Beach Nov 2016
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Joe Hohm, Bob Holmes, General Petraeus, Russ Lesser and Rich Lucy.<br />
General David Petraeus and Milo Basic.<br />
should be based on facts on the ground, but informed<br />
by the issues a president has to deal with.<br />
I’m focused on the Middle East, he’s focused on<br />
the whole world. Coalition politics, domestic politics,<br />
Congressional politics, budgetary constraints<br />
– these issues may not be material to war<br />
decisions, but can’t be divorced from it.”<br />
“During the final [2011] meeting on the drawdown<br />
of forces in Afghanistan, the president<br />
went around the room and elicited support from<br />
everyone, until he came to me. I said, ‘Mr. President,<br />
with all due respect (not always the most<br />
sincere words, Petraeus interjected, eliciting<br />
laughter from his listeners), I said a year ago, and<br />
again last week, based on the facts on the ground,<br />
and informed by the issues you have to deal with,<br />
I think the drawdown is too aggressive. The facts<br />
have not changed in the last week, so my recommendation<br />
remains the same.’”<br />
“If you ever want to feel the oxygen go out of<br />
the situation room in the West Wing, try that,” he<br />
said.<br />
Petraeus was peppered with ‘What if’ questions<br />
both during the reception and the talk he gave<br />
later that evening to Distinguished Speaker subscribers<br />
at the Redondo <strong>Beach</strong> Performing Arts<br />
Center.<br />
(He deflected questions about his extramarital<br />
affair and mishandling of classified information,<br />
which led to a misdemeanor plea and his dismissal<br />
as CIA director, by saying, “I won’t address<br />
painful, personal topics, such as Why Army<br />
can’t beat Navy,” again eliciting laughter.<br />
(He also declined to discuss the current presidential<br />
election, except to dismiss, without naming<br />
Trump, “the suggestion in the presidential<br />
campaign that [our intervention in Iraq] is a grab<br />
for oil.” “The oil is in the south, not in the northern<br />
area controlled by the Islamic State,” he said.<br />
He added, “We could have bought 100 years of<br />
oil with what we’ve spent in Iraq.”)<br />
Former Manhattan <strong>Beach</strong> councilman Russ<br />
Lesser asked Petraeus at the reception, “Had we<br />
kept 10,000 troops in Iraq, would ISIS be there<br />
now?”<br />
“That’s a fantastic question,” Petraeus said. “As<br />
then director of the CIA, I thought keeping<br />
10,000 troops there would have been the correct<br />
course of action. But the answer is not as clear as<br />
you might think, given how Iraqi Prime Minister<br />
Maliki upended everything we had done.”<br />
During his Distinguished Speaker address, Petraeus<br />
expanded on his answer.<br />
He described Maliki’s arrest of Sunnis in his<br />
administration and Maliki’s use of force against<br />
protesters as “predictable, but a tragic undoing of<br />
what we sacrificed for.”<br />
The U.S sacrifice he referred to was the 2007<br />
“surge,” which he led.<br />
“When Ambassador Crocker and I arrived in<br />
Baghdad, we were summoned by Maliki’s national<br />
security advisor. Just 45 days earlier, President<br />
Bush and Maliki had agreed to a strategy<br />
that was 180 degrees different from mine. They<br />
wanted U.S. military out of the cities. We were<br />
going back into the cities. They wanted detainees<br />
released. We weren’t going to release detainees<br />
because there was no rehabilitation program.<br />
They wanted to dial back nighttime activities. We<br />
were going to double them. There was nothing in<br />
their program about reconciliation.<br />
“I told the national security advisor to tell Maliki<br />
that if he disagreed with my policies, he could<br />
tell that to our president the next day on the<br />
scheduled teleconference. But if he did, I’d be on<br />
the next plane back to Washington D.C.<br />
“The next day Maliki didn’t mention it. I had<br />
25,000 U.S. troops, 250 helicopters and the authority<br />
of an occupying commander and was not<br />
reticent to exercise that authority. We drove down<br />
violence by 85 percent.<br />
“Some three and a half years later, after our<br />
withdrawal, Maliki went after Sunni leaders because<br />
he was worried about his Shiite base in the<br />
upcoming election. The Sunni area then became<br />
fertile grounds for extremism.<br />
“Before we went to Iraq [in 2003], I’d been in<br />
Craig Leach, Judy Leach, David Petraeus, Judith Gassner, Michael Zislis and<br />
Mark Lurie, M.D.<br />
Ty Bobbit, Nadine Bobbit, David Petraeus, Lenore Levine, Mary Jo Unatin, Song<br />
Cho Klein and David Klein