Posted on 01/25/2013 7:53:06 AM PST by Sub-Driver
Obama Fires Top General Without Even a Phone Call Daniel Halper January 25, 2013 10:26 AM
President Barack Obama fired General James Mattis, the head of Central Command, without even calling the general to let him know he was being replaced.
"I am told that General Mattis was travelling and in a meeting when an aide passed him a note telling him that the Pentagon had announced his replacement as head of Central Command. It was news to him -- he hadn't received a phone call or a heads-up from anyone at the Pentagon or the White House," Thomas E. Ricks reports.
In another post, Ricks says Mattis was fired because:
Pentagon insiders say that he rubbed civilian officials the wrong way -- not because he went all "mad dog," which is his public image, and the view at the White House, but rather because he pushed the civilians so hard on considering the second- and third-order consequences of military action against Iran. Some of those questions apparently were uncomfortable. Like, what do you do with Iran once the nuclear issue is resolved and it remains a foe? What do you do if Iran then develops conventional capabilities that could make it hazardous for U.S. Navy ships to operate in the Persian Gulf? He kept saying, "And then what?"
There is also a belief that Mattis and Obama differed on Iran. "A particular point of disagreement was what to do about mischief Iran is exporting to other countries. Mattis is indeed more hawkish on this than the White House was," writes Ricks in yet another post.
"National Security Advisor Tom Donilon in particular was irked by Mattis's insistence on being heard. I cringe when I hear about civilians shutting down strategic discussions. That is exactly what the Bush administration did in late 2002 when generals persisted in questioning whether it was wise to invade Iraq. That led to what some might call a fiasco."
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-Obama Fires Top General Without Even a Phone Call-
Ping.
.
Probably refused to fire on Americans...
Seems like the evidence keeps adding up.
5.56mm
The purge - American style.
Mine as well.
BM
Well, we did get rid of Saddam so Iran is more powerful now, if that means anything ;)
We need thesae guys to start speaking out.
Where is Gen Ham and the other General that were fired while Benghazzi was happening?
I've seen that going on around here, too. It's getting curiouser and curiouser.
On the lighter brighter side, gay officers won't have to worry about sending their potential battalion of lovers into combat - they can send young woman instead...
"Moms with no arms' can be a new liberal victim group... Oh forgot - liberals only protect elite liberal women... they don't care about everyday women like Paula Jones ... or young Privates. Liberal elites protect fragile women like Fluke and Anita Hill - women who are liberal lawyers...
Yay, now “we” can have him....along with all the others. They can keep all their butt boys and “we’ll” take the harda$$ boys with experience.
Unintended consequences. These people never learn, much to my delight.
Or he could be firing anybody that he thinks might stage a coup against him, should he go full metal Marxist on us.
Austin’s flag rank was from Sept 10, 2010 to December 2011 as Commander Iraq forces (after the combat missions were all over). This was an administrative role.
He was also vice chief of staff of XVIII Airborne Corps and then Commander (increased rank to LTGeneral).
This was a command once held by Hugh Shelton (whom some will remember as a watercarrier for clintons).
So from Vice Chief of Staff of the Army to CIC Centcom.
You do not promote a non-warrior to our Special Ops commander— this will not sit well. Of course McChrystal has nothing to say either.
“This kinda reminds me of the stuff Stalin did - just before WWII.”
‘Kind of’ reminds you? This is exactly what Stalin did (though with more “permanency,” if you know what I mean).
Now, all that are left are McCrystal clones... nothing more than Obama acolytes in uniform.
Here's a hint. One of Obama's fundraisers was Nemazee, a supporter of the Iranian regime who, after bundling loads of money to donate to Obama, got caught in in a fraud scandal- turns out his millions were fraudulently obtained from Bank of America and another bank I can't recall. He went to jail for it but he may be out now. He wasn't lobbying Obama to help Israel, obviously.
Then there's Obama's associate Antoin Rezco with the fishy Syrian connections. We know what country Syria's been linked with for ages. He went to jail too.
And we all knw what Obama did when Iran was undergoing the gree revolution- pretty much nothing.
