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Mattis on the Marines: Pendleton commander upbeat about morale, progress in Iraq
By: North County Times - | ∞
Marine Lt. General James N. Mattis during an interview held at Camp Pendleton on Dec. 20.
JAMIE SCOTT LYTLE Staff Photographer
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On Wednesday, North County Times reporter Mark Walker sat down for an exclusive interview with Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, commanding general of Camp Pendleton's I Marine Expeditionary Force and commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Central Command.
Here are a few excerpts from that conversation:
On the conditions in Iraq:
Mattis: The situation in al-Anbar, which is the Marine area, it's a cancer on Iraq. ... But al-Anbar does not have the sectarian violence that the rest of the country has. It's the Sunni triangle. In fact, the only area that has any significant Shia in it is an area on the eastern side and we have no sectarian violence. Interestingly enough, it's an area with Sunni and Shia living side by side, and we have no significant violence, I couldn't tell you why.
Fallujah is considered to be so changed for the better that Sunni fleeing out of Baghdad are going to Fallujah now. Who would have thought that two years ago? It sounds almost bizarre.
But unlike the sectarian violence elsewhere, it is al-Qaida in Iraq that the Marines fight. That said, after the second election, where for the first time Sunnis voted in very large numbers, al-Qaida moved in the area and basically declared war on the nationalist groups there. And the tribes realized they bought in with the wrong people.
What we are seeing now is a significant shift in the tribes. They are coming over. How does this manifest itself? How is it more than just my words? The Sunni sheiks are having their young guys join the Iraqi police. The reason is they will go to their local areas after they go to training academies in various countries outside of Iraq and they return, when they come back, they go back to their home areas.
So you've got the tribes shifting over, their kids joining the police. You've got the Iraqi army and the Iraqi security forces today, they are probably running around, about 52 percent of the casualties in our medical treatment facilities are Iraqi security forces. Which says something about the nature of the fight and the nature of the Iraqi troops who are now represented among the casualties. It's one way to indicate whether or not they are really in the fight or not.
So these are significant shifts right now. And the transition teams and the Marines who are over there, fighting in a very lethal area where the efforts have been unrelenting, have basically achieved successes that we would not have anticipated this early in this process.
Our strategy approach to this remains pretty much the same. This is the U.S. approach: Get the security situation under control, the violence down. Get the Iraqi security forces trained and picking up more of the load. And third, assist and facilitate the Iraqi government becoming capable of meeting needs of the people. These things happen fast.
But if there's one point I would make strongly, it is this, Mark: that violence and progress can and do coexist. You see the blasts, you see the IEDs, you see the cameras on them out there. And that is a legitimate point.
But it is interesting to see in the background people driving by, looking at it the way we look at a car accident. Kids with backpacks on their backs walking by and looking at the blast site, but life is going on.
A third province today was just turned over to Iraqi control. Now that's not going to be happening in al-Anbar anytime soon; I don't want to put lipstick on a pig and say everything is hunky-dory, but that said, the tribes coming over, the transition of authority, the growing capability of Iraqi security forces in terms of police and army, that sort of thing, the conditions we are seeing over there are specifically that we are winning.
Now I realize that when you see the amount of violence going on and the amount of criminal activity going on, it's easy to just throw up your hands and say, 'Gosh, you know, this just isn't working,' or at best, 'We're going sideways, we're not going forward.'
But the fact is, this is hard stuff. A lot of hard work has been done, a lot of hard work remains, and if this is important, then we've got to do it. And the fact is that our troops coming home from overseas sense that they are part of something important and they are making progress.
Reporter: As we go forward, do you see that the deployment schedule will be increased?
Mattis: You know, we are at war and the enemy gets a vote in this thing. If the enemy makes a press, a full-court press, and we have to react, we would shrink the dwell (the time troops spend between deployments). It's whatever it takes. But we, what we will not do is permit the enemy an initiative that we don't check him on.
Reporter: How, in your view, can stability be achieved at this point?
Mattis: I think we continue what we're doing. It doesn't happen overnight. There's been a lot of work done, like I said, there's a lot of work left to do, hard work.
