The Pentagon’s leaders, still licking their wounds, had more serious work to do than help the White House generate sound bites defending the president. At 2:00 p.m. on December 20, Mattis’s assistant secretary for policy, John C. Rood, led a meeting about the practicalities of pulling out. McGurk, the premier expert on the ground, had canceled his trip to Jordan and flown back to the States the previous night to help, gotten up that morning after a few hours of sleep, thrown on a suit without shaving, and arrived at the Pentagon for a slew of meetings. The military officials had so many questions crying out for decisions. How would they withdraw the troops? In what order? What was the time frame for stopping key elements of their work? Did they have to stop air support for fighters on the ground immediately, or could they continue for some time? If other coalition members wanted to continue working with the militia, what should the United States tell them? What advice or help should the United States give other allies that had joined the U.S.-led coalition who might be in harm’s way?
A central question nagged at everyone. How would they help protect the SDF and coalition members? Erdogan’s Turkish fighters were reported to be massing at the border, waiting for U.S. forces to leave. Rood explained that they were getting some specific operational questions from General Mazloum. He had explained that ISIS was still a threat, but if the United States let the Turks rush into Syria from their northern border, Mazloum would have to redirect his fighters to the north to protect themselves. Around the table at the Pentagon were dejected faces. “We were all resigned to the fact that he was going to massacre the Kurds,” one civilian official said of Erdogan.
A question arose about whether the U.S. forces should technically reclaim the weapons they gave the SDF fighters. Some discussed whether the National Security Council should review and decide whether militia members kept or surrendered the weapons. Rood stepped in with a firm no. He said something to the effect of “It’s not our priority to take back certain weapons because this is too lethal for them. ISIS is not defeated. We are not taking them back.”
At that moment, McGurk had had it. He burst into the discussion with a fury.
“Let’s just be real, everybody,” McGurk said. “Stop the wishful thinking. The president’s ordered us to leave without a plan or any apparent thought. We’re not picking up weapons on our way out. We can’t get out safely without the Kurds. They protect our supply lines, convoys, and facilities. To say we’ll take their weapons as we invite in the Turks is nuts. It will get Americans killed. The Kurds will be slaughtered from all sides.”
McGurk warned that because of the president’s lack of planning, the odds were high the Kurds would be slaughtered. The SDF might crack apart. ISIS would rush back in to wreak havoc on the villages the United States and its partners had temporarily turned into peaceful havens. Nobody spoke up to dispute him or to counsel against the derisive way he was speaking about Trump. The miliary officers in the room looked resigned and defeated, as if mourning the loss of something sacred. Before and after the meeting, several talked privately in small clusters about Mattis, their rock. They wondered how he was going to handle this latest assault on a soldier’s code, the military’s duty to its brothers-in-arms. Trump had effectively forced Mattis to abandon a fellow warrior on the battlefield.
“This is an abandonment of a partner and an ally in such a cavalier fashion,” recalled one person who attended the meeting. “He had worked so hard to get us out of Syria, and out of Afghanistan, in a responsible way.” This person added, “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how Mattis deals with this.’”
They would all find out how Mattis would handle “this” in a few hours. The afternoon of December 20, an aide showed Sweeney the video that Trump had posted on Twitter about “our boys” coming home and said, “SecDef should see this.” It was about 3:30 p.m., and Mattis was fixing his tie in his office, getting ready to go to the White House for a 4:00 p.m. meeting with the president. At Sweeney’s direction, he watched the video. He had no obvious facial reaction. “Huh,” Mattis said. “Okay.”
Mattis had been in a pensive mood that day, with a lot of major events to ponder. He had been to a memorial service for a friend, commander of the Fifth Fleet, who appeared to have killed himself. He left for the White House to meet with the president.
Around 4:30 p.m., Sweeney called an emergency meeting of all of Mattis’s senior staff, including Deputy Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Rood, and the other assistant secretaries, Ellen Lord, Robert Hood, and Michael Griffin. He passed out Mattis’s resignation letter. There were long faces and expressions of shock.
In the resignation letter, which Mattis had delivered to Trump, he offered no praise for the president, but rather laid out his own core beliefs. He wrote that America’s strength “is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.” And he wrote that “we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” including Russia and China.
“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues,” Mattis wrote. He added, “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
McGurk also resigned that day, which Trump would later dismiss as a “nothing event!”
Mattis joined his team at the Pentagon conference room. He smiled warmly at them all, folded his arms on the back of his chair at the end of the table, and said, “Come on, guys, it’s okay. All things have to come to an end. As long as the sergeants and corporals are on watch, it’s fine.”
Mattis explained that he and the president had a “good conversation” and that he would stay on as defense secretary until February 28, to ensure a “proper turnover.” Mattis was light. He was reassuring. His emphasis was on the people who do the real work and how they would still be doing the real work no matter who the secretary was. Nobody asked any questions. One person who looked the most upset and shocked was Shanahan. He was indeed floored, later telling his deputies, “I always thought Mattis was going to run through the tape. This was his life.” Shanahan didn’t know at this point that he would succeed Mattis, but some believed they saw the deputy bracing for it.
“There was a whole lot of fear in his eyes,” recalled one person who was present. “He was going to have to shepherd this ship until whenever. The rest of us were like, ‘The world is about to end!’”
PART FIVE
Twenty-two
AXIS OF ENABLERS
The deal was done. After days of maneuvering at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House announced on December 18 that President Trump planned to sign a spending compromise to keep the government funded for two months. He would punt into the New Year his fight with congressional Democrats over border wall funding.