June 20, 2024
The nation needs to remember the hard lesson it learned with World War II, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis told a crowd of more than 400 at a Columbia Basin Badger Club event Tuesday night in Pasco.
The former secretary of defense, who calls Richland his hometown, warned of the growing nexus between Russia and China, supported by North Korea and Iran in a talk focused on America’s role in a dangerous world.
“Democracy has no divine right to survival,” he said.
Two weeks ago the United States and its allies paid respect to the troops that stormed the beaches of Normandy to invade Nazi-occupied France on D-Day June 6, 1944.
There a Word War II veteran in a wheelchair told the U.S. chairman of the joint chief of staffs, “Never again. Don’t let this happen again,” Mattis said.
The United States turned its back on the world after World War I, thinking that if it ignored troubles they would go away, and then faced WWII, Mattis said.
“Today we face a strengthening partnership among autocrats,” he said.
The network they form “is a reality,” he said. “We are going to have to face it. It does no good to look the other way.”
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R&I~Smit
Bugs Marlowe