Democratic lawmakers and their allies in the press are getting more than they bargained for this week with the release of former Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ memoir, Call Sign Chaos.
White House critics have salivated for weeks over the possibility that the book would be a White House tell-all, overflowing with delicious gossip about President Trump and his inner circle. The book provides no such juicy tidbits for the #Resistance, according to the Washington Examiner’s Kelly Jane Torrance.
The memoir does, however, include an awfully unflattering glimpse into Obama-era foreign policy and the former president’s strategy (or the lack thereof) for defeating the Islamic State.
Those who still adore former President Barack Obama will likely consider Mattis’ memoir a deeply unwelcome surprise. And those who have pinned their hopes of recapturing the White House on former Vice President Joe Biden, well, they are not going to like the book at all.
In 2011, Mattis writes, the White House’s foreign policy eggheads roundly ignored his assessment that a sudden withdrawal from Iraq would produce disastrous results. Biden, who boasts often of his supposed foreign policy chops, was one of the key players who dismissed Mattis’ prescient warnings.
The former Secretary of Defense says of Biden (via Torrance):
Biden reassured Mattis that Maliki wouldn’t eject all American troops from the country.
“Maliki wants us to stick around, because he does not see a future in Iraq otherwise,” Biden said. “I’ll bet you my vice presidency.”
Mattis doesn’t say whether he tried to collect on that bet. As he writes, “In October 2011, Prime Minister Maliki and President Obama agreed that all U.S. forces would leave at the end of the year.”
Mattis’ warnings proved prescient, as Maliki, free of American influence, went after Sunni politicians and districts, alienating a third of the country. “Iraq slipped back into escalating violence. It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion,” Mattis writes. A Sunni revolt and a weak Iraqi Army allowed al Qaeda-aligned terrorists to return in 2014, calling themselves the Islamic State.
Then there is the former Secretary of Defense’s recollection of working with Obama himself. Unlike Mattis’ generally friendly assessment of Biden, the memoir has no similarly kind words for the former president. The way Mattis tells it, Obama is personally responsible for the violence, chaos, destruction, raping, and pillaging that occurred in Iraq after the U.S.’ abrupt withdrawal. The way Mattis tells it, the former president is a man consumed entirely by arrogance and pride, whose stubborn refusal to listen to those who understood the situation on the ground in Iraq doomed thousands of civilians to die.
The White House “dealt with Iraq as a ‘one-off,’ as if the pullout of our troops there would have no regional implications, reinforcing our allies’ fears that we were abandoning them. I argued strongly that any vacuum left in our wake would be filled by Sunni terrorists and Iran.”
Mattis believes he was vindicated by events. Obama declared the war over, but “Iraq slipped back into escalating violence. It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion,” Mattis says. “All of this was predicted — and preventable.”
Obama made “catastrophic decisions” in Iraq, Mattis concludes. And he did so because he ignored the advice coming from multiple military and civilian advisers, thinking he knew better than all of them.
“At the top, then as now, there was an aura of omniscience. The assessments of the intelligence community, our diplomats, and our military had been excluded from the decision-making circle,” Mattis writes.
It was this constant tension between Mattis and the Obama White House that led to the latter’s sudden dismissal, the retired general writes. In recalling how he was “fired” by the White House, Mattis pretty directly accuses Obama of being a gutless coward:
I was leaving a region aflame and in disarray. The lack of an integrated regional strategy had left us adrift, and our friends confused. We were offering no leadership or direction. I left my post deeply disturbed that we had shaken our friends’ confidence and created vacuums that our adversaries would exploit.
As Ed Morrisey notes at Hot Air, Mattis’ book holds obvious implications for the 2020 election. Namely, it undercuts the narrative that Biden knows what he doing when it comes to foreign policy.
“Obama’s history, but Biden is presently arguing to be the future. This assessment from Mattis makes that argument a lot more complicated, especially since foreign policy and national-security strategy is supposed to be Biden’s strong point,” Morrisey notes.
He adds, “Mattis is now the second former Secretary of Defense to allege that Biden’s the emperor with no clothes on when it comes to his supposed specialty.”
The first Secretary of Defense to challenge Biden’s alleged foreign policy expertise, Morrisey reminds us, was Robert Gates, who wrote in 2014 of the then-vice president, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Team Biden and his allies in the Democratic National Committee are going to have to get in front of these criticisms and fast. If the Gates/Mattis narrative takes hold, the former vice president is going to lose his grip on one of his chief claims to fame. That alone will be disastrous for him in 2020. But pair their criticisms with the fact that the Trump administration can rightly point to its record of successfully throwing ISIS back into hell, and this could be a total catastrophe for “Lunchbox” Joe.
