No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

by Jim Proser

  Back in Hawaii, the wedding proceeds with customary frenzy. As relatives from the mainland begin to arrive and caterers prepare, Mattis receives word that his bride-to-be has reconsidered. She realizes that Mattis is going to have an exceptional future in the Corps. His time will increasingly not be his own. She simply can’t imagine their married life being anything other than an unhappy waiting game. She realizes she’ll be a burden to him and his career.

  This time only a few truly close friends rush to the couple’s support. They beg Alice to reconsider and to be patient. Jim Mattis, they stress, is worth the wait. It won’t always be as it has been recently. The men tell her, truthfully, that he hasn’t looked at another woman since their engagement. Finally Mattis and Alice have an agonizing talk, but she is not swayed. The wedding is canceled.

  On July 28, 1981, Mattis relinquishes command of 3/3 weapons company Kilo. He is promoted to the rank of major and leaves Hawaii to return home to the Pacific Northwest, where he takes command of a quiet Marine recruiting office in Portland, Oregon, near the banks of his beloved Columbia River. Like the first Marines, who remained unmarried while in the Corps, he returns to the simple, monkish life of reading and fishing that he knew before Alice and the 3/3, even before the Marine Corps.

  He will never marry.

  6

  The Enemy of My Enemy

  Until the Iranian people can get rid of this theocracy, these guys who think they can tell the people even which candidates they get a choice of, it’s going to be very, very difficult. This is a regime that employs surrogates, like Lebanese Hezbollah to threaten Israel, to murder the former Lebanese prime minister, murder Israeli tourists in Bulgaria which caused the European Union to put more severe sanctions on Iran than the Americans have ever put on Iran.

  . . . The Iranian people are not the problem. The Iranian people are definitely not the problem, it’s the regime that sends agents around to murder ambassadors in Pakistan or in Washington DC. It’s the regime that provides missiles to Lebanese Hezbollah or the Houthi in Yemen.

  . . . So somehow, you don’t want to unite the Iranian people with that unpopular regime because if you pressure them both then they will grow together. We’ve got to make certain that the Iranian people know that we don’t have any conflict with them.

  . . . I think that’s mostly economic but it also includes a political counterweight so people who don’t agree have a place to turn to other than picking up a gun.

  . . . By having everybody feel like they’ve got a stake in the future, especially the young people, you can create a positive environment economically, politically, and diplomatically.

  —Mattis interview, the MIHS Islander, June 20, 2017

  0930 Hours—3 June 1982—London

  Iraqi intelligence officer Colonel Nawaf al-Rosan loiters outside the five-star Dorchester Hotel on the corner of Park Lane and Deanery Street in London’s exclusive Mayfair district. The colonel waits outside to greet Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov, who is having dinner there. With al-Rosan is a notorious terrorist assassin for the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) and a Palestinian member of the PLF. Al-Rosan is the commander and paymaster of the group for Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

  The men are dressed in fashionable, dark-colored summer jackets and stand quietly together on the corner, keeping an eye on the front door of the hotel. In the assassin’s jacket pocket is a loaded 7.62-millimeter Tokarev pistol, standard issue of the Russian and now Iraqi armies. Iraqi president Saddam has chosen this simple weapon and a very simple tactic to begin a war between Israel and the Palestinians. Saddam knows Israel is looking for any excuse to retaliate against him for financing and arming PLF’s many terror attacks against Israel, and may take advantage of his current weakness. To deflect possible Israeli attack, he will simply feed his allies, the trusting patriots of Palestine, to the lion of Israel.

