Rolling Stone’s Weird Attack on James Mattis

By Mark Antonio Wright

Wednesday, March 08, 2023

 

Rolling Stone magazine has published a — there’s no other way to say this — very weird essay by national-security correspondent Spencer Ackerman that looks at the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and declares that it ushered in an American “age of grift.”

 

“The prevailing consensus now is that the Iraq War was a mistake, a deviation born of post-9/11 madness,” Ackerman writes. “In reality . . . it was a big con — built on cherished myths of American power, greatness, and justice — that heralded a thousand more.”

 

Ackerman prosecutes his thesis by sorta-kinda profiling Marine general James Mattis and tying together the 2003-era casus belli arguments, the flawed U.S. war effort, Mattis’s role in the war, and his post-war service on the board of Theranos, the now-disgraced biomedical tech company led by Elizabeth Holmes.

 

To be clear, I have no issue with critiques of and retrospectives on the hugely consequential American decision to go to war in Iraq. Indeed, the next issue of National Review magazine, which goes to press next week, will include almost a dozen writers arguing all sides of the debate. For what it’s worth, my own view is that while the U.S. won the war, it’s clear in hindsight that the costs far outweighed the benefits, both in the domestic aftershocks and to America’s geopolitical position.

 

And I have no issue with a critique of James Mattis the general or the man. It’s true that as a Marine officer, I revere Mattis’s reputation. But neither I nor Mattis, who is famously and frequently self-critical, would mind a pointed correction. Even a cursory reading of Mattis’s memoir, Call Sign Chaos, reveals a man who is deeply introspective and who believes intensely in honest assessments and criticism. Mattis bluntly dissects the times he got things wrong because, as he lays out in the memoir, “my purpose in writing this book is to convey the lessons I learned for those who might benefit, whether in military or civilian life.”

 

Though Ackerman quotes from Call Sign Chaos in his essay, he doesn’t appear to have read it very closely. In fact, the only plausible reading of Ackerman’s tract is that he wanted to write about the Iraq War, and he wanted to write about Mattis, and he had a theory about America entering an “age of grift” — so he shoehorned all the evidence into an essay that couldn’t fit it naturally.

 

How else is a reader to understand paragraphs such as this?

 

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. [Emphasis added.]

 

Let me get this straight: James Mattis was skeptical of the war, wasn’t responsible for its launch, and cautioned against operational incoherence, but since he “chose to serve” rather than “walk away” from his Marines, he is “illustrative of an age of American hubris”? Did anyone at Rolling Stone read this thing before they published it?

 

Regardless, it’s somewhat amazing that Ackerman — so worried about the decline of American competence and the lack of accountability in the old boys’ club of the high command — doesn’t even mention Mattis’s truly remarkable leadership of the First Marine Division during its drive on Baghdad. Only amateurs or the ignorant could fail to appreciate the complexity and difficulty of a mechanized advance of more than 800 kilometers over 17 days of sustained combat that culminated in the capture of a city of more than 5 million souls.

 

And Ackerman doesn’t mention Mattis’s stunning firing of Colonel Joe Dowdy, the commander of the First Marine Regiment during the invasion, for what Mattis viewed as a lack of performance.

 

Should Mattis have been more skeptical of Elizabeth Holmes’s claims regarding what her blood-testing technology was capable of? Of course — but Holmes was lying to almost everyone about just that subject while concealing the evidence. Indeed, that’s why she’s in jail for fraud. Ackerman writes that “Theranos appealed to Mattis because, he explained in court, ‘in triage, where you have casualties going in, this could be very, very helpful for medical personnel if it could do what she said it could do.'” Maybe Mattis should have dug deeper, but I’m at a loss to understand how a general, who had witnessed his Marines die in battle, would not be excited about such a possibility.

 

Ackerman then dings Mattis for quitting the Trump administration “because he believed Trump to be insufficiently committed to the American empire — not, say, a year earlier, when Trump hailed a white-supremacist riot in Charlottesville,” as if Mattis’s warnings about how a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Syria would lead to a terrorist victory have not been born out in the debacle of America’s 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan. And am I supposed to lament that a lifelong servant of his country would choose to helm the Department of Defense during a turbulent presidency and while attempting to stay as nonpolitical as possible?

 

Before the end of his rambling essay, Ackerman compares Mattis and the war in Iraq to everything from the Gulf of Tonkin incident to Steve Jobs’s and Bill Gates’s theft of the basic idea of a “windows”-based computer-operating system to Elon Musk’s eccentric and ill-advised tweeting to Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto boondoggle FTX.

 

It would be too harsh to call Spencer Ackerman’s essay a “grift” in itself, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it’s “illustrative of an age of American hubris.”