(Washington Examiner) Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says he predicted years ago that Iran would escalate its provocations against the United States — and he partly blames the Obama administration’s anemic reaction to an Iranian plot to bomb a restaurant in Washington, D.C.
In his just-released book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, Mattis details his time as leader of U.S. Central Command from 2010 to 2013, overseeing military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. “From my first day at CENTCOM, I knew we faced two principal adversaries: stateless Sunni Islamist terrorists and the revolutionary Shiite regime of Iran, the most destabilizing country in the region,” he writes. “Iran was by far the more deadly of the two threats.”
That’s not how the president under whom Mattis served saw it, though, and Barack Obama eventually fired the storied Marine general for what Mattis believes were his insistent warnings about the Iranian threat.