I think what we have to do is continue using American troops as a bulwark, as a shelter break behind which to stand up the Iraqi security forces who are standing up, like I said, to the point where they are taking over half the casualties now in al-Anbar, and giving, behind this shelter break, the very shallow roots of this Iraqi democracy, imperfect as it is, the chance to move forward.
Now is Iraq going to look like Switzerland with its cantons of French-speaking Catholics and German-speaking Lutherans? No, it's not. But it can look a lot more stable than it is today, and get it down to a point where the Iraqi security forces can handle it.
How long? I think it'll take five years and what you will see over those five-year period is declining U.S. force levels, declining U.S. casualty levels, declining enemy effectiveness.
When you look at how reconciliations, for example, between Sunni, Shia, peshmerga, this is going to happen. I look at South Africa in the wake of apartheid, I look at Northern Ireland. These things take time. And so this is part of what has to happen. There has to be a natural reconciliation.
I've noticed some good things seem to be going on right now along those lines, and I think with the hydrocarbon law, the sharing of the oil profits, there's reasons why more people can say, 'Well, this is in my best interest.' So I think overall, there is reason to be optimistic right now, but I am under no illusions about the difficulty of the task we have. We removed Saddam Hussein and these tensions were allowed to come to the surface. And we are not willing to be a police state with all the ramifications of that.
If all we wanted to do was turn out an army over there, an Iraqi army that wanted to go out and murder everybody over there, we could do that literally in a couple of weeks and go home. But we are not going to do that. You have to teach forces to use ethical levels of force, and that's a lot more difficult.
On the status of Marines:
Mattis: Obviously we can sustain the current deployment tempo indefinitely, but do we think this the healthiest thing to do, for the force? We think not, not healthy in terms of equipment, training readiness, family readiness.
But that said, let me give you the story of one battalion because it kind of encapsulates what we are seeing with our most deployed units and units that frequently take, that always take the most casualties, the infantry battalions. I kind of use them as a canary in the mineshaft for this topic.
Second battalion, 5th Marines invited me up to speak at a birthday ball here, last November 10, in Las Vegas. Young battalion, infantry battalion, these are the young guys who go toe to toe, they go out hunting for the enemy. They don't sit inside Forward Operating Bases, they don't guard things, they're out on the roads.
They are going to Ramadi, the key terrain in Al-Anbar. Fallujah has always gotten a lot of press, and rightfully so, it's the scene of some rather murderous fighting, but al-Anbar's key terrain is the provincial capital of Ramadi. This battalion has been there before.
Their young men have re-enlisted at nearly double the rate that they were expected to. In other words, each unit has a certain number to give the commander an idea of what we need them to re-enlist at, and I think they doubled it, or very close to doubled it.
But more importantly, 170-odd Marines decided to extend their enlistment to return to Ramadi with their battalion. They aren't going to make the Marine Corps a career, they're going to get out and go to school and go on with their lives, but you can't buy that level of commitment, and this is not being done by a bunch of novices.
These are combat veterans who have been to Ramadi before, and know its alleyways and know the enemy in that area. These are not people who are unaware of the danger in a decision such as this.
So what we have is a force where we currently see the lowest rates of misconduct and desertion as long as we've been keeping the statistics. Spousal abuse is declining, going downward, drug abuse continues to hover at very, very low levels. Our re-enlistment rates are at all-time highs, and the quality of what we are bringing in to the re-enlisted force, if these are the Marines that are able to re-enlist, most of them are coming out of the top half of that cohort.
Further, our recruiters, many of them NCOs home from their second tour in Iraq, are going out and working upwards of 80- and 85-hour workweeks. But we have not had to lower our quality standards. The point I want to make here is: They are having to work much harder in order to get parent support for the enlistment, that sort of thing, but for some reason, we are able to maintain this very high quality force without any lowering of standards, and I won't go into any other services' situations.
On the preparedness of Marines:
Reporter: Let's talk about something I know you have been intimately involved with. Has the cultural training and the awareness of the Marines in Iraq progressed to the point where you are comfortable in their ability to carry out the mission at hand? Are we making the significant kinds of progress we talked about in August, in terms of really reaching the Iraqi people?
