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(Bloomberg) — Iran is ramping up negotiations as signs gather that it’s closer to ending a showdown with Europe over the wobbling 2015 nuclear deal and easing a security crisis in the Persian Gulf.Iran’s top envoy Mohammad Javad Zarif held talks in Mo…
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(Bloomberg) — Hong Kong protesters caused major disruptions to the city’s international airport Sunday, massing outside the building in attempt to paralyze transport to and from the facility.MTR Corp., operator of the city’s rail system, canceled expr…
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In a memoir that is part hymn to the constitution, the former secretary of defense offers only veiled criticism of the presidentJames Mattis listens as Donald Trump speaks to the media in the cabinet room in October 2018. Photograph: Leah Millis/ReutersJames Mattis was Donald Trump’s defense secretary for less than two years, resigning in December 2018. The general’s departure came with headlines but little surprise. His resignation letter omitted any praise for the commander-in-chief. “Because you have the right to have a secretary of defense whose views are better aligned with yours,” he wrote, “I believe it is right for me to step down.”Mattis had been on thin ice for a long time. At an infamous cabinet meeting in June 2017, Mattis praised the men and women of the military instead of gushing over the president. Just months later, a White House official told me Mattis had shown insufficient loyalty to Trump. But because North Korea was on the front burner – before “Little Rocket Man” had started sending Trump love letters – the president felt he needed generals around him. In the end, everyone in Trump’s orbit is expendable. Except Ivanka Trump.Call Sign Chaos, Mattis’s memoir, is a readable look at more than four decades as a marine. Co-written with Bing West, a former marine and Reagan Pentagon alumnus, the book spans Mattis’s career, from enlistment through retirement.It contains veiled disapproval of Trump and is sharper in expressing disagreements with his Oval Office predecessors.> Call Sign Chaos takes aim at bigotry and lauds the military service of migrants. It gives full-throated support for NatoOfficially, the book’s title derives from the call-sign bestowed when Mattis became a regimental commander, Chaos an acronym for “Colonel Has An Outstanding Solution”.Mattis comes across as plain-spoken and reflective, a fan of books and history. Abraham Lincoln and Gettysburg receive their due. As a younger man, however, Mattis was not above brawling. In other words, he’s interesting.He repeatedly expresses his regard for America’s institutions and its constitution even as he offers criticism, one thing which sets him apart from the 45th president.“I’ve developed a love affair with our constitution,” Mattis writes.He tells of getting into a fight in Montana with three other men. Then 19, he was rewarded with a brief jail sentence and a sheriff’s escort to a westbound freight train. His brush with the law became a formative experience.Mattis recalls that as a marine recruiter he was confronted with a prospect who had been arrested for a “single use of cocaine”. Channeling his inner Nick Saban on the value of “second chances”, Mattis pushed for a waiver. “There’s a huge difference,” he writes, “between making a mistake and letting that mistake define you.”As Mattis moved up the ranks, interaction with Congress, the White House and civilian Pentagon leadership became a norm, although not necessarily a welcome one. Mattis professes to prefer the field and his troops. DC was not his “cup of tea”. Yet he appears to have overcome that hurdle, to a point anyway, when he was appointed executive secretary to Bill Clinton’s defense chiefs, William Perry and William Cohen.“I gained an abiding respect for those with whom I served and from whom I also learned a new skill set,” he writes. “I had a front-row seat to policymaking as it was supposed to work.”As for congressional oversight and the power of the purse, Mattis “received a pragmatic introduction to article one of the constitution”, a reminder to the reader that it is Congress that is tasked with raising America’s armed forces.Mattis saw action in Afghanistan and Iraq. He blames Tommy Franks, head of US Central Command and an army general, for Osama bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora, his refusal to deploy the marines a key cause of that debacle. As Mattis frames things: “We in the military missed the opportunity, not the president, who properly deferred to his senior military commander on how to carry out the mission.”But Iraq was a different story, and there Mattis places blame squarely on George W Bush for getting the US into the mess, and on Barack Obama and Joe Biden for the mode of the eventual pullback. As for going to war, Mattis observes: “Invading Iraq stunned me. Why were we fighting them again?”