Generation Shill

This spring marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq - and the inauguration of a new era of American fraud

- SPENCER ACKERMAN

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, recognising that flattening the City of Mosques would throw gasoline on a smouldering nationwide insurrection. But he followed White House-pushed orders to invade, and after roughly a week of intense urban fighting - leaving 39 US 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."