Trump’s
“Moderate” Defense Secretary Has Already Brought
Us to the Brink of War
By Mehdi
Hasan
March
02, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Intercept"
- Did you know that the Trump
administration almost went to war with Iran at
the start of February?
Perhaps you were distracted by
Gen. Michael Flynn’s resignation
as national security adviser or by President
Trump’s
online jihad against Nordstrom.
Or maybe you missed the story because the New
York Times bizarrely buried it in the midst of
a long piece on the turmoil and chaos
inside the National Security Council. Defense
Secretary James Mattis, according to the paper,
had wanted the U.S. Navy to “intercept and board
an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons
possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen. …
But the ship was in international waters in the
Arabian Sea, according to two officials. Mr.
Mattis ultimately decided to set the operation
aside, at least for now. White House officials
said that was because news of the impending
operation leaked.”
Get that? It was only thanks to what Mattis’s
commander in chief has called
“illegal leaks”
that the operation was (at least temporarily)
set aside and military action between the United
States and Iran was averted.
Am I exaggerating? Ask the Iranians. “Boarding
an Iranian ship is a shortcut” to confrontation,
says
Seyyed Hossein Mousavian,
former member of Iran’s National Security
Council and a close ally of Iranian President
Hassan Rouhani. Even if a firefight in
international waters were avoided, the Islamic
Republic, Mousavian tells me, “would retaliate”
and has “many other options for retaliation.”
Trita Parsi,
head of the National Iranian American Council
and author of the forthcoming book “Losing an
Enemy — Obama, Iran and the Triumph of
Diplomacy,” agrees. Such acts of “escalation” by
the Trump administration, he tells me,
“significantly increases the risk of war.”
In an administration overflowing with Iran
hawks, from CIA Director Mike Pompeo (“I
look forward to rolling back this disastrous
deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of
terrorism”) to
Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly (“Iran’s
involvement in [Latin America] … is a matter for
concern”) to
former National Security Adviser Flynn (“We
are officially putting Iran on notice”),
some may have naively expected Mattis to be the
responsible adult in the room.
The defense secretary has been lauded by
politicians and pundits alike: the
“scholar-warrior”
(New York Daily News) and
“most revered Marine in a generation”
(Marine Corps Times) with
“the potential to act as a restraint”
(New York Times) on an impulsive commander in
chief as he is
“the anti-Trump”
(Politico) and therefore
“good news for global order”
(Wall Street Journal).
So why would a retired Marine Corps general such
as Mattis be willing to provoke a conflict with
Tehran over a single ship? The fact is that Mattis,
too, is obsessed with Iran. He has
hyperbolically called the Islamic Republic
“the single most enduring threat to stability
and peace in the Middle East”
and — in a Trump-esque descent into the world of
conspiracy theories — suggested Tehran is
working with ISIS.
“Iran is not an enemy of ISIS,”
Mattis declaimed in 2016, because “the one
country in the Middle East that has not been
attacked” by ISIS “is Iran. That is more than
happenstance, I’m sure.”
According to the
Washington Post,
in the run-up to the talks over Iran’s nuclear
program, “Israelis may have questioned Obama’s
willingness to use force against Iran. … But
they believed Mattis was serious.” The general,
in his capacity as head of U.S. Central Command,
even proposed launching “dead of night”
airstrikes on Iranian soil in 2011, in
retaliation for Tehran’s support for
anti-American militias in Iraq — a proposal
rejected by White House officials who were
worried that it “risked starting yet another war
in the Middle East.”
Mousavian is puzzled by the defense secretary’s
hawkishness: “He is one of the most experienced
U.S. generals and he knows … the consequences of
confrontation with Iran would be tenfold what
the U.S. experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq
combined.”
Mattis has, in fact, been tied to some of the
worst war crimes of the Iraq invasion. It was he
who gave the order to attack the village of
Mukaradeeb in April 2004 — a decision he would
later
admit took him
only 30 seconds to approve — which killed 42
civilians, including 13 children, who were
attending a wedding there. “I don’t have to
apologize for the conduct of my men,”
he told reporters.
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Six months later, in November 2004, it was
Mattis who planned the Marine assault on
Fallujah that reduced that city to rubble,
forced 200,000 residents from their homes,
and resulted,
according to the Red Cross,
in at least 800 civilian deaths.
There’s a reason Mattis is nicknamed
“Mad Dog.” There’s
a reason his militant maxims — or
“Mattisisms” —
include telling Marines under his command in
Iraq to
“be polite, be professional, but have a plan to
kill everybody you meet,”
and telling an audience in California:
“It’s fun to shoot some people. …
I like brawling.”
Is this the kind of “restraint” that we can
expect from Mattis? Trump was rightly lambasted
over his January raid in Yemen that led to the
deaths of a U.S. Navy SEAL and at least 15
Yemeni women and children, but it was the
defense secretary, joined by the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, who persuaded the
neophyte president that the SEALs’ attack on al
Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would be a
“game changer.”
It was the gung-ho Mattis who,
according to Reuters,
told Trump that he “doubted that the Obama
administration would have been bold enough to
try it.” And this week,
we learned, it
is Mattis to whom Trump wants to give free rein
to launch raids, drone strikes, and hostage
rescues without prior presidential approval.
What could possibly go wrong?
According to Parsi, Mattis “believes the U.S.
needs to have a strong hegemonic position in the
Middle East,” and “if your aim is hegemony in
the Middle East, Iran will be your No. 1 foe due
to Tehran’s rejection of Pax Americana — even
though the U.S. and Iran share a lot of common
interests, such as opposition to ISIS.”
Yet even normally skeptical voices have bought
into the myth of Mattis’s moderation. “I
actually do think he is the closest thing we
have to a ‘moderate’ in this administration,”
Andrew Bacevich,
a conservative military historian at Boston
University and long-standing critic of U.S.
defense policy, tells me. This, to misapply a
line from George W. Bush, is “the soft bigotry
of low expectations.” The defense secretary may
not be a bigot or a crank like so many other top
Trump appointees, but he could prove to be far
more lethal in the long run.
Remember: It was not Dick Cheney or Donald
Rumsfeld but “moderate” Secretary of State Colin
Powell — another retired general — who was
tasked with
selling President Bush’s Mesopotamian
misadventure to the United Nations in February
2003. Who do you imagine would make a more
convincing public case, on behalf of the Trump
administration, for a future shooting war with
Iran? The
draft-dodging
president or his decorated defense secretary?
Ex-Breitbart boss Steve Bannon
or
“Warrior Monk”
Mattis, who, lest we forget,
45 out of 46
Senate Democrats voted to confirm?
“War is once again on the agenda, whether by
design or by accident,” warns Parsi. So don’t be
fooled. Mattis is far from a sheep in hawk’s
clothing; he is a hawk in hawk’s clothing. The
defense secretary may once have described the
three biggest threats to U.S. national security
as
“Iran, Iran, Iran,”
but if the Trump administration ends up going to
war with Iran as a result of the defense
secretary’s recklessness, the three biggest
threats to “stability and peace in the Middle
East” may turn out to be “Mattis, Mattis, Mattis.”
