Regarding Mattis. From my friend.
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Sir, I read your Letter of Resignation to President Donald Trump.
In it, you express satisfaction at the job you've done thus far, and you cite how you serve the men and women under your command as Defense Secretary.
But there is no mention of President Trump's policies towards Syria, North Korea, or the other places he has avoided war or kept war from expanding. You do mention China and Russia being a threat, but I found it odd that you would resign the day after the president's new Syria policy is announced.
Many Defense Secretaries may have threatened to resign over the conduct of their president. Did Truman's SecDef threaten to resign when he fired General MacArthur? Did Johnson's SecDef resign when Johnson sought passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? Did Nixon's SecDef resign when he ordered the bombing of Cambodia? Did Reagan's SecDef resign when he cut off funds to Israel for their invasion of Lebanon? Did Bush's SecDef resign when we invaded Iraq?
The answer is no to all of those. Because those Secretaries put the good of the nation ahead of their own vanity. But you, General Mattis, are arrogant and think only of yourself. You pretend not to care about politics but you are obviously a political general, worried only about unnamed "alliances" in Syria, and not the fighting men and women of our Armed Forces put into harm's way in nebulous missions like Syria. This was a mission created by John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama! The same idiots who gave us Benghazi and the "red line" over Syria.
When he campaigned and when he took office, President Trump made two promises: He would fight to destroy ISIS and then draw down our forces in the Middle East. And second, he would fire anybody and everybody if they did not perform. Trump kept that promise this week, and if you didn't like working for him, then he kept the second promise as well. No one is un-replacable.
I guess the thing that saddens me the most is that within minutes of you publishing your resignation letter, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer printed it out to wave in front of television cameras to denounce Trump. And you knew this would happen!
General Mattis, if it were in my power, I would put the above photo of Pelosi and Schumer on a billboard of your retirement town or city, along with the caption: "General Mattis betrayed his President, betrayed the flag, and betrayed his country".
Mattis knew that President Trump was in deep budget negotiations with the Democrats. And he dumped this on the president anyway. President Trump is bleeding from a thousand cuts, and you just slashed him a new one right across his wide chest, sir. How dare you?
In your letter, you mentioned vague commitments to unnamed "allies" as the reason to keep our troops in Syria. Not good enough sir. You don't work for those international allies, you work for America and you work for the fighting men and women of our military. And they deserve straight reasons for why they should be dumped into the middle of a conflict that has nothing to do with us. In The American Spectator, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamim writes:
As a result, a combination came about of pushing dubious aims without the formulation of a contingency plan that would have honestly addressed the most serious problems. The most notable case of the former was framing the U.S. troop deployment in Syria in terms of an unrealistic “counter-Iran†angle.
This is not a good enough reason for putting American soldiers in the middle of an inter-Muslim fight, Sir. President Trump laid it out very precisely in his tweet yesterday, where he stated:
The president is right, but more than that, he is the president. And that, General Mattis, is where you made your gravest mistake and assumption.
General Mattis, you may have opinions. You may want to go your own way. But as every general knows, there is only one president and what he says goes. Deciding policy is not simply "optional" if you feel strongly about it, your job is to implement the president's policy to the best of your ability. Not to throw hissy fits if you don't get your way. You are not a co-president, how dare you assert otherwise?
I listed the previous Secretary of States in the latter half of this past century for a reason. They may have all had reasons to resign, and might have threatened so in private. But they kept that private. They didn't go out of their way to damage the sitting president while he is in the midst of grave negotiations, here and abroad. That's what you did, sir. You put your opinion, your views, above that of the country. This has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with you and your ego.
General Mattis, most reporters are simply going to label your departure as Trump's revolving door and an ongoing crisis in his leadership style. I see this as Trump standing up for the common people who voted for him, the common people who support him bringing home those 2,000 American troops from Syria for the very reasons Trump stated. We support Trump in continually firing people out for their own advancement, until he finds public servants who truly know the meaning of the term. People who work for us, not for Washington D.C., or whatever interests you, General Mattis, accumulated as a general.
There's something very creepy and sinister about a defense secretary who believes his secretive alliances with international groups are more important than the lives of the soldiers he supposedly represents. You sir, apparently don't work for me or the rest of the American people. Good riddance to yet another self-promoter.
There are no winners here, and you did everything you could to make it worse. You could have been just like our UN ambassador, and said you were planning a retirement after a good two years. But you had to dial up your reporter friends, the contacts you made with "friendly" reporters the past two years in your job, and you gushed to them how you didn't approve of Trump's Syrian withdrawal, and were quitting in a pique.
That's not leadership, that's not a matter of conscience, and that's not public service, General Mattis. You let our country down, and you disgraced yourself far more than anything you attempted to do against the president. His conscience is clear, he places us first. That's how President Trump always operates. I wish I could say the same for you.
Whatever allies you value above public service, General Mattis, be it France or Belgium or Germany, I suggest you move to one of their countries, renounce your American citizenship, and stay there. Whatever your past public service, you stand a traitor today and you should not draw another breath of free air as an American citizen here with the rest of us. bleep off to hell, sir.
(What you think of me is none of my business - Donald Trump)
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