Soon after his country began bombing Yemen in 2015, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates confidentially reached out to an old friend: retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis.

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who also served as the deputy supreme commander of the Emirati military, needed help. The UAE was part of a coalition of Arab countries that had intervened in Yemen’s civil war to fight Iran-backed Houthi rebels. But the coalition’s bombing campaign was killing large numbers of civilians and doing little to deter the Houthis.

In an extraordinary condemnation, the former defense secretary backs protesters and says the president is trying to turn Americans against one another.

President Trump responded to criticism from former Defense Secretary James Mattis by calling him an “overrated” military leader whom he relished firing.

“Probably the only thing Barack Obama and I have in common is that we both had the honor of firing Jim Mattis, the world’s most overrated General,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “I asked for his letter of resignation, & felt great about.”

Retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, who resigned as President Trump's defense secretary nearly a year and a half ago over policy differences, has issued an extraordinary critique of the White House's handling of nationwide unrest, saying Trump has sought to divide Americans and warning against "militarizing our response" to the protests.

"When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution," Mattis said in a statement published in The Atlantic.

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. The subject was citizenship and the preservation of America’s political institutions. The backdrop was the threat posed to those institutions by the evil of slavery. Lincoln warned that the greatest danger to the nation came from within. All the armies of the world could not crush us, he maintained, but we could still “die by suicide.”

President Trump fired him (after he submitted his resignation) and earlier this week reportedly called him "the world's most overrated general," but former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had a few barbs of his own to sling in a speech he gave in New York on Thursday.

Delivering the keynote address at the 74th Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, Mattis — a retired four-star U.S. Marine general — said he felt he had finally "achieved greatness."

"I'm not just an overrated general, I am the greatest, the world's most overrated," he said to laughter.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis poked fun at himself and President Trump at the 74th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City on Thursday night, a day after the president called Mattis “the world’s most overrated general.”

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis roasted his former boss at the Alfred E. Smith dinner in New York City on Thursday night.
Mattis took the stage at the annual dinner -- an opportunity to crack jokes about local and national politics -- with an introduction from comic legend Martin Short.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis is back in the public eye with a book to promote, doing interviews and speaking in public about his career in government service.

That’s a golden opportunity to finally ask some tough questions about his prior service on the board of Theranos, a company that allegedly peddled fake blood tests and peddled connections to influential people in the national security world to get away with it for years.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took several implicit swipes at President Trump’s leadership in an op-ed published Wednesday, warning about the fallout from fractured alliances and increasing divisiveness under the current administration.

Mattis’ comments were included in a lengthy essay adapted from a forthcoming book and published in The Wall Street Journal. They amount to the most extensive remarks from him about his time in the Trump administration since he quietly resigned in January.