LEGENDARY MARINE GENERAL CONDEMNED DONALD TRUMP, SUPPORTED BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTERS.

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"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."

That's just one of the raw but true violent military aphorisms made famous by retired four-star Marine Gen. Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis. He said it to Iraqi tribal leaders after invading Iraq in 2003. Most followed his advice. A few in Fallujah didn't. 

Mattis served 41 years in the Marine Corp before retiring in 2013. He fought in the Gulf War, projected the longest amphibious assault in Marine history into Afghanistan after 9/11 and led American forces in the Iraq War, liberating Baghdad from dictator Saddam Hussein. He ended his Marine career as head of U.S. Central Command.

Now 73, Mattis has been called universally beloved, legendary, most popular and revered, esteemed, the most celebrated Marine general of his generation and a sometimes gruff, opinionated leader who isn't afraid to tell it like it is. 

Mattis did not respond to an emailed invitation to speak about Israel's strategy in Gaza, but the veteran general's view on precisely the kind of war Israel is waging against the Palestinians is expressed in his 2019 memoir, Call Sign Chaos. 

In brief, according to the Gospel of Mattis, Israel's conventional military attack on the Gaza Strip is morally and militarily wrong—even if it is to avenge Hamas's 7 Oct. attack, which killed about 1,200 Israeli soldiers, police and civilians .

Instead of "eliminating" Hamas, Israel's scorched-earth tactics are only going to grow Hamas and guarantee perpetual war—as Raphael S. Cohen, the Rand Corporation's Senior Political Scientist, warned 19 Oct. 2023 in a report headlined, "The Inevitable, Ongoing Failure of Israel's Gaza Strategy."

As of 9 Mar., Israel has killed 30,960 Palestinians, half of which are women and children. Israel claims more than 13,000 were combatants, according to the Times of Israel. 

The American public knows Mattis best from his time serving as former Pres. Donald Trump's Secretary of Defense. He resigned when Trump ordered American troops withdrawn from Syria in 2018.

Mattis refused to publicly criticize Trump at the time, and continued to stay mum even in his memoir. But after Trump ordered police to beat peaceful protesters demonstrating against the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, and threatened to unleash the American military on them, Mattis finally opened fire on Trump.

“'Equal Justice Under Law' are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court," the veteran Marine general's 2 1/2-page long broadside began. "This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind."

"Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try," Mattis wrote. "Instead he tries to divide us."

"We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort," Mattis added. "We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership."

Another one of Mattis's nicknames is "Warrior Monk" because he likes to read and never married. 

That changed in 2022, when he married Christina Lomasney on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington, where they're both from and still live. They were married a second time by an Elvis impersonator at the Little Church of the West in Las Vegas days later. 

Hours after the 7 Oct. attack by Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swore revenge and immediately started bombing Gaza.

"We will take mighty vengeance for this wicked day," Prime Minister Netanyahu said that night.

"I say to the residents of Gaza," Netanyahu added, "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere."

But the Palestinians could not leave Gaza because there was no place for them go. They are literally trapped between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: surrounded by Israeli walls and mine-fields on three sides and the Mediterranean Sea on the fourth. (Egypt controls a small stretch of border with Gaza's western border, but largely keeps it shut for fear Israel will use it as one-way valve to enforce the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.)

In effect, Gaza is a giant 141-square mile open-air prison. 

"We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared in a video published 9 Oct. on X, formerly known as Twitter. "There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed."

"We are fighting against human animals, and are acting accordingly," Gallant added.

In 2004, Gen. Mattis was in charge of Marine forces in Western Iraq when foreign fighters and local anti-American militia captured, murdered, burnt and dismembered four American mercenaries working for Blackwater. The rebels hung the charred remains of two of them from a bridge. Video and still photographs of the grisly scene were broadcast and published around the world.

American political leaders were swamped with emotional calls for vengeance by the public, the press and other politicians. Pres. George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered those calls, Mattis wrote. They wanted to kill whoever did it. 

So did Mattis. But Mattis diverged with Bush and Rumsfeld on the best way to get the job done. Satiating public bloodlust wasn't a legitimate military objective. 

"Great nations don't get angry," Mattis wrote in Chaos. "Military action should be undertaken only to achieve specific strategic effects."

In addition, a "battle inside a city would inflict horrendous damage on noncombatants," Mattis recognized. That "would unify the residents against us."  

Finally, American war-fighting doctrine was dead-set against it. Military doctrine is the military's version of literary canon. Its a body of formalized, institutional military knowledge forged in the merciless crucible of combat.

Doctrine made it a strategic mistake "to treat the problem of Fallujah like a conventional war," Mattis wrote. 

The gunmen in Fallujah were insurgents fighting an insurgency. Insurgencies are different, the U.S. learned in Vietnam. 

Insurgents don't wear uniforms and stand on a battlefield waiting to fight. They wear civilian clothes, use guerilla tactics like ambushes, snipers and bombs, and hide among a civilian population—which international law says you can't indiscriminately kill because that makes you a war criminal. 

The outcome of insurgencies are governed by a special set of rules generals call "Insurgent Math." That means if you kill one civilian, you create 10 new insurgents. Even if you kill an insurgent and manage not to kill any civilians you still create more insurgents.

"There are more likely to be as many as 20, because each one you killed has a brother, father, son and friends, who do not necessarily think that they were killed because they were doing something wrong," U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal explained at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 2009. 

That makes "the calculus of military operations very different," McChrystal explained.

Given Insurgent Math, rational counterinsurgency war-planning relies on the discriminate use of force instead of its indiscriminate use. For example, targeted kidnappings and killings instead of a conventional all-out combined arms assault. Snipers instead of artillery. A single missile strike instead of 500-pound bombs. Special Operations squads instead of mechanized infantry battalions. 

Mattis's battle plan for killing the murderers of the American mercenaries in Fallujah incorporated Insurgent Math. Instead of using indiscriminate conventional force, he would use discriminate unconventional forces to kill the killers one-by-one.

"We would learn the identities of the ringleaders." Then "we would deliver justice by the discriminate use of force." 

That meant "we would respond with raids at times of our choosing. I would employ, to quote Napoleon, 'an iron first in a velvet glove.'"

"The generals above me," Mattis said, “agreed with my plan."

But Pres. Bush didn't. He ordered Mattis "to attack" Fallujah "in force."

In the end, after two battles, for every insurgent the Marines claimed they killed they killed at least one civilian: about 1,200 total. Half of those killed were women and children. They also damaged 60% of Fallujah’s buildings and outright destroyed 20%.

Now, 20 years later, with more lethal tactics learned in those battles, and with more lethal weapons, the Israelis repeated the same strategic mistakes in Gaza that Pres. Bush did in Fallujah. So far, the cost of those mistakes has been more than 30,000 Palestinians killed and the total destruction of about half of Gaza. 

Still, no matter how many Palestinians it kills, Israel's military-based strategy is doomed to fail. Insurgent math dictates a political solution, not a military one. 

Only America has the power to break the cycle of violence. Only America can impose on Israel and the Palestinians a "diplomatic" two-state solution. 

If it doesn't, the cycle of mass-murder and generational hatred will continue forever—or until one side is totally annihilated. That's called genocide. 

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