MICHAEL GORDON, The New York Times:
Well, he's certainly an unconventional choice for secretary of defense, simply because he's only been out of the military for three years.
He's been a Marine in some of the — a Marine commander in the hottest wars that we have had over the past 10 years, Iraq, Afghanistan, and ran the Central Command, which oversees both those wars. And that's a position that also involved him with a lot of diplomacy in the region, I think.
But he's famous also for a lot of his Mattis-isms, his kind of sayings. I remember, when I was in Barwana, Iraq, there was a sign on one of the outposts that said, "Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet."
I mean, that pretty much expresses I think Mattis' approach. He was prepared to use violence to achieve ends in war, but he also sought to work with the population and to, you know, constrain the violence as much as possible, which wasn't always easy in an environment like Iraq.
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