Sunday Long Read: The Suck, 20 Years Later

Our Sunday Long Read this week has Rolling Stone's Spencer Ackerman taking a brutally honest look at the Iraq War, which began 20 years ago this month and defined the entire Millennial generation. How we got here, what we did, and where we're going all comes back to America's disastrous response to invading the wrong country over September 11th, and how we live in the Age of Gruft today.

THE QUOTE THAT would secure Jim Mattis’ reputation as the most celebrated Marine general of his generation came during meetings he hadn’t wanted to attend. It was April 2004, a half-mile east of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which had exploded in an insurrection that threatened to doom the American occupation after barely a year. Mattis hadn’t wanted to take Fallujah, recognizing that flattening the City of Mosques would throw gasoline on a smoldering nationwide insurrection. But he followed White House-pushed orders to invade, and after roughly a week of intense urban fighting — leaving 39 U.S. troops dead, an estimated 616 Iraqi civilians killed, and Fallujah untaken — he followed orders to stop.

The first order was stupid, he thought, but combining it with the second was risible. It sent the message that America was not only idiotic during a crucial moment of challenge but also weak. Still, no matter how disastrous the order, no Marine general would ever resign his command as his Marines went through such a crucible, so Mattis reached for a different kind of weapon: his mouth.

In his 2019 memoir, Call Sign Chaos, Mattis recounts sitting down to discuss the future of Fallujah with local notables enlisted to guarantee its security. One of the sheikhs, evidently frustrated, “demanded” to know when the Americans would leave. Mattis replied that he had bought property on the Euphrates River, where he would “marry one of your daughters and retire there.” Then he warned the Iraqis: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

It was quintessential Mattis: a threat of ultra-violence wrapped in a wit quick enough to make him as quotatious as Shaquille O’Neal. As reports of the comment spread, Mattis became something of a folk hero in American military circles and back home. One of his nicknames, much promoted by journalists, was “Warrior Monk,” emphasizing not only his martial expertise but also his devotion to his craft. Years later, the “kill you all” line would take pride of place in an adoring Twitter hashtag, #Mattisisms, celebrating not so much his deeds as his attitude.

The adulation obscured the fact that Mattis’ swagger didn’t really work. “The sheikhs did not act on my warning,” Mattis writes in Call Sign Chaos. “They were allowing their sons to be recruited by the insurgents while they were talking to me — unwittingly abrogating their own authority.” Maybe. Or perhaps they didn’t like a foreign invader pledging to fuck their daughters and kill everyone they know.

The Iraq War was supposed to showcase American potency after 9/11. But the fuck-around stage gave way within months to a finding-out stage that lasted for years. A war partially predicated on dealing a lethal blow to terrorism instead prompted the creation of the Al Qaeda affiliate that would become the so-called Islamic State. America’s 100-plus years of experience with imperial policing were no match for widespread Iraqi rejectionism. At home, the humiliations of the War on Terror were political fuel for those who said America needed to be made great again. As we approach the 20th anniversary of one of the most unjust and calamitous wars the U.S. ever waged, #Mattisisms read like a way for Americans to save face amid self-inflicted disasters that revealed their weakness.

Mattis, who through a spokesperson declined an interview request, doesn’t even crack the top 30 list of people culpable for the Iraq War. As a division commander, he was several rungs down from the decision-makers of George W. Bush’s administration. Mattis’ tour ended months before the Marines began another operation to take Fallujah — a grueling, bloody, urban battle that has passed into Corps legend. Yet his example is illustrative of an age of American hubris. Even when Mattis saw through the pretexts of the war — he suggests in his memoir that Saddam Hussein was “boxed in” before the offensive even began — he, like most officers, chose to serve rather than walk away, and expressed greater displeasure at the prospect of withdrawal from the war than the initial invasion. Ten years later, he was no more an obstacle when he joined the board of another doomed-to-fail enterprise based on deception.

That company was the now infamous Theranos, of con artist Elizabeth Holmes fame, and later still, Mattis became Trump's Pentagon chief. 

The biggest con operation in US history, leading to two more historic cons, all with Mad Dog Mattis involved.

It was always about the grift. We trained a generation to do it. Is it any wonder then why America is just one or two more con artist circus shows away from military state fascism?