As a matter of fact can anyone define America's policy regarding Iran at any time since 1981?
Up until 2004 it's been SOP to simply maintain a balance between Iraq and Iran, and a deep desire to not ruffle Iran's feathers so much that we can't buy oil from them indirectly, while still trying to prevent Iranian terror attacks. In the 90s we were on the hunt for Imad Muglniyeh, Iran's main player, but Clinton just couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger for fear he would end up with a Jimmy Carter style hostage crisis on his hands, so Clinton settled for simply muddling up every terrorist investigation by treating it as common criminal activity so as to avoid having to go after an actual state player like Iran or Iraq. His foreign policy was like Obama's - a simple desire to stay in power domestically overrode all foreign policy considerations, making US foreign policy look indecisive and impotent. The only time we had a fairly clear policy towards Iran was during the tanker war. Our policy was to use Iran to weaken Iraq and use Iraq to weaken Iran, since it was in our and indeed everyone's interest that those two countries be weakened, but due to the typical three-year attnetion span of the American people before post-Vietnam timidity complex sets in, nothing more assertive was ever done in order to avoid starting sokething the American people would not have the will to see through.
We sold them weapons for hostages,
It's true we sold them small arms, but not enough weapons for them to do much with, and the proceeds from said sale went not just to getting our people back but also towards attacking a Soviet-backed, palestinian terrorist-linked, narcoterrorist communist regime on our doorstep. There's something a bit amusing about using Iranian money to kill Sandinistas who were known for cooperating with palestinian terrorists to hijack airplanes, in exchange for weapons the Iranians could have procured anywhere and which they were going to use in their war wth Iraq, for whom we had no love, in any case. Iran went along with it not just because of the weapons, but because at the time the Soviets were making Iran very nervous in Afghanistan. Iran was no more a friend of the USSR than it had been under the Shah, and the USSR wasn't fond of Iran's new regime because the mullah's revolutionaries had backstabbed the communist revolutionaries before the communist revolutionaries had a chance to backstab the religious revolutionaries. If Iran could make life difficult for the Soviets in Nicaragua then that was less attention the Soviets could spare on ogling Iran's warm-water ports. All in all that was a mutually benefical sale, had it not been twiste and politicized by obama's wannabe future Secretary of State for the benefit of his friends the Soviets.
armed Saddam Hussein so he could slaughter them,
We did NOT arm Saddam Hussein, not even to kill Iranians. We sold Iraq UNARMED helicopters. If you looked at 2004'a post-invasion Iraq it wasn't American weapons found strewn about the countryside, it was Chinese, Eastern Bloc and French weapons. Iran at the time of the Iran-Iraq war in he 80s was firing on UNARMED civilian tankers. And as for slaughtering Iranians, Iran at that time was doing more to kill iranians than even Iraq by giving out little plastic keys to thousands of little Iranian children, telling them they were the keys to heaven, as they tied them together in large groups and sent them in rank after rank of human wave attacks against Iraqi lines, or to clear landmines.
Now, we did give Saddam Hussein the coordinates to Iran's nuclear sites, and Iraq did target those sites, which was not a bad thing at all, and slowed down the Iranian program, much as the Israeli strike on Iraq's nuclear sites crippled his program. All in all that worked out well.
buy their oil (oil for food scam),
It wasn't the buying of Iraqi oil that was the bad thing, had the sales been monitored by the UN as they were supposed to do it so as to insure that the goods Iraq bought with the money were actually going to feed Iraqis and not into the black market and into a warehouse near the port to rot, or to buy whiskey for Saddam Hussein while regular Iraqis were denied basics in order to use their malnutrtioned children as documentary material for western liberal producers toundermine the sanctions process. If anything , the use of sanctions to topple a regime rather than a straightforward speedy effort to assassinate a dictator in order to eliminate the regime is the problem, as sanctions only make the poor suffer for years and years while making the imposers of sanctions look as evil as the regime, and the regime only gets stronger, or at minimum is free for years to launch endless false flag operations against its opponents. The scam in the Oil for Food scandal was Saddam Hussein's use of oil vouchers to bribe media and politicians worldwide, and it was easy to figure out which politicians were on the take because those were the same politicians who were staunchly against war on Iraq. Oh, and the vouchers were used to buy off the UN, its top officials, a French Catholic priest who had a thing for singing protest songs against George Bush and making documentaries, and indirectly the former arms inspector and documentary maker Scott Ritter, who got himself all tangled up with the al Qaeda cell that operated out of Falls Church Virginia that was headed by al Timimi the Iraqi-American imam.
