Thank you James Mattis for avoiding World War III

We've known for a long time that Jim Mattis at the Pentagon was a bit of a rebel. If he didn't like what Trump was ordering him to do when he was defence secretary, he just plain didn't do it. Well now, according to insider details reported in The New Yorker, Mattis disobeyed presidential orders on numerous occasions. It was the instinctive all-action president versus the seasoned four-star commander who thought things out properly. So thank God for Jim Mattis who probably saved the US from diving into a World War III situation. It's one of the most remarkable aspects of Trump's presidency so far, that people like Mattis and John Kelly when he was White House chief of staff deliberately avoided carrying out specific Trump orders. Quite extraodinary. And a sackable offence. Well both Mattis and Kelly were effectively sacked because they had no choice but to resign. But they lasted a long time and managed successfully to restrain Trump from acting on his gut instincts. In 2017, apparently, according to the new report, Trump ordered Mattis to withdraw all families of US troops in South Korea because of North Korea's ballistic missile tests. That would no doubt have been interpreted by Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, as a signal that Trump was going to launch an attack on Pyongyang. Mattis got the order but put it in his trash tray. He made no phone call to the US commander in South Korea. He did nothing. So what hapened when Trump noticed nothing was going on in South Korea? Did he ring Mattis and say: "Hey, Mad Dog, what the hell is happening? I thought I said get those families out now!" Well, if he did, it has not been recorded. Either way, Mattis refused to carry out the order. Then also in 2017, Trump wanted a war meeting about North Korea at Camp David and expected Mattis to arrive with a long list of wonderful options for bombing North Korea to hell. Mattis, it is reported, ignored the request to send officials with their plans to the meeting which then didn't take place. Eventually of course Mattis received one order which he knew he couldn't ignore - start withdrawing US troops from Syria immediately - and as a result he promptly resigned. Trump must have been SO pleased because soon after Mattis had gone he started maligning him, saying he hadn't done a very good job. Mattis was replaced by his deputy Patrick Shanahan who is still after four months only acting defence secretary. I think it suits Trump very well to have an acting Pentagon chief because Shanahan is so eager to be nominated for the top job the president probably thinks he will do whatever he orders him to do, like send more and more troops to the Mexican border. What a carry-on.