Iraq: No Marine Killed after Major Hostilities Ended: Why?

Newshour ^ | Sep 26, 2003

[george wythe]

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS:

But we were out to win the trust of the Iraqi people. We knew we were an American foreign force, largely Christian force, and we occupied, for example, two of the holy cities of the Shiia. What we did not want to do was find ourselves in a position of creating a conflict. So I sent about 15,000 of my 23,000 men home. I got rid of all my tanks and armored personnel carriers. Marines went on dismounted patrols. We had wave tactics, waving to the people, assuming we were there as friends. Eventually that expectation paid off.

[Dead Dog]

Great, but he's not operating in the Sunni Triangle.

[PeterPrinciple]

"MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: We went into the attack with the motto that said no better friend, no worse enemy. 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. "

It appears they practiced what they preached.

[steplock]

How did you go about it? I read that you said one of your principles was do no harm. Describe that for us.

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: We went into the attack with the motto that said no better friend, no worse enemy. 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.


THAT is the answer - that garbage about not being somewhere else is a bunch of crap.

The key is let the enemy know up front that there will be consequences for their actions...

Marines are not their to give their lives for their country ... they are there to make the other SOB give up his life for his country.

[IGOTMINE]

No, he was operating with the Iranian influenced Shias instead.

Wouldn't have mattered. The Marine Corps carries a "don't mess with us" reputation, deserved or not. For instance while in Somalia I was invited to a lunch at the Italian compound. (I was 5'8", 160lbs. Alas I've experienced "mission creep" along my waist line.) Anyway I was accompanied by an Army staff sergeant, a terricially huge man that ran at least 6'4" and a solid 240. The Italian soldiers in the mess wouldn't take their eyes off me. Finally I asked my host what was wrong and he said, "You're a Marine. They're afraid of you."

[george wythe]

The key is let the enemy know up front that there will be consequences for their actions...

Correct.

If you read the whole interview, you noticed that he mentioned that plenty of battles were fought, and enemies were pulverized into oblivion.

Even though no Marines were killed, plenty of Marines were injured fighting the enemies out of their area. The Marines even had infiltrators from Iran and other nations causing trouble in their area.

The Marines had a two-prong campaign: great PR with the friendly local folks and plenty of ammo for the unfriendly people.

The friendly locals provided intelligence while the Marines were doing “medical assistance” visits to the local villages. The Marines knew that it was easier for a local to whisper a tip to a Marine visiting his village than for a local to travel to a Marine checkpoint to volunteer information.

[elbucko]

MARGARET WARNER: But are there not Shiite clerics and forces, I'm thinking of this fellow al Sadr, who, in fact, seem to want something different from what the U.S. says it wants, that they want more of a theocracy, less of a sort of democracy as we might know it. How potent do you think they are?

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Sadr is impotent. Sadr has no following. He gets more of a following in the international press than he gets inside Najaf. He is in an area where you are not considered to be a grown man until you're 40. He tries to tell people he is 29. In fact he is about 23 years old. He is just a guy with a very marginal following, and right now the people of Najaf don't even turn out for his sermons more than a couple hundred of them. He is simply not a big influence in the town.

The question and the answer say a lot about the the situation as it is presented and the situation as it is.

[TheGunny]

Is that the best you can do? You just had to make a post didnt you? Next time use an emory board to itch your fingers. Did you see the Video of the streets of Najaf when the Mosque was hit? Did it ever occur to you that the reason the Marines werent hit like in other places, was because they are Marines?

[Dead Dog]

Are you saying the 101st Airborne are that inferior?

[george wythe]

Instead of minimizing the Marines' accomplishment, we should learn from them.

The Marine Major General did an excellent job by all accounts; although he explains some of his successful tactics in this interview, he probably has even better tips for his fellow soldiers in private debriefing. This was not Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, but he brought all his men home alive.

He had infiltrators, truck bombs, paid terrorists, religious fanatics, etc in his area, so he did something right. He even sent many of his troops home.

[pageonetoo]

from a Navy guy, YEP...
give me a marine at my back any time! I only have to worry about what is in front of me!

[RaceBannon]

Mattis was a young Captain on my boat off Iran in 1980, he was a Grunt Commander then with 3/3

[mfulstone]

WHY?

