Beach Nov 2016
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Bosnia, Haiti and Kuwait and had a sense of the magnitude of the undertaking.<br />
I meekly asked my superiors for details on what would happen<br />
after we took down the [Hussein] regime. I was told, ‘Dave. You get us to<br />
Baghdad, we’ll take it from there.’ When we liberated Najaf, the Shiites’<br />
holiest city, without putting a bullet in a single mosque, I called my bosses<br />
and said, ‘The good news is we own Najaf. The bad news is we own Najaf.<br />
What do we do with it?’”<br />
“I was told, ‘We’re still getting organized.’”<br />
Petraeus’ own grim and controversial assessment at the time was disclosed<br />
by Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson.<br />
“I made the mistake of having a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter<br />
in the back of my Humvee,” Petraeus confessed to the Distinguished<br />
Speaker audience.<br />
Petraeus asked Atkinson, just six days into the battle for Baghdad “Tell<br />
me how this ends?” And then he answered his own question, “Eight years<br />
and eight divisions.” He was quoting what General Matthew Ridgway told<br />
President Dwight Eisenhower when asked what it would take to win a war<br />
in Vietnam.<br />
Petraeus said he foresees a similar problem in the current effort to push<br />
ISIS out of Mosul. He called it the “battle after the battle.”<br />
“Mosul was my home for four years. It was a city of two million people.<br />
Now it has one and a half million. The campaign for Mosul is a textbook<br />
design on how to circle a city and take it down.<br />
“ISIS are dead men walking and they know it. They are deserting and<br />
they execute their deserters. The Iraqi government needs to clear every<br />
building and leave people in them or the enemy will fill in from behind.”<br />
“But the real battle is not defeating the ISIS. That will happen. The real<br />
battle will be the battle after the battle – the struggle for power and resources<br />
between the area’s Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis, the Turkmen Shiites<br />
and Sunnis, the Christians, the Kurds and the tribes.”<br />
“My advice is endless patience, fierce determination and an occasional<br />
demonstration of the full range of emotions,” Petraeus said in a rare expression<br />
of his own emotions.<br />
“I’m not one in favor of breaking up Iraq into Sunnistan, Shiitestan, Kurdistan…<br />
Look at Syria,” he said.<br />
Instead, he offered a surprisingly hopeful outcome.<br />
“Iraq is developing in a heartening way. It needs to make the most of its<br />
extraordinary blessings. It has one of the world’s three or four largest oil<br />
reserves. With its two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, it is the only<br />
Arab country with water. South of Baghdad is very fertile.”<br />
Petraeus summed up his Distinguished Speakers talk by relating five lessons<br />
he learned in his nearly two decades in the Middle East.<br />
“These are points I would have loved to see debated by the candidates<br />
in the current presidential campaign,” he noted.<br />
“One, the ungoverned spaces in the Middle East and Africa will be exploited<br />
by Islamic extremists.”<br />
“Two, Las Vegas rules don’t apply. What happens doesn’t stay there. It<br />
creates a spewing of violence and instability and a tsunami of refugees.<br />
The Chernobyl meltdown that is Syria has displaced half of its 20 million<br />
people.”<br />
“Third, the U.S. has to lead. We have five times the assets of all of our<br />
allies, aggregated. But that doesn’t mean we go it alone. Churchill said the<br />
only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting against them.<br />
“We need Islamic allies. Muslim hate speech is absolutely counterproductive<br />
in this effort.”<br />
“Fourth, we must craft a comprehensive campaign. We can’t drone fight,<br />
or Delta Force fight our way out of this problem.”<br />
In another allusion to the presidential campaign, he said, to applause<br />
from the audience, “I’m hugely in favor of carpet bombing if the enemy<br />
arrays itself as a carpet in the desert, away from civilian populations, in<br />
which case, bring in the B52s.”<br />
The fifth and final lesson reflected his belief in “facts on the ground” assessments.<br />
“We are engaged in a generational struggle, not one of a few years or<br />
even decades. Even if we put a stake through the heart of ISIS in Mosul,<br />
we will not put a stake through the heart of the ideologists, who will continue<br />
the combat in cyberspace. We must contest the activities that go on<br />
there as well”<br />
“How do we measure a sustainable strategy?” the general asked.<br />
“The two measures are blood and treasure.” B<br />
20 Easy Reader / <strong>Beach</strong> magazine • <strong>Nov</strong>ember 10, <strong>2016</strong>