> For Mattis, Iran was an implacable foe. He also believes Tehran came to view the Obama administration as ‘impotent’In a chapter titled Incoherence, Mattis acidly mocks and quotes Bush 43’s Freedom Agenda. These days, Iraq is ranked “not free” by Freedom House. Irony abounds.He commends Obama for his intelligence and reserve and Biden for his warmth. Yet he tags them over the pullout from Iraq, Obama’s imaginary red line in Syria and their stance toward Iran. He does not mask his disapproval.For Mattis, Iran was an implacable foe. He also believes Tehran came to view the Obama administration as “impotent”. To the general, proof positive lay in the failure to respond to an Iranian plot to bomb Cafe Milano, a restaurant just miles from the White House, and assassinate the Saudi ambassador.Mattis also takes aim at WikiLeaks, describing it as “new kind of adversary” that “inflicted deep harm” to American interests. Unlike Trump, he never harbored any love for Julian Assange’s creation.To Mattis, American uncertainty and messianism can both have steep downsides. As he saw it, an absence of strategy would engender the sense that the US was “proving unreliable.”“I was disappointed and frustrated,” he writes. “Policymakers all too often failed to deliver clear direction.”Yet Mattis does not grapple with domestic political realities. Lives and treasure aside, Iraq cost the Republicans both houses of Congress in 2006 and paved the way for Obama. Furthermore, casualty counts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were factors in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Not everything is about Russia.When it comes to Trump, Mattis flanks, avoiding a head-on clash. Call Sign Chaos takes aim at bigotry and lauds the military service of migrants. As in his resignation letter, Mattis gives full-throated support for Nato: “Nations with allies thrive, and those without wither.”In his epilogue, Mattis notes America’s political divide and full-throated tribalism. But he is optimistic. Call Sign Chaos ends thus: “E Pluribus Unum.”
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They called him “Jop” | Lifestyles Commonwealth Journal’s History
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The standoff is upending the relationship between the world’s two largest economies.
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On July 21, 1987, a gigantic 414,000-ton supertanker entered the Persian Gulf with an unusually prominent escort—a U.S. Navy missile cruiser and three frigates.The narrow straits of the Persian Gulf had become a shooting gallery due to the Iran-Iraq War, still raging seven years after Iraq’s surprise invasion of Iran in 1980. As Iran counterattacked into Iraqi territory, Baghdad—supplied and armed by the Soviet Union, France, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia—began blasting Iranian oil tankers with missiles, often with assistance from U.S. surveillance assets.Iran retaliated by targeting Kuwaiti tankers with imported Chinese Silkworm missiles. Though terrifying, both side’s anti-ship missiles inflicted relatively little damage as the tankers were simply too bulky to be easily sunk. The same was not true for the frigate USS Stark, struck accidentally by an Iraqi Exocet missile in May 1987 that killed thirty-seven crew.But Washington had an axe to grind with Tehran, not Baghdad—and decided to respond to pleas for military escort from Kuwait. This led to the controversial policy of reflagging Kuwaiti tankers so they could be escorted by U.S. warships in Operation Earnest Will.The supertanker Bridgeton—formerly the Kuwaiti tanker al-Rekkah—was the first ship to receive a U.S. escort. Upon entering the narrow Straits of Hormuz, a flight of four Iranian Phantom jets swooped towards the Bridgeton convoy, but turned away at the last minute. On July 23, Tehran rumbled that tanker was carrying “prohibited goods” but made no obvious movesU.S. intelligence had learned of Iranian plans to attack the convoy with motorboats operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. Indeed, the head of the IRGC had lobbied for such an attack but was vetoed by Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini. He had a subtler approach in mind.As the Bridgeton cruised eighteen miles west of Iran’s Farsi Island on the morning of July 24, she abruptly struck what resembled a spiked-ball chained to the sea floor—a variant of an old Soviet M-08 mine built by North Korea and exported to Iran. An explosion ripped a large hole the tanker’s port cargo tank, flooding five of her thirty-one compartments but not injuring any crew.The night before, IRGCN motorboats had lain three chains totaling sixty mines spaced a half-kilometer part along the convoy’s well-known path.Ironically, the Bridgeton, limping along at just six knots, effectively escorted the U.S. warships back to port, because the huge tanker was the only vessel likely to survive hitting another mine.The “Bridgeton incident” was an inauspicious start for Earnest Will—highlighting the Navy’s failure to plan for mines. Iranian Mir-Hossein Prime Minister Mousavi gloated it had dealt “an irreparable blow on America’s political and military prestige.”Cunningly, the minelaying was both clearly Iranian in origin, while being technically deniable. However, the tactic inspired France and the UK, and later Italy and the Netherlands, to deploy their own warships to the Gulf, including seven minesweepersThe U.S. Navy had few assets immediately at hand to deal with mines. Then, as today, mine warfare was a neglected branch. Weeks later, the Navy deployed the amphibious carrier USS Guadalcanal with RH-53D Sea Stallion minesweeping helicopters aboard. Eventually six ocean-going