Though Ackerman quotes from Call Sign Chaos in his essay, he doesn’t appear to have read it very closely. In fact, the only plausible reading of Ackerman’s tract is that he wanted to write about the Iraq War, and he wanted to write about Mattis, and he had a theory about America entering an “age of grift” — so he shoehorned all the evidence into an essay that couldn’t fit it naturally. …

Let me get this straight: James Mattis was skeptical of the war, wasn’t responsible for its launch, and cautioned against operational incoherence, but since he “chose to serve” rather than “walk away” from his Marines, he is “illustrative of an age of American hubris”? Did anyone at Rolling Stone read this thing before they published it?