Mattis: I don't think we're at the point we need to be at. ... I think the cultural training, I mean we are so advanced from what we were doing three years ago, it's night and day, there's no comparison. We are doing much better now, but I will never be satisfied with it, is the bottom line. We will always be improving on it, the anthropological aspects of the preparation of the troops, where we will continue to be a priority, confident that we have prioritized it properly. We are fighting wars amongst the people. It's not industrial wars anymore and so you can never do enough.
It's all improving. I was talking to a transition team over in Habiniya here last week when I was there. We were talking about how they were coming to the end of their tour, they had been there for just about a year, and they talked about a new transition team that was just a couple miles away and they had come down to meet 'em and they had come in and taken the place of a team they had worked alongside for many months.
And they said the new team had such better language skills, that they were already making connections with their Iraqi soldiers ... at a level that this team was still not. And this was a team that had the books, they had the tapes, they had been put through it.
On the media coverage in Iraq:
Mattis: I was talking to a lieutenant in Haditha, he told me that because they are now all connected nowadays in their FOBs, he could read stories about Haditha. He said, 'I guarantee you there has not been a reporter in Haditha in my last two and a half months here.'
We're seeing, I think, an unwitting passing of the enemy's message, uncritical, unwitting passing of the enemy's message because the enemy has successfully denied the Western media access to the battlefields.
I'm not sure what Lloyds of London is charging now, I think it's over $5,000 a month insurance for a reporter or photographer to go in. But the murder, the kidnapping, the intimidation means that, in many cases, we have media folks who are relying on stringers who are Iraqi.
Now you can have any kind of (complaint) about the American media or Western media you want, but there is at least a nod, an effort toward objectivity. The stringers who are being brought in, who are bringing in these stories, are not bringing that same degree of objectivity.
So on the one hand, our enemy is denying our media access to the battlefield, where anything perhaps that I say as a general is subject to any number of interpretations, challenges, questions, but the enemy's story basically gets there without that because our media is unable to challenge them. It's unwitting, but at the same time, it can promote the enemy's agenda, simply because there is an apparent attempt at objectivity.
Reporter: Would you like to see more Western media there then?
Mattis: Oh, we would be happy to have more Western media out there. We've had Al-Jazeera out with our troops.
On the number of troops:
Mattis: Well, we caveat it all by saying we do not want to lower the quality standards of the Marine Corps, we are not going to do that.
So we have to put more NCOs out on recruiting and those are pulled from the combat force; you don't create an NCO overnight. So I think right now that I'd have to defer because this issue is actually in play right now in Washington to the commandant. With that said, the richest country in the history of this planet can afford survival.
And I think that when we look at the fact that we have fought the war for several years now using basically supplementals to give us a few extra Marines over a peace-time insufficient, admittedly insufficient strength, it's time to get the wartime focus in the Marine Corps balanced, and this obviously means somewhere in excess of 180,000 Marines, and could be. I'm not giving you the full answer there, Mark, and I regret that it's active, between the president, the commandant, the chairman, the new SecDef, I'd rather not say something that could perhaps pre-empt or contradict (them).
You have to be careful of just deciding to throw numbers at something, quantity at something, I think what we are all saying is that you need to think this problem is out there. I've talked to (Marine Maj.) Gen. (Richard C.) Zilner (the I Marine Expeditionary Force commander), I asked him if he needed more troops; he said the first thing he needs is more Iraqi troops.
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Randy wrote on Dec 24, 2006 2:03 AM:LBJ poured troops into Vietman. Did the surge result in a favorable outcome in the Far East? There is no reason to believe that a troop surge in Iraq, in and of itself, will result in a favorable outcome in the Middle East. The time for a troop surge was 4 years ago. Now is not the time for a troop surge.
Bill wrote on Dec 24, 2006 9:40 AM:It seems like the Bush Administration likes to put key people in place who will tell them what they want to hear and not what they need to hear. We need more Marines Officers like Gen Conway and LtGen Mattis leading the way. I agree, we do need more troops, Iraqi troops, not Americans.