  As Ambassador Argov and his bodyguard step from the front doors of the Dorchester, the assassin moves toward him, the others close behind. Argov’s bodyguard opens the rear door of the waiting car as Argov steps to enter the car. The pistol is drawn, and the assassin fires one shot into the side of Argov’s head, then turns and runs back toward the corner. Argov’s bodyguard draws his weapon and fires one shot, hitting the fleeing shooter in the back of the head and knocking him to the sidewalk. The pistol clatters across the stone. Al-Rosan picks it up and runs after the second accomplice toward the corner, where a car waits to whisk them to the Iraqi Embassy. From the embassy, the two remaining assassins are taken to a safe house, where they are told to wait for further instructions. Within minutes of the embassy car leaving, the London police are at the safe house and arrest the two for attempted murder. Argov is still alive; although incapacitated, he will survive for another twenty-five years.1

  Israeli general Ariel Sharon now has the excuse he needs, and the obvious culprits have been conveniently delivered while emotions are still high. The following day, the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of Yasser Arafat are bombed in Lebanon. Within forty-eight hours, Israeli tanks cross the border into Lebanon, sweeping the defending Syrian armor aside as they attack the Palestinian headquarters in Beirut. Syria, Lebanon’s armorer and ally, is now drawn into the battle as well.

  Watching all this bloodshed with great interest is Iran’s Shiite Muslim dictator, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the ruling mullahs, the lead actors in this drama. Through their stalwart support of certain suicidally aggressive Palestinian factions, the Iranians have kept their ultimate enemy, Israel, on the defensive. This surprising invasion of Beirut may be an opportunity. The mullahs watch patiently. If this is a typical Israeli lightning strike and quick victory, they won’t have time to move against the Israelis. They quietly send weapons to the Palestinians.

  After fast initial victories in the open desert against the antiquated Russian tanks of the Syrians, the sleek new Israeli Merkava tanks are almost useless in the narrow streets of Beirut. Days stretch into weeks, weeks into months. The Israelis are becoming bogged down in a house-to-house urban quagmire. The mullahs attack, sending 1,500 elite Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa Valley near Beirut. Their mission: to mold the half dozen Palestinian and Lebanese factions inside Beirut into a unified Shiite guerilla army. Disguising the organization as a spontaneous people’s resistance force to avoid any responsibility and possible retaliation, they call it the Party of God—Hezbollah.

  * * *

  Months of quietly manning Marine Recruiting Station Portland have allowed thirty-two-year-old Major Mattis to develop the comforting and regular routines of an office worker. He likely recalls the raucous pub crawls through ports of call around the world with the 3/3 with fondness and amusement. Memories of evenings with Alice may still sting but are probably becoming less sharp and less frequent. If he wanted to prove that he could hold down a real nine-to-five desk job like a normal, working man, he’s done that. With the rest of America, he has seen terrorism erupt around the world. New players Iran and Russia are on rampages of conquest, killing thousands of innocent people in their wakes. The counterbalance of American military leadership is missing.

  Almost like Mattis himself, America seems to be struggling out of a period of retreat. The legacy of Vietnam still stifles discussions of military power, even as the country is humiliated once again by a small group of oil-rich nations imposing an oil embargo. America has lost its nerve.

  Mattis is very likely not surprised by any of this. From his reading of history he can probably see alliances form and then turn against each other, allies betraying and enemies helping each other. All of it would be instantly recognizable to Sun Tzu, Thucydides, or George Patton. The only thing new about war is that now everyone watches it on television.

  0622 Hours—23 October 1983

  Hezbollah kills 241 American Marines and sailors—the backbone of the multinational force acting as peacekeepers with the French2—and fifty-eight French peacekeepers in Beirut, Lebanon. The Marines are
in Battalion Landing Team 1/8, East Coast Marines from Camp Lejeune, of the storied Second Division. Two trucks, carrying about five tons of high explosive each, detonate in front of the men’s barracks. It is the most fatal day for Marines since the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, fifteen years before.

  A previously unknown group calling itself Islamic Jihad claims responsibility. President Ronald Reagan retreats from Lebanon, but on his way out, in a spasm of impotent rage, he lobs three hundred 16-inch artillery shells from the USS New Jersey at the heart of Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley. Reagan may have wounded Hezbollah slightly, but it had moved out of the valley long ago and now operates all over the world. For decades Iran will deny that it was behind the attack, but twenty years later, after the attack has been long forgotten, a statue commemorating the day and the two heroic martyrs who drove the trucks will be erected in central Tehran.

