After Petraeus,Centcom to get a blunt-talk chief

If his predecessor as the commander of Central Command,Gen. David H. Petraeus,is known for his skill at winning over constituencies outside the military,General Mattis has a reputation for candid statements that are not always appreciated inside or outside the Pentagon.

“You go into Afghanistan,you got guys who slap around women for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” he said during a forum in San Diego in 2005. “You know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway,so it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.” For those comments,he received an official rebuke. His career path,however,was not seriously altered,and he now finds himself awaiting Senate confirmation to take over one of the most important jobs in the military. His new assignment would nominally put him atop General Petraeus — now the commander in Afghanistan — in the chain of command and leave him overseeing the reduction of American troops in Iraq,the escalation in Afghanistan and an array of threats from across the West Asia and South Asia.

Defence Secretary Robert M Gates described General Mattis as “one of our military’s outstanding combat leaders and strategic thinkers”. But the general angered one of Gates’s predecessors,Donald H. Rumsfeld,in 2001 with another remark that played well with his Marines,but not with civilian leaders in Washington.

After Marines under his command seized an airstrip outside Kandahar,establishing the first forward operating base for conventional forces in the country,General Mattis declared,“The Marines have landed,and we now own a piece of Afghanistan.” Rumsfeld and other senior officials believed that these words violated the official message of the invasion,that the US had no desire to occupy a Muslim nation.