Beach Nov 2016

Joe Hohm, Bob Holmes, General Petraeus, Russ Lesser and Rich Lucy.
General David Petraeus and Milo Basic.
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
Craig Leach, Judy Leach, David Petraeus, Judith Gassner, Michael Zislis and
Mark Lurie, M.D.
Ty Bobbit, Nadine Bobbit, David Petraeus, Lenore Levine, Mary Jo Unatin, Song
Cho Klein and David Klein