  Mattis enrolls in the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, moving from quiet Portland to the busy campus in Quantico, Virginia, headquarters of the Marine Corps. He tackles a master’s degree in military studies by analyzing and reminding the Marine Corps about what they do best—attacking from the sea. The title of his dissertation is “Amphibious Raids: An Historical Imperative for Today’s Marines.” In it he points to America’s growing confidence under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan, arguing that Marines should maintain and expand their historical role as soldiers from the sea.

  Mattis writes:

  At a time when the American people are demonstrating their belief in the traditional need for a strong national defense, it is well that we in the Corps remind ourselves that it hasn’t always been so. Only a few short years ago, after the Vietnam debacle, the need for any amphibious capability was questioned by many Americans, notably some highly placed, vocal critics, in and out of government.

  Conversely, today we are living in the “Halcyon Days,” as our expanded budgets provide equipment and capabilities we could only dream about years ago. Prepositioned equipment, additional mechanized vehicles, integration into NATO’s command structure—all these show how widely the Marines’ role has been accepted, and even expanded, beyond the forcible entry capability (the prepositioned equipment must be “married up” with airlifted troops in a benign environment where ship offload facilities and airports are available).

  But as the political winds blow more favorably for us in the budget process, it is essential that we do not permit ourselves to be led astray from our primarily amphibious mission. Historical examples give credibility to this position, as the Marine Corps contributes its best when it performs in the amphibious role.3

  * * *

  In Baghdad, Mattis’s future enemy Saddam Hussein resorts to World War I tactics by using mustard gas against the conscripted child soldiers of Iran’s Ruhollah Khomeini. The two leaders, rather than learning from history, have repeated it, using the same barbed wire, trenches, bayonet charges, and human wave attacks that killed twenty million people within living memory in Europe. Shamefully, both Iraqis and Iranians resort to using children as combatants and civilian families as targets.

  Although Saddam seized the advantage by attacking first, just after Khomeini’s coup defeating the shah and backhanding American president Jimmy Carter, the war has devolved into a consuming stalemate, killing nearly five hundred thousand soldiers and civilians from both sides over six years. Finally, lacking ready military ground forces, Saddam rains his chemical weapons down on the northern Iraqi city of Halabja, recently taken by Iranian forces, killing and injuring about fifteen thousand Iraqi Kurdish civilians. The naked barbarism of Saddam and the Iranian mullahs is now on full display to the world through twenty-four-hour satellite news broadcasts showing the aftermath in Halabja and their stalemated trench warfare.

  No doubt Mattis, along with most people, felt disgust at this brutality against civilians. It may have deepened his sense of responsibility toward the innocent victims of war. This sensitivity would become an essential element in his coming role of peacemaker in Iraq.

  Also in Baghdad at the time, Abu Nidal, reliable assassin and collaborator, lives comfortably, awaiting contracts from Saddam or others seeking to destroy Israel. Realizing that Saddam is preoccupied with his own survival, Nidal initiates a freelance operation to maintain the high profile of his Palestinian Liberation Front.

  On October 7, 1985, four PLF hijackers take control of the ocean liner Achille Lauro as it is sailing from Alexandria to Port Said, Egypt. They demand the release of fifty Palestinian militants from Israeli prisons. The next day, after being refused permission by the Syrian government to dock at Tartus, the hijackers single out elderly, disabled Leon Klinghoffer, a sixty-nine-year-old American Jew. They shoot Leon in the forehead and chest and throw his body and wheelchair overboard. They negotiate their escape with Moammar Qaddafi’s Libyan regime on a plane out of Tripoli. In the air, President Reagan orders the interception of the plane with American F-15 fighters that force it to land at the American base in Sigonella, Italy. He finally has a chance to expose the connections of Palestinian terrorist networks such as Hezbollah and begin to retaliate.4

  Italian authorities arrest the Palestinians and hold them while an extradition dispute is being decided. Before an American arrest warrant can be served, PLF founder Abu Abbas is released to Yugoslavia. The others are convicted and imprisoned.

