iraq, perhaps the most secular country in the Middle East. Our Saudi masters were calling.

Iraq, like Afghanistan (and Ba'athist Syria) had made great strides bringing women out from behind the Veil. Our ally, Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, was still punishing the women, who, in 1990, had gone out for a drive unescorted.

(In addition, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Osama bin Laden, penniless after his alms-giving mission to the Sudan, relied on a network of Saudi and Gulf States donors to finance al Qaeda.)

We chose to back away from an unfinished mission of redemption in Afghanistan in order to bring down the most secular country in the Middle East, adding the women of Iraq and Saudi Arabia to the list of those betrayed. How pathetic!

The remarks of General Mattis bring into sharp relief the essence of this struggle. The enemy wants the Veil. We don't. That is a fight worth having.

(There is more along these lines in my essays A WINNABLE WAR, THE REAGAN LEGACY, THE FOUR BASIC STRATEGIC CHOICES, and RUMFOORD'S POCKET HISTORY OF IRAQ.)