Bob wrote on Dec 24, 2006 8:16 PM:Do you realize how rare this article is? Ever since the Col. Devlin report was leaked in November, I've watched for information about Anbar province. There is hardly anything other than reports of the killing of American military personnel. I just did a "Google search" and this article was the only one that offered any information about how things are going. This part seems important: "So these are significant shifts right now. And the transition teams and the Marines who are over there, fighting in a very lethal area where the efforts have been unrelenting, have basically achieved successes that we would not have anticipated this early in this process." Surely people in the military, the administration and the news media can provide more information to the American public about the flow of events, not simply the number of deaths today, this week or this month. Thanks for publishing one such bit of information.
MorallyRight1 wrote on Dec 26, 2006 4:13 AM:It is odd that there was no conversation or exchange on the two biggest media events to his Camp Pendleton in recent years: Hamdania and Haditha.
Opinion Editor Denis Devine wrote on Dec 26, 2006 2:40 PM:To "MorallyRight1": Mark Walker and Gen. Mattis did discuss Hamdania and Haditha. Due to the limited space, time and quality of the recording, I chose not to include those excerpts in this transcript. However, some of Gen. Mattis' comments were incorporated into this story: Prosecutors file murder, dereliction of duty charges in Haditha case
RileyAZ wrote on Dec 27, 2006 4:53 AM:When confronted with facts delivered by a person who knows, your commentators above revert to form for the uninformed- attack the message, the messenger and anyone else in the area. Vietnam? Biggest media events? Let's try to see the threat that is not the one that was, or the .001% (Mi Lai or Haditha) and not abandon a necessary completion of the mission.
Mount-Union82 wrote on Dec 27, 2006 5:04 PM:I really enjoyed this article and the General's honest and fairly comprehensive assessment of the situation in Iraq. What was most striking to me his admission of the notion that violence can progress can co-exist. the two are not mutually exclusive states of being. This is a notion that many people can't seem to grap (or refuse to try and grasp). I suspect, mostly due to partisan political perspective, more than anything based in substantive reality of those who have an understanding of the details. Thanks for this refreshing perspective. We simply don't have the opportunity to have these perspectives aired out in the major media outlets.
David wrote on Dec 27, 2006 9:41 PM:It's a closed mind that causes someone to read a transcript and complain that they don't see the words printed that they wanted to see.
Richard wrote on Dec 28, 2006 2:36 AM:I only scanned your article but it seems to me we are not using the right tactics. As a former Infantryman, it is my opinion that we need to get tougher with the Iraqis. The main weapon that al quida is using to kill our troops is the IED booby traps. And why do we not do what is necessary to stop these IED's? Everyone knows these come from Iran and are stored somewhere in Bagdad and other al quida villages. What is needed is a stronger effort to find these explosives and stop them from coming into Iraq. The Border Guard needs to be strengthen and use of more electronic devices and better searches of vehicles. Why do we need any traffic from Iran or Syria? Use the drones! I suggest a permanent Dusk to Dawn Curfew and restrict movement of people during the night. With shooting if they don't submit to arrest during the Curfew. Changing the Rules of Engagement so that Grenades can be used on rooms that don't answer and surrender. House to House Searches by cordoned off neighborhoods. With out these tactics the IED's will continue to kill our troops. These people are not our friends and never will be. They need to be subdued so their government can succeed. Clean out the neighborhoods one by one and extend the cordon to the edge of the village or city and intensify the searches of vehicles. The explosives are coming in somewhere. And, it needs to be stopped.
Kudos wrote on Dec 28, 2006 7:01 AM:This was a really good article and a great format (no "filtering"). Hopefully this informed explanation will reach a wide audience. It's also worth noting in light of the accusations against the Marines at CP that Mattis himself was "counseled" (which probably killed his shot at Commandant) for telling his troops in Afghanistan that sometimes it's "fun to kill people." Not to rehash that incident, but this guy has been around the block from a variety of angles, and his assessments are highly credible.