  Israel remains entangled in a low-intensity guerrilla war in southern Lebanon for the next five years. After the 1983 assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bechir Gemayel, a Christian, Israeli allies in the Lebanese Christian militia kill three hundred suspected Palestinian fighters in the Shatila refugee camp. Israel is condemned by a United Nations commission for the war crime of genocide. Finally, recognizing the cost and futility of further engagement, Israel withdraws from Beirut, ceding control to rivals Syria and factions under Hezbollah.

  Iran, through proxies like Hezbollah in Palestine, is now an unstoppable sponsor of Islamic terrorism. Based in the Middle East but conducting operations around the world, it is the inspiration and working model for organizations yet to come, like al-Qaeda, that will occupy the entire career of Jim Mattis.

  9 November 1989

  Major Mattis’s focus on possible Soviet aggression in Europe shifts as the Berlin Wall collapses and the Soviet Union disbands into fifteen separate nations. The wary eyes of the world move toward the Middle East, where Soviet clients including Saddam Hussein are now without a nuclear-armed ally and business partner. Saddam is no longer even sure he can get spare parts for his Soviet-equipped army. The good news is that territories and resources once under Soviet protection are now available for conquest.

  Suddenly Mattis’s vision of maintaining a sea-based, highly mobile Marine Corps appears to be a vital component of American military power. Soon he will be called upon to integrate his vision into the doctrine of “maneuver warfare.” This will become America’s blitzkrieg, the shock and awe of the new fast and light footprint of American military power that Mattis will command on the battlefields of the Middle East.

  Now, with his master’s degree in military studies and rank of lieutenant colonel, Mattis takes command of the First Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment, the storied “First Team” once commanded by Marine Corps legend Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller and first made famous at the Battle of Bloody Ridge by legendary gunnery sergeant “Manila John” Basilone.5 The 1/7 is based at Twentynine Palms, California, the Corps’ primary training ground for desert warfare.

  In Baghdad, desperate for cash after eight years of fighting Iran and sponsoring Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon and Europe, Saddam engages neighboring Kuwait in a Melian Dialogue. He moves one hundred thousand of his most elite troops to the Kuwaiti border and then makes an offer that is elegantly simple and couched in the most innocuous diplomatic language. Kuwait will forgive the $14 billion in debt he borrowed to finance the Iranian war and give him another $1 billion in cash for the oil it had stolen by horizo
ntal drilling into his Rumayla oil fields. In return, Saddam will not invade and kill them all. The naive Kuwaitis respond that the offer is not fair. They seem to think he is negotiating. They insult him with a counteroffer of $9 billion.

  Checking his western flank first, on June 25, 1990, Saddam meets with American ambassador April Glaspie in Baghdad about Kuwait’s oil theft. The American ambassador also seems to believe Saddam is negotiating. Glaspie says that America is “inspired by the friendship and not by confrontation . . . we have no opinion on the Arab–Arab conflicts.” For further assurance, she says the United States does not intend “to start an economic war against Iraq.”6

  0200 Hours—2 August 1990—Kuwait-Iraq Border

  Saddam invades Kuwait with special forces and three elite Iraqi Republican Guard divisions. By midday of the first day, the poorly prepared Kuwaitis have run out of ammunition and are overrun. Kuwaitis who can escape over land or sea to Saudi Arabia or by air to Bahrain and Qatar, run for their lives. By nightfall Ali al-Salem Air Base is captured, and the Iraqi flag flies over the capital of Kuwait City.

  The Kuwaitis and Americans are both surprised. Like the ancient warriors of Athens, Saddam had not been negotiating. He had simply offered a reasonable choice. And like the militarily weak merchants of the island of Melos who rejected a similar Athenian offer, the Kuwaitis were crushed without mercy.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Colonel Mattis is about to lead the one thousand Marines of the 1/7 into harm’s way. They will be a vital part of the coalition of thirty-four nations, including regional rival Syria, and will lead the attack at the “tip of the spear” against Saddam’s battle-hardened, dug-in defenders in Kuwait City. As the first mission for a first-time battle commander, it is an ambitious trial by fire, one that forty-year-old Mattis has been preparing to face for over twenty years.