Letter to Mattis from John Dowd

Jim:

I slept on your statement and woke up appalled and upset. You lost me. Never dreamed you would let a bunch of hack politicians use your good name and reputation—earned with the blood and guts of young Marines. You did what you said you would—engage in this discourse. Marines keep their word.

The phony protesters near Lafayette park were not peaceful and are not real. They are terrorists using idle hate filled students to burn and destroy. They were abusing and disrespecting the police when the police were preparing the area for the 1900 curfew. Jim, this is the new nihilism. See Dan Henninger in WSJ today. Marines support the police in harms way.

Did you forget that President Bush used active duty Marines to quell the riots in LA? President Trump has countless cities and some snowflake governors and mayors wetting themselves in the use force to protect innocent lives and property. The AG of Massachusetts thinks burning property is good protest.

Three more policemen were stabbed and shot in NYC last night.

Think about it. Should he be upset about the obvious failure of leadership? Where are you Jim?

Marines go to the fight.

No one divided this country more than Obama. He abandoned our black brothers and sisters. He gave guns to the cartels. He apologized for our precious sacrifice and generosity overseas.

President Trump has done more to help our minority brothers and sisters in the three years than anyone in the last fifty. Ask the black pastors. Ask the leaders of the black colleges and universities. He got them funded. Ask them about the prison reform which ended the draconian sentences imposed on young black men by the laws enacted by Biden and his hacks. You need to bone up on your homework and stop listening to Uncle Leon.

I understand, you had to stick to the assigned narrative which did not include three years of corrupt investigations and evidence to destroy this President, his office, and his lawful free election. Nancy has no tolerance for dissent in the ranks—including those with stars.

You said nothing of the ugly, hate filled, disgraceful comments of Pelosi, Schumer, Perez and other Democrat hacks defaming the President and his office. You said nothing of the unlawful sanctuary cities and the unlawful release of hoodlums. You said nothing of the resistance movement to paralyze our courts and our government operations. You said nothing of the obstruction and subversion of our immigration laws. You said nothing of MS-13 killers and the drug cartels who own huge sections of our major cities. Jim, do you think that hateful rhetoric and those corrupt actions were inspiring and unifying? Do you think the DI’s at Parr’s Island would find such behavior as unifying?

Maybe, your problem, is a lot deeper. Perhaps you ought to explain how and why you (and John Allen), as CG Central Command, did not engage and take out Iranian Major General Soleimani who roamed the Middle East and wreaked havoc and death of American boys with his infamous IEDs?

Why did it take President Trump to have the instinct and balls to take him out (of course over the objection the geniuses in the Pentagon)?

Looks like the Persian mullahs were a one horse sleigh and Trump nailed the horse….forever. It has been quiet ever since. Perhaps, your anger is borne of embarrassment for your own failure as the leader of Central command. Did you applaud when the President recognized the central problem in the middle east? Did you applaud the President when he wanted to save American lives by bringing them home in one piece?

John M Dowd

Roger Kimball: "The so-called ‘adults’ in the Trump administration are surprisingly childish"

OK, so maybe I overestimated Mad Dog Mattis.

Like President Trump, I liked the fact that Mattis’s nickname was ‘Mad Dog,’ though I understand he dislikes the soubriquet. After the America-last, apologize-first foreign policy of Obama, it was nice to have a Secretary of Defense with sufficient backbone to compliment the steeliness of a robust Commender-in-Chief such as Donald Trump.

At the same time, I remember several conservative friends expressing reservations about Mattis when his nomination for the post of SecDef was announced. He was, it was widely rumored, a Hillary supporter and, what’s more, his view of foreign policy was much more in line with the Bush-Obama species of moralism than Trump’s ‘we’ll-do-what’s-in-our-national-interest’ pragmatism.
[snip]
The sad thing about Jim Mattis’s exit is his grandstanding, not to say petulant and immature, mode of departure. The letter announcing his resignation, circulated yesterday, is half bureaucratic boilerplate (‘I have been privileged to serve,’ ‘proud of the progress,’ etc., etc.).

But those nuggets are set in a jelly of snarky recrimination about how he, Jim Mattis, has always believed that our strength as a nation is ‘inextricably linked’ to our system of ‘alliance and partnerships.’ Further, he says we must treat our allies ‘with respect’ while remaining ‘resolute and unambiguous’ about ‘those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,’ e.g., Russia and China.