Stan wrote on Dec 28, 2006 5:46 PM:I served as a company commander for then Lt. Col Mattis during the Gulf War, and it is inspiring to see a level-headed, realistic appraisal of the current situation in Iraq. He rightfully points out that we need to expand our horizon to years, not months, if we are to hope for a positive outcome in Iraq. Hopefully, the national command authority will see what an asset this officer is for the country, and place him in command of CENTCOM.
AW4cryinoutloud wrote on Dec 31, 2006 4:45 AM:I was impressed by General Mattis' comments about "an unwitting passage of the enemy's message." Also his admission that because of intimidation we have media relying on 'stringers' who are Iraqi; stringers without some degree of objectivity; which was being polite as far as I can see. What I don't understand is that, with the knowledge the General has of this, WHY have there been 7 Marines and 1 Navy Corpsman persecuted by their own media and military in the Hamdania incident? WHY are there now at least 8 Marines being persecuted by their own media and military in the Haditha incident? This General seems to have a lot of courage. Perhaps he could spread some of it around to those who have turned their backs on their own.
Support Our Oops wrote on Dec 31, 2006 9:36 AM:Mattis' most revealing phrase is: "I don't want to put lipstick on a pig and say everything is hunky-dory, but...we are winning." This guy is living in the same delusional state as Bubble Boy, who will, undoubtedly, order a "surge" this month, against all the best advice given to him, and set a new record in January for American deaths in Iraq, while accomplishing absolutely nothing.
John1 to Oops wrote on Jan 2, 2007 1:10 AM:Mattis isn't delusional. He may be many things, but that isn't one of them. A surge would only work if we didn't handcuff our troops by making them act in a manner for which they are not trained and for which they are nothing but sitting ducks.
Sam wrote on Jan 2, 2007 4:46 AM:The General said: "violence and progress can and do coexist" Yes they can. Some of the hardest fighting and highest American deaths per day in the war against Japan came right before the end of the war. We are winning in Iraq, we just have to win here at home to give the military the time to finish the job.
To all in denial wrote on Jan 2, 2007 12:46 PM:The war, thanks to our civilian leaders, has been prosecuted worse than the Katrina relief effort. Read teh book Fiasco for an eye-popping account of some of the worst incompetence ever offered by an administration.
Julia wrote on Jan 2, 2007 3:44 PM:Where was the American mediaīs objectivity when this adventure in Iraq started? It was a feckless media that went along for the ride. The Iraqis were invaded, their country occupied, their police and army disbanded and their entire civil service fired. So the result was chaos? America hasnīt the guts to rule Iraq properly, yet it lacks the guts to leave. Iraq was driven on to the rocks, so let the Iraqis at least report on the price they are paying.
mark wrote on Jan 3, 2007 11:11 PM:well at any rate as far as i can tell Gen Mattis you are going to have the next two years to get things right. Then sanity will prevail and the plug will be pulled.
Samantha wrote on Jan 3, 2007 11:58 PM:To "MorallyRight1": So is it your point that the Pendleton 8 and the Haditha incident Marines, if found guilty, define the war and the Marines as a whole? Tisk.. tisk.. To "To all in denial": So what would satisfy you as to the proper execution of this war? Your hatred for the present administration, rather than facts, seems to color you opinion. To "Julia": You have absolutely no idea of what is going on in Iraq, Iran, Somalia or Afghanistan. You have no idea of the relationship there or how it will impact your freedom in the future. Got any comments on the uranium ore being supplied to Iran from Somalia, or do you have a clue? You have been spoon fed by an incompetent media and are too lazy to do your own research or thinking. To "Support Our Oops": If you were half the man LtGen Mattis is, if you had half the compassion, half the knowledge, well, then you might make a little sense. You too, have absolutely NO IDEA of what is going on in Iraq and your comments are also colored by your hatred for our President and not by anything cogent. Could any of you detractors carry the weight on your shoulders that is carried by both LtGen Mattis or President Bush? I doubt it. Now then, I don't always agree with our President, but those of you who denigrate the LtGen do not know the man or the job he is tasked to do. I dare say none of you are up to doing either job, leading the 1st MEF or the country, and so why should your bs mean anything?
