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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 disclosed
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.” B
20 Easy Reader / Beach magazine • November 10, 2016