Photos by Deidre Davidson/Torrance Memorial Medical Center
During a reception for General David Petraeus, hosted by Torrance Memorial Medical Center in the Manhattan Beach Shade Hotel patio on October 25, Milo Basic asked the general, “Why did we go into the Middle East after 9-11? Thinking of all the suffering there now. In your opinion, would we be better off if we hadn’t.”
Basic is the Croatian-born father-in-law of Shade Hotel owner Michael Zislis.
Petraeus broke the uncomfortable silence that followed the bold question by acknowledging. “That’s a legitimate question.” He prefaced his answer first by observing, “The question presumes we had a choice.”
Then he recounted the events of the Arab Spring that destabilized Muslim countries, from Africa to the Middle East.
“If Egyptian President Mubarak had been able to stick around, we might have been less hasty in declaring his time was over. But there were not thousands, but millions demonstrating for his overthrow in Tahrir Square in Cairo.”
“Mubarak was a mentor and father figure to me when I was a major stationed in the Middle East, 25 years earlier. One day he put his hand on my knee and said, ‘General, listen to the Arab Street. Never forget the Arab Street.’”
Petraeus said he wished Mubarak had followed his own advice.
“In Tunisia, there was no saving President Ben Ali [after a fruit vendor set himself on fire, triggering the Tunisian revolution]. In Libya, we helped the opposition take down Gaddafi. And certainly, our invasion of Iraq took out Saddam Hussein. But he was the personification of a kleptocrat and I don’t think he would have lasted much longer.”
Finally, Petraeus responded to Basic’s question. “In all honesty, I don’t second guess the decision. The worst thing for a military leader, especially one who has written more letters than I care to remember to mothers and fathers, would be to give an opinion, one way or another. I think it would be inappropriate. Our focus now should be to make the future as good as possible.”
Petraeus was less reticent in discussing President Barack Obama’s controversial decision to withdraw troops from Iraq in 2011. Petraeus had been named Commander of U.S. Forces in the Middle East by President George W. Bush in 2007 and served in that post until being named Director of the CIA by President Obama in 2011.
The subject came up when Vietnam veteran and former Manhattan Beach councilman Bob Holmes asked Petraeus what lessons he had learned from Vietnam. Petraeus’ doctoral dissertation was on Vietnam.
Petraeus answered, “I took from that experience how a military commander should give advice to a president. In my view, the advice should be based on facts on the ground, but informed by the issues a president has to deal with. I’m focused on the Middle East, he’s focused on the whole world. Coalition politics, domestic politics, Congressional politics, budgetary constraints — these issues may not be material to war decisions, but can’t be divorced from it.”
“During the final [2011] meeting on the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan, the president went around the room and elicited support from everyone, until he came to me. I said, ‘Mr. President, with all due respect (not always the most sincere words, Petraeus interjected, eliciting laughter from his listeners), I said a year ago, and again last week, based on the facts on the ground, and informed by the issues you have to deal with, I think the drawdown is too aggressive. The facts have not changed in the last week, so my recommendation remains the same.”
“If you ever want to feel the oxygen go out of the situation room in the West Wing, try that,” he said.
Petraeus was peppered with ‘What if’ questions both during the reception and the talk he gave later that evening to Distinguished Speaker subscribers at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center.
(He deflected questions about his extramarital affair and mishandling of classified information, which led to a misdemeanor plea and his dismissal as CIA director, by saying, “I won’t address painful, personal topics, such as Why Army can’t beat Navy,” again eliciting laughter.
(He also declined to discuss the current presidential election, except to dismiss, without naming Trump, “the suggestion in the presidential campaign that [our intervention in Iraq] is a grab for oil.” “The oil is in the south, not in the northern area controlled by the Islamic State,” he said. He added, “We could have bought 100 years of oil with what we’ve spent in Iraq.”)
Former Manhattan Beach councilman Russ Lesser asked Petraeus at the reception, “Had we kept 10,000 troops in Iraq, would ISIS be there now?”
“That’s a fantastic question,” Petraeus said. “As then director of the CIA, I thought keeping 10,000 troops there would have been the correct course of action. But the answer is not as clear as you might think, given how Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki upended everything we had done.”
During his Distinguished Speaker address, Petraeus expanded on his answer.
He described Maliki’s arrest of Sunnis in his administration and Maliki’s use of force against protesters as “predictable, but a tragic undoing of what we sacrificed for.”
The U.S sacrifice he referred to was the 2007 “surge,” which he led.