Because they tell Marines, in boot camp, that it's not their job to get killed.

[donozark]

You and others here may have an interest in seeing this month's VFW MAGAZINE. A tribute to the "Beirut Marines" is given.

[Vets_Husband_and_Wife]

I pulled out some exerpts that I found of particular interest. I think I'll take the Generals words. We always bitched when the Presidents of past (Johnson) tried to run wars from behind desks. This time the Generals are running it and we think they are doing just fine! President Bush doesn't Micro manage..listening to Gen. Shelton and Gen. Tommy Franks they think he is doing things pretty close to perfect.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: We went into the attack with the motto that said no better friend, no worse enemy. 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.

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Yes, when soldiers walk into a city, and they're foreign soldiers, the first thing people are going to look at is all that gear and the weapons hanging off them. Generally the second place people look is into people's eyes, to see if they can trust them. So Marines removed their sunglasses and we tried to build the trust one act at a time. They learned quickly to trust us; they would even protest against us at times. On the suggestion of my Catholic chaplain, the marines would take chilled drinking water in bottles and walk out amongst the protestors and hand it out. It is just hard to throw a rock at somebody who has given you a cold drink of water and it's 120 degrees outside.

MARGARET WARNER: Now even during the stability ops as you called them, you are certainly, as you said, had some troops wounded. There were some attacks, but from what I read, it appeared you didn't go about frying trying to catch the "bad guys" again in the same way with big, big raids and a lot of firepower.

Is that right? How did you go about trying to roll up the people who were hostile to you and were out to get you?

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Well, I think both the First Marine Division and the 101st, Army's 101st Division up North did somewhat the same thing. We would use human intelligence, satellites do not give you what you need in this kind of a situation. They will not do that. But an Iraqi who trusts you will tell you where the bad guys are. The people we were out to get, we did not want to create enemies. Again, first do no harm. If you do a cordon around somebody's village, you are creating an adversarial relationship.

MARGARET WARNER: With the whole village.

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Exactly. But Margaret, if you go in on a medical assistance visit one day and someone takes you aside and says there's somebody in town who has RPG's, then we get precise intelligence and go there and take that one person down. So we try to go about doing this in a way that doesn't create additional problems and having trained up the Iraqi police, obviously they give us a lot of intelligence. On any given day over there, 95 percent of our intelligence comes from the Iraqi people. Many days it's 100 percent.

MARGARET WARNER: Now in your region, you did have some real intra-Iraqi violence, the most horrific incident of course was August 29 when there was that massive truck bomb, the very revered Shiite cleric was killed, more than 100 people. You had not been protecting that particular area out of deference to the Shiite cleric's sensibilities. Any regrets about that?

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Well, I don't think so. This is holy ground to them. They recognized the futility of trying to maintain the sacredness of it when you're up against criminals like this. And so we took Najaf police, who we had already trained, put them through three additional days of training about how you do screening of vehicles and now they have their own Najaf police in there taking care of them.

The point is that these criminals are just that. They're not a political threat. It is not like they get together and organize a political comeback. They're simply killers and they will kill as long as they can. So it's simply a police function to go after them backed up by the marines.

MARGARET WARNER: But are there not Shiite clerics and forces, I'm thinking of this fellow al Sadr, who, in fact, seem to want something different from what the U.S. says it wants, that they want more of a theocracy, less of a sort of democracy as we might know it. How potent do you think they are?

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Sadr is impotent. Sadr has no following. He gets more of a following in the international press than he gets inside Najaf. He is in an area where you are not considered to be a grown man until you're 40. He tries to tell people he is 29. In fact he is about 23 years old. He is just a guy with a very marginal following, and right now the people of Najaf don't even turn out for his sermons more than a couple hundred of them. He is simply not a big influence in the town.

MARGARET WARNER: Are you concerned about Iranian influence and meddling and trying to stir up, at least this element of the Shiite community? Or has that also been overblown here in Washington?

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: I don't know that it could be overblown because certainly there might be a motive there but we did not see it while we were over there. We would see them trying things, whether through Sadr or through some other people. And by and large, they did not get a big following. That's one of the reasons why the Hakim murder was so tragic.

