PunkAssBlog.com

A few days ago, Tiny Revolution linked to abb1, who pointed out that Lt. Gen. James Mattis is now the top Marine general in US Central Command. Part of his new job will be to decide if charges are warranted in the Haditha massacre.

Abb1 also linked to a CNN article from last year featuring the words of Mattis himself:

“Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot,” Mattis said, prompting laughter from some military members in the audience. “It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

Whitehouse.org has a hilarious fictional Q&A with the man, but the NRO wasn’t laughing at the criticisms directed at Mattis after his comments:

The context of the comments makes clear that Gen. Mattis was having some fun and playing to his audience. My criticism of Gen. Mattis is that he forgot that he wasn’t trying to inspire his Marines but was instead addressing a civilian group with press present. We wouldn’t want the ladies of the press getting a case of the vapors, now, would we?

In 2003, Mattis conducted an interview with PBS. Some of his comments (emphasis mine):

We were going to try to avoid adversarial relationships and we were going to try to remain friendly one week longer, one day longer, one hour longer than perhaps some of the people who distrusted us coming in might have expected. And that’s worked out pretty well.
[…]
So if you want to be our friend, we’ll be the best friends you ever had. If you want to fight us, you’re going to regret it.
[…]
We had wave tactics, waving to the people, assuming we were there as friends. Eventually that expectation paid off.
[…]
But I would tell you that already they are running the things that are most important to people. Are the street lights on? Is the neighborhood safe? These kinds of things are already in their hands with the marines very much in the background.

It’s reassuring to know a man who had such a clear grasp of how well the war was going in 2003, who has such respect for human life, calls the shots these days, isn’t it?