President-elect Donald J. Trump has announced that he has chosen General James Mattis, 66, to serve as his Secretary of Defense. “We are going to appoint Mad Dog Mattis as our secretary of defense,”  Trump told the Ohio crowd, yesterday.  Who is General Mattis and why is a four-star general like him called ‘Mad Dog”? 

CNN said that Mattis, a retired Marine general, earned his Mad Dog nickname “after the 2004 battle of Fallujah in Iraq, where he led British and American troops against Iraqi insurgents.”
The Sun said Mattis earned the Mad Dog moniker during “one of the hardest-fought campaigns following the Iraq invasion in 2003 — where he was one of four Commanders leading the British/US troops to take the city from Iraqi insurgents after the fall of Saddam Hussein.”

Indeed, Mattis led the Marine division to Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was chief of the US Central Command during the Bush Administration. He was cut off from this position by the Obama Administration, for considering him too hawkish on Iran.

Since his retirement, Mattis has been a fierce critic of the Obama’s military strategies to combat ISIS in Iraq and Syria and believes in a tougher stance on Iran.

However, Mattis disagrees with Donald Trump’s conciliatory statements toward Russia and has criticized Moscow’s expansionist and aggressive policies in Syria, Ukraine and the Baltics.
As reported today in The New York Times and online news website Heavy.