and five-riverine minesweepers joined Earnest Will, which at its peak involved as many as thirty U.S. Navy ships including carriers and the huge battleship Missouri.SEALs, Little Birds and Swift BoatsAs deploying U.S. mine-sweeping units ashore in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait proved politically prohibitive, Kuwait instead furnished two barges, Hercules and Wimbrown that the Pentagon promptly converted into mobile sea bases, complete with their own extensive self-defense weapons.The floating bases also hosted assets vital to a covert U.S. counter-offensive called Operation Prime Chance to catch the Iranians red-handed in the act. These included two Navy SEAL teams, six 64-foot-long Mark III “swift boats” and six tiny egg-shaped “Little Bird” helicopters from the Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation regiment.On September 21, a trio of Little Bird choppers flying off the frigate Jarrett were assigned to shadow the Iranian tank landing ship Iran Ajr, suspected to have been converted for minelaying. An MH-6 helicopter equipped with a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) sensor and night-vision goggles led the way, escorted by two AH-6 gunships loaded with 7.62-millimeter miniguns and 2.75” rocket pods.Hovering stealthily 500 meters away, the helicopter crews recorded footage of the Iran Ajr’s crew deploying mines next to the Middle Shoals navigational buoy used by tankers. The Little Birds were ordered to open fire, and they raked the 614-ton vessel with their miniguns, causing the crew to take cover.However, Iranian sailors resumed deploying the mines a half-hour later. This time the night-vision-aided helicopter pilots unleashed a sustained barrage including rockets, killing three crew—and causing the remaining twenty-six to abandon ship.The following morning, Navy SEALs on Mark III boats rescued all but two of the Iranian sailors and boarded Iran Ajr. They found nine mines onboard and seized a logbook recording past minelaying activity, including maps showing the locations of those mines. Then the Navy towed Iran Ajr to deep water and blew her up.A trio of minigun-armed MH-6 helicopters tangled again with four Iranian ships approaching the sea base Hercules on October 8, including a corvette, a Swedish-built Boghammar and two Boston whaler type boats. The Boghammar’s crew fired Stinger missiles at the scout helicopters before being sunk by return fire. Eight Iranian crew were killed, and six more rescued from the water.When an Iranian missile struck the U.S.-flagged Sea Island City on October 16, injuring eighteen crew, Washington authorized a counterattack three days later called Operation Nimble Archer, resulting in the destruction of two Iranian oil platforms used to host IRGCN boats.But Iranian minelaying continued. On April 14, 1988, the crew of the frigate Samuel B. Roberts spotted three Iranian mines and realized she had unwittingly cruised into a minefield. While attempting to back out of danger, Roberts struck a mine which nearly split her in two and injured ten sailors. A heroic damage control effort saved the ship and her crew. Navy divers later identified additional mines in the area—with serial numbers identical to those on the Iran Ajr.Four days later, the U.S. launched a second retaliatory strike targeting two more Iranian oil platforms called Operation Praying Mantis. This time frigates and gunboats of the regular Iranian Navy counter attacked, resulting in the U.S. Navy’s largest foray since World War II, in which half of Iran’s surface combatants were sunk or crippled.This subdued Iranian naval operations thereafter. The Iran-Iraq war ended four months later—but sadly, not before one final tragic incident. On July 3, the U.S. Aegis missile cruiser Vincennes was skirmishing with Iranian fast boats, having unknowingly entered Iranian territorial waters, when her radar reported she was being approached by an Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter. The cruiser fired two radar-guided SM-2 missiles at the contact—bringing down Iranian A300 airliner Flight 655, killing all 290 civilians aboard.Operation Earnest Will concluded September 26 when the USS Vandergrift escorted a final tanker into the Persian Gulf. The operatives involved in Prime Chance remained active, however, until June 1990.The Tanker War demonstrated how Iran could retaliate against foreign pressure through calibrated, and semi-deniable attacks on the valuable shipping passing through the narrow waters of the Gulf—even though the campaign failed to inflict substantial economic damage, or indeed sink many large ships. A less violent variant of this strategy has evidently been implemented by Tehran today in its harassment and sabotage of shipping in the Gulf. However, experience from the Tanker War suggested that even controlled, asymmetric harassment attacks may risk provoking a more destructive retaliation.Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.Image: Wikimedia Commons.
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(Bloomberg) — It’s been a good few weeks for Scotland’s pro-independence government. An opinion poll showed an increase in support for breaking away from the rest of Britain. Then the U.K. headed for a showdown over Brexit and the popular leader of th…
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