Here was a moderate man trying to do something good for his people. So someone took him out. We think it was Baath Party, what we call kind of people who don't know where they want to go so -- a bunch of colorful names for them actually. But the bottom line is somebody went after him just because he was a man trying to make good for his people.

MARGARET WARNER: Now you mentioned that you sent a large part of your forces home, so you were running this huge area with what, eight or ten thousand troops. There's a big debate here in Washington about whether more troops are needed, particularly in that hostile region in the center. What is your view on that whole question of whether we need more troops?

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Well, I sent 15,000 home in May and I had three or four months to live with the decision. I never regretted it. I did not want a heavy boot print, a sense of oppression, everywhere you looked you saw a marine. If we needed more people over there, I wanted to enlist the Iraqis into our common cause and get on with turning the country back over to them.

That was completely consistent with the military and political guidance we were receiving and relatively straightforward to do because the Iraqi people want this. The last couple of weeks I was there, they were tugging on my sleeve saying can't we keep the marines longer? I reminded them when we first came there, they were not certain whether they wanted us there. They now wanted us to stay but I assured them the 22 nations that freed us up and allowed me to bring the rest of my troops home were going to take good care of them. I think it worked out without having the big troop lift there.

MARGARET WARNER: Final question for you. General Abizaid, the overall commander said just yesterday that he is pretty much given up hope, that wasn't his word, but that there is really going to be a lot in the way of foreign troops coming in to help replace other American troops. And Pentagon people are saying on background that that will mean calling up more reserves and sending marines back for really longer deployments. How do you feel about that?

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: It's no problem. That's what we are paid to do. I never had to deal with any low morale amongst my people. They knew what they were doing was good. I think right now though, that General Abizaid is a great soldier. He understands the area, and he is also allowing us to bring on the Iraqi security forces, and it may be that we can use Iraqi security forces that would free us up from this sort of thing.

MARGARET WARNER: General Jim Mattis, thanks.

MAJ. GEN. JAMES MATTIS: You're welcome.

[faithincowboys]

I am superstitous I guess, but I don't like when people talk about things like this. Inevitably we will not be able to say it soon, if we keep talking about it so much.

[river rat]

Actually, that doesn't explain the KIA/WIA figure for Marines.

In the Corps - it is a violation to fail..
If you're killed or wounded - that puts you in jeopardy of prosecution..
</ sarcasm> -- but just a little!

I actually heard a very violent redneck Gunny in Vietnam SWEAR he would write up charges against ANY Marine that bled or died while assigned to him....

I believed him!

Semper Fi

[91B]

I guess they don't teach any humility in Marine boot camp. You'd think that while the other guys were still doing the heavy lifting and all the dying that some of these jokers would have the common decency not to come on here and imply that those guys were somehow inferior because they have a different mission (and let's not even kid that the south is as dangerous as the Sunni controlled areas-otherwise I guess that the Italians, Poles, ROK and Danes are just as good as the Marines-they operate in the same areas and haven't taken any KIAs either).

[ASOC]

If I might posit

Posture is big thing.

Marine convoy goes out, every gun is up and out - even a dopehead can see you are picking a fight with a porcupine……Army convoy goes out, no guns showing - might be too aggressive or sum such sillyness.

Just for myself - I would want every piece out, locked and loaded - what the heck - don't go to a gunfight with a knife…..

Also
It IS OK to use a very large sledgehammer to crack a nut - the nut stays cracked and it does not hurt the hammer one bit.

YMMV

[M0sby]

Jokers???
Wow!
Amazing...

I guess the Marines invented the station that carried the interview... possibly even Wrote the title... maybe they even LIED and LOTS of Marines were killed.

Ya know.. I ave a friend who's daughter is in the Army in Iraq. She says that she is afraid to go out on conoys with her unit because SHE feels that their Cpt has ulterior motives, does not think about the situation very well before hand and could give a @(#$@# about his troups.. she has many friends who say the same thing...(no they are NOT all women)

Yes their are MANY, Many, Many great units in the GIANT sandbox-Lots of whom are NOT Marines...
However their are a lot of REALLY badly prepared KIDS out their with some goofball leaders..

The MARINES did not write the artice...
Nor are they Jokers..