Yesterday Eli Lake published a piece at the Daily Beast showing that CentCom commander James Mattis is is rattling the chain of command for a war in the Persian Gulf. Mattis, some of you may recall, dodged possible reprimand in 2005 for an anti-Taliban comment that went off the rails:
You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.
He “speaks his mind” ala General Curtis LeMay back in Vietnam days, even as Obama is urging patience. Lake:
Those who have worked with Mattis say his views when it comes to Iran are more in line with those of America’s allies in the Persian Gulf and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than with his own government’s. At a recent charity event for Spirit of America, Mattis, known by admirers as the “warrior monk” and by detractors as “Mad Dog Mattis,” said his three top concerns in the Middle East were “Iran, Iran, and Iran.”
I asked David Bromwich– who has described Obama’s presidency as “the Peace Prize War Presidency” — what is going on. He says:
I think Obama believes he has all this under control. He wants the
pressure to be ratcheted up continuously but slowly between now and
November; he looks for a position of slightly increased hope for peace
with Iran. So the evident plan is to put off an attack but not remove
the pressure for attack before November. Yesterday’s “hopeful” statement about inspections in Iran by the IAEA director Yukiya Amano, accompanied by the cautious remarks of Obama’s press secretary and the extremely skeptical public statement by Ehud Barak, show the plan going forward apparently on schedule.But as with the debt ceiling, as with health care, as with Israel/Palestine, as with the economy–Obama’s sense here of his own control has a precarious foundation in the visible facts.
Obama is very clearly not in complete control of the process. He’s supporting more or less unlimited bribes to Israel to keep them in line (the latest reports of new aid are so big no one has been able to quantify them yet), but both Israel and the American neocons (in Congress, the media, and the military) are constantly working to undermine Obama.
This is an extremely dangerous cycle. Obama has to take harsher and harsher position to stay out in front of the warmongers. Those positions not only make a deal less likely, them lock the US into an expensive an unsustainable position (the US simply cannot keep forces massed in the Persian Gulf forever, nor can it keep Iranian oil off the market and thus oil prices high). Something will have to change, and Obama could effectively be forced into war, whatever he may personally want.
Very odd that Mattis got that four-star CENTCOM command. Besides having gotten into hot water for his comments, Mattis is also not an Annapolis graduate. His undergraduate degree is from Central Washington University.
Mattis sounds like a knuckle dragging idiot to me, another US General when asked what they were doing in Afghanistan replied “to kill the bad guys” where do they get these clowns, subtle they ain’t, I recommend a few years at a Swiss finishing school, paid for by the pentagon of course.
i do not trust elilake as far as i could throw a stick and i think we are being taken for a ride.
from the comment section over @- DB
well, to be perfectly clear..eli lake never really said “Obama nixed sending one”…it just implied as much..and that’s how propaganda works.
plus, there’s this post: https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2012/03/nyt-warns-iran-strike-blowback-would-kill-200-americans-but-israel-says-this-isnt-your-picnic.html
“Pentagon fears Israeli strike on Iran would drag US in” and who did they quote:
Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands American forces in the Middle East, was said to be troubled by results of the war game…The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia….
this article made israel furious.
and source? “according to U.S. military officials familiar with his thinking…”
but later he said: “Military sources close to the general..Those who have worked with Mattis ”
now note the article also references israeli military leaders who have worked w/mattis..iow, the second allegation (about “when it comes to Iran are more in line .. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”) could be referencing…you guessed it Israel Military sources who have worked with Mattis …like the mentioned Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni, the military attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Washington
then lake says “rebuff ..odd man out”? he’s the commander of central command! he could be a lot of things but ‘odd man out’ is not one of them.
plus, notice “At a recent charity event for Spirit of America
check out http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jim_Hake
and http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/palmer_mark
neocons all the way.
this is a hatchet job from israel. i don’t trust it. and this:
Mattis declined to comment for this article.
yeah, i bet he did. the article is setting up the mattis as being more aligned with israel than his the prez, that’s a hatchet job screaming out for an official response meant to create internal strife. remember when israel has done that in the past?
also remember when the Rolling stone wrote that article that happened to be true about mc crystal? he resigned almost immediately, that will not be true in this case.
eli lake is a servant of the lobby.
“Those who have worked with Mattis say his views when it comes to Iran are more in line with those of America’s allies in the Persian Gulf and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than with his own government’s.”
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Rubbish. This guy has made it through every filter, to say his views are not aligned with the washington consensus is absurd – if anything he is just more vocal and vulgar. I love it how here at MW, and it seems elsewhere, even if you are wearing the uniform on the US, and are a general in its military -as soon as you spout “neo-con” views, you are at once a de-facto agent of israel or saudi arabia etc, you cease to be a functionary of the US government – what an unbelievable mechanism to re-direct guilt for US policy. This is part of my criticism of a lot of lobby arguments – most of “the lobby” is in OFFICIAL positions of power, their decisions are OFFICIAL policy, yet we talk about the lobby as a foreign entity, this doesnt make any sense to me. Take some responsibility for who you elect and the people those you elect appoint.