“When Ambassador Crocker and I arrived in Baghdad, we were summoned by Maliki’s national security advisor. Just 45 days earlier, President Bush and Maliki had agreed to a strategy that was 180 degrees different from mine. They wanted U.S. military out of the cities. We were going back into the cities. They wanted detainees released. We weren’t going to release detainees because there was no rehabilitation program. They wanted to dial back nighttime activities. We were going to double them. There was nothing in their program about reconciliation.
“I told the national security advisor to tell Maliki that if he disagreed with my policies, he could tell that to our president the next day on the scheduled teleconference. But if he did, I’d be on the next plane back to Washington D.C.
“The next day Maliki didn’t mention it. I had 25,000 U.S. troops, 250 helicopters and the authority of an occupying commander and was not reticent to exercise that authority. We drove down violence by 85 percent.
“Some three and a half years later, after our withdrawal, Maliki went after Sunni leaders because he was worried about his Shiite base in the upcoming election. The Sunni area then became fertile grounds for extremism.
“Before we went to Iraq [in 2003], I’d been in Bosnia, Haiti and Kuwait and had a sense of the magnitude of the undertaking. I meekly asked my superiors for details on what would happen after we took down the [Hussein] regime. I was told, ‘Dave. You get us to Baghdad, we’ll take it from there.’ When we liberated Najaf, the Shiites’ holiest city, without putting a bullet in a single mosque, I called my bosses and said, ‘The good news is we own Najaf. The bad news is we own Najaf. What do we do with it?’”
“I was told, ‘We’re still getting organized.’”
Petraeus’ own grim and controversial assessment at the time was reported by Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson.
“I made the mistake of having a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in the back of my Humvee,” Petraeus confessed to the Distinguished Speaker audience.
Petraeus asked Atkinson, just six days into the battle for Baghdad “Tell me how this ends?” And then he answered his own question, “Eight years and eight divisions.” He was quoting what General Matthew Ridgway told President Dwight Eisenhower when asked what it would take to win a war in Vietnam.
Petraeus said he foresees a similar problem in the current effort to push ISIS out of Mosul. He called it the “battle after the battle.”
“Mosul was my home for four years. It was a city of two million people. Now it has one and a half million. The campaign for Mosul is a textbook design on how to circle a city and take it down.
“ISIS are dead men walking and they know it. They are deserting and they execute their deserters. The Iraqi government needs to clear every building and leave people in them or the enemy will fill in from behind.”
“But the real battle is not defeating the ISIS. That will happen. The real battle will be the battle after the battle — the struggle for power and resources between the area’s Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis, the Turkmen Shiites and Sunnis, the Christians, the Kurds and the tribes.”
“My advice is endless patience, fierce determination and an occasional demonstration of the full range of emotions,” Petraeus said in a rare expression of his own emotions.
“I’m not one in favor of breaking up Iraq into Sunnistan, Shiitestan, Kurdistan… Look at Syria,” he said.
Instead, he offered a surprisingly hopeful outcome.
“Iraq is developing in a heartening way. It needs to make the most of its extraordinary blessings. It has one of the world’s three or four largest oil reserves. With its two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, it is the only Arab country with water. South of Baghdad is very fertile.”
Petraeus summed up his Distinguished Speakers talk by relating five lessons he learned in his nearly two decades in the Middle East.
“These are points I would have loved to see debated by the candidates in the current presidential campaign,” he noted.
“One, the ungoverned spaces in the Middle East and Africa will be exploited by Islamic extremists.”
“Two, Las Vegas rules don’t apply. What happens doesn’t stay there. It creates a spewing of violence and instability and a tsunami of refugees. The Chernobyl meltdown that is Syria has displaced half of its 20 million people.”
“Third, the U.S. has to lead. We have five times the assets of all of our allies, aggregated. But that doesn’t mean we go it alone. Churchill said the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting against them.
“We need Islamic allies. Muslim hate speech is absolutely counterproductive in this effort.”
“Fourth, we must craft a comprehensive campaign. We can’t drone fight, or Delta Force fight our way out of this problem.”
In another allusion to the presidential campaign, he said, to applause from the audience, “I’m hugely in favor of carpet bombing if the enemy arrays itself as a carpet in the desert, away from civilian populations, in which case, bring in the B52s.”
The fifth and final lesson reflected his belief in “facts on the ground” assessments.
“We are engaged in a generational struggle, not one of a few years or even decades. Even if we put a stake through the heart of ISIS in Mosul, we will not put a stake through the heart of the ideologists, who will continue the combat in cyberspace. We must contest the activities that go on there as well”
“How do we measure a sustainable strategy?” the general asked.
“The two measures are blood and treasure.”