Sanctions were a cruel way for western politicians to do what could have been done through assassination, only in the case of an assassination, the media outcry would be far more loud for killing a ruling-class celebrity figure like Saddam Hussein than for simply letting a large number of unfortunate Iraqi nobodys slowly starve.
It's like the Buddhas in Afghanistan- the media never uttered a peep about the Taliban murdering thousands in the villages next to those statues, but they did raise all hell when the Taliban started destroying the statues. The world's elite could play at being sophisticated for being disturbed about the welfare of a cultural site but could not be bothered about the welfare of a bunch of sheep herders.
sell them technology (through third party countries),
As I recall the only sales of technology was by rogue smugglers, many of whom are in jail, and not by the US government, which jailed them, or caught their shipments. threaten them,
Threaten them with what, exactly? Iranian regime figures are second only to North Korea in making threats- from their very first baby words "Death to America" on up to the more sophisticated modern threats we have seen since they tried to attack US Navy ships with speed boats in the 80s, only to find they would need to install glass bottoms on their next class of speed boats in order to enjoy a view of their own Navy.
betray the people of Iran when they try to rise up,
Obama did do that. Of course, we're not sure who those rising up would turn out to be; it's possible we would just be enabling a communist regime to come to power over Iran instead of a bunch of freedom loving iranian patriots, which is what Carter was trying to do when he discovered that his much preferred communists could not hold on to power and were overwhelmed by jihadists led by mullahs. Of course, given that we are talking about Obama, I think he was afraid the protesters weren't sufficiently communist.
promise to negotiate,
No offense, but we have negotiated ad nauseum with Iran fore decades. Iran's never been serious, they have just been using negotiations as cover so they can continue stalling and training terrorists.
play footsie in the UN,
Iran plays footsie in the UN too, it is what the UN is for: a place politicians can -play footsie so they look serious in front of their constituency without ever actually having to be serious and make real decisions.
give them a Predator drone
I'm not sure we can prove that but it would not be the first time there has been reason to suspect our politicians have aided the enemy. The Loral thing in China was another, for which there was much more evidence presented that is yet lacking in the drone case, and even Reagan was accused of it too for selling supercomputers to Russia. It just turned out later that those supercomputers he sent to Russia were the ones responsible for taking out Russia's pipelines to Europe and really wrecking what was left of the Soviet economy. But the Russians would have been too suspicious to accept that trojan horse if no American hawks had made outcries against Reagan for doing it.
and get really serious with more sanctions. I don't know how anyone could disagree about Iran since no one has a position on Iran.
It is hard to tell what out real position is on Iran. at times they are coddled and cuddled and other times a computer virus which may be coming from us mucks up their nuclear enrichment efforts. Since the liberals don't have Iraq funneling oil vouchers their way any more, the "western world" would probably like to create some kind of oil for food thing with Iran to fill the gap, and to do that they need to be cozy with Iran, or else they could be nastier and demand payola for not doing stuxnet 2. we know liberal thought leans towards spreading nuclear technology to everyone for a sort of global MAD doctrine but I don't think the dems want to actually sign their names on Iran's "guest list" and be responsible for an Iranian islamic bomb. If you want to know what our policy is with regard to Iran maybe we should just ask the Qataris.
ROTFL
Mattis obviously did not believe in fighting war using only propaganda from Obama as ammunition, like all the other generals. Also rumor is that Mattis did not pass the Obama litmus test of promising to order fire on US citizens if required.
Yo, General Mattis, have a little respeck fo’ dat fascis’ president! “ Buahahahahahaha!
Mattis is a far better man than Obama ever will be.
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