Citizen wrote on Jan 5, 2007 7:06 AM:Corrections in response to "Richard" the former infantryman. Point 1, Al Qaida doesn't equal Iraqi's. As LtGen Mattis referenced, there are two separate conflicts going on: 1) the sectarian violence between the Shia's and Sunni's in the East, and the Al Qaida insurgency in the West. For the record, you are the only person who knows that IEDs are coming from Iran and being stored in Bagdad. You may also know that farmers in Iowa don't actually grow their own corn, but rather have it shipped in from diamond mines in Ethiopia. Throughout his reign Sadam stock piled munitions on a scale that riviled Amelda Marcos' zeal for shoes. Because he feared immediate invasion everywhere, he scattered the stuff everywhere. Coalition forces have worked non-stop for years to locate and clean up all the piles of munitions. The stuff isn't "coming in from somewhere" it was there long before we got there. This nations technical and tactical effort to defeat the use of IEDs has been on a scale, cost and tempo comparible to the Manhattan Project. Also, since you only scanned the article, you apparently missed the numerous references LtGen Mattis made to "the tribes coming over" to our side, our turning the mission over to the Iraqi's and the absurdity of reinstalling the police state you assert is the only way to get the job done. Not sure how treating an entire population like convicts, while lobbing grenades into rooms that are as likely to occupied by terrified children as by terrorists is going to get us closer to achieving our goals. If you are offended because these people aren't our friends, you miss the point; its in our nations very strong interest to have them as an ally; not a despotic ally like the Shah of Iran, but a true ally with the national will to support the global war on terror. Ask a Marine of any rank who has served with LtGen Mattis and they will testify that they would follow him anywhere. That is not loyalty for loyalty's sake. As a former infantryman, you know that loyalty in combat is directly proportional to your confidence in a persons ability. Its conceit that leads you to believe that while you only have time to scan the words of LtGen Mattis, while you then have the time to provide readers with your opinion. Its up to you Rich, but you might consider whether in the future, your time might be better spent actually reading an article, then keeping your thoughts to yourself.
Support Our Oops wrote on Jan 5, 2007 8:39 PM:Poor, poor Samantha has been living in the rubber room of Faux News and Rush Limbaugh for too many years. As if she even had the slightest clue about what's really been going on in Iraq. Perhaps she thinks our inspectors found a stockpile of WMDs? That Saddam was allied with Al Queda? That he was preparing to launch ICBMs full of chemical, biological and nuclear warheads at the USA? That we just couldn't wait to invade before the Saddam "smoking gun" arrives in the form of a mushroom cloud? Apparently, she fell and perhaps is still falling for all of those outrageous, toxic lies, and anyone who questions or criticizes any of her heroes gets the same pathetic pablum from her - "you're not man enough to do their job". How dense.
John CO wrote on Jan 11, 2007 11:42 AM:Samantha and Citizen are right on the money. Those such as "support our oops" do nothing but spout the same talking points and false arguements as many liberals in the "Hate the President Now" crowd. Give up and pull out so they can truly blame the President for losing. Disregard all facts such as we have the highest reenlistment rates of combat veterans and that those of all ranks in the military want to complete the job and stabilize Iraq. Oops also ignores the fact that some in the media and his kind give aid and comfort to the enemy by their "lose at all costs before it is even half-time" mentality. I spoke with then Maj Gen Mattis several times in OIF I on several occasions and he came across as the kind of Marine leader I and several of my air wing cohorts would follow in combat anytime.
Ray L wrote on Apr 16, 2007 12:03 AM:Those who look to Vietnam as a comparison to support an argument against a "surge" and to support a pull out need to read about the Vietnam War. Vietnam fell to North Vietnam tanks when Congress cut the funding to support the South Vietnamese government. The additiona troops poured in to support a "cat and release" land police that was a failure. Neither should happin in Iraq. The new Iraqi strategy is a clear hold buid strategy that Vietnam never tried. But if Pelosi cuts funding, the Iraq will fall like Vietnam, and the US will have to live with 2 failure and the mockery of the world.
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