You do not need an advance degree in hermeneutics to unpack the implications of such statements. ‘I, Jim Mattis, am the adult in the room. I want to foster our partnerships with our allies — unlike some people — and I want to be tough with respect to opponents like Russia and China’ — again, not stated but clearly implied, unlike some.

The implication is made all-but-explicit in the next paragraph which begins ‘Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects…’ Well, because of all this, I quit. In other words, I am the good guy who wants to reward our friends and stand up to our enemies, whereas you, Donald Trump, do not.

I think there is plenty of room for disagreement and shades of opinion about how the United States ought to conduct its foreign policy. I can understand how Donald Trump’s heterodox behavior and rhetoric raises eyebrows among establishment diplomats. The President speaks a novel language most of us are unused to hearing among politicians. I believe that thus far the he has been admirably resolute in his dealings with Russia and China while at the same time regularly reminding us that ‘it would be a good thing, not a bad thing’ to have good relations with both countries. I think that is true, notwithstanding the thuggishness of Putin and the neo-Maoist ambitions of Xi.

In any event, the larger point here is that Secretary Mattis’s letter of resignation exhibits a petulance and smallness unbecoming a man of his distinction, accomplishments, and position. I was sorry to see it. Curiously, however, it was of a piece with the behavior of other former high-ranking officials in the Trump administration. The most conspicuous is Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, whose chief qualification for the job seems to have been that he looked the part. Since being abruptly fired, he has taken to sniping at the President publicly, an unbecoming and counterproductive habit. The takeaway, alas, is that many of the figures who were hailed as the adults in the Trump administration have turned out to be grandstanding partisans. In the aftermath of Mattis’s resignation, the spigots of fake news are gleefully disgorging dire predictions of ‘global chaos’ and ‘international shock waves.’ The whole spectacle is childish and distasteful, and it reminds us that it is not always as easy to tell who are the real adults in the room as we might think.

There's more tha a little truth in that.  So far Trump has been one of the most successful Presidents in my memeory and I'm unwilling to concede that despite this his enemies are right and Trump's wrong.

Three cheers for President Trump and General Mattis

Now that’s how things like this should be handled!

When a high government official and the President of the United States have a fundamental disagreement about government policy the government official should resign and do so stating the reason for his resignation.

The President, as Commander in Chief, is in charge of the military.  His Secretary of Defense is the one who carries out the hi policies.  Of course, he can advise the President, even argue his case, but he is required to carry out the President’s policies.

Why?

Because the President, not the Secretaryof Defense, was elected by the people. 

 

This does not mean that the President’s policies are the right ones, but they are the ones that count.  

I believed that President Obama’s policies – foreign and domestic – were wrong and made the country and the world worse off.  But I would not expect his Cabinet secretaries to obstruct him or defy his policies.

Are Trump’s policies of withdrawal from a number of long-term foreign wars right or wrong.  Time will tell.  

A case can be made that keeping American troops in in foreign wars will prevent adversaries from increasing their influence in those regions.  Withdrawal will signal admission of defeat and result in loss of face as well as trust of our allies.  I suspect that General Mattis believes this to be the case.

A case can also be made that participation in endless wars without a strategy for winning is wrong morally, financially and strategically.    

America is a wealthy country with a gargantuan debt and a dysfunctional political system that is unwilling to defend its own borders even as it attempts to defend foreign borders.

Spending billions, sending American men and women to die or be maimed in foreign lands with no prospect of victory is immoral.  Attempting to impose our values on cultures that don’t share out values – who, in many cases despises our values - is foolish.

   

What’s curious is that those who only yesterday opposed these wars are today demanding that we continue them.  The real reason for the screams of outrage on the Left is that (1) this is President Trump’s policy and they oppose Trump in everything and (2) they saw General Mattis as America’s real military leader who made military policy.  They simply can’t stand the fact that Donald Trump is actually telling everyone that he is the Commander in Chief.

I have the utmost respect for General Mattis and I believe he will be missed.  But I also believe that continuing to do what we have been doing, sending our military to hundreds of foreign fields to fight and die will be a slow-motion suicide for this nation.   

We need to define out national interest, defend those interests vigorously, and husband our resources so that when we go to war, we go to win.  I heard someone ask the question recently: “when was the last time America won a war?”  Putting American troops into the battle line for a stalemate is not the answer.