David Petraeus on US policy under Donald Trump, the generational war against Islamist terrorism, and dealing with China

Retired United States general David Petraeus was a commander of international forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Later he headed the CIA, before resigning amid a scandal involving his affair with his biographer.

At a Liberal Party gala dinner in Sydney on Friday, Petraeus was interviewed by Brendan Nicholson from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Petraeus argued there was more continuity than change in American foreign policy under the Trump presidency; warned the “generational” fight against Islamist terrorism would last far beyond its defeat on the military battleground; and declared China’s activities in the South China Sea should be dealt with firmly.

Below is an edited transcript of their “in conversation”.

DAVID PETRAEUS: I am here, frankly, because of the fondness, the affection, the admiration that I have for, first and foremost those who have worn your uniform - especially in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan where I was privileged to command diggers and developed extraordinary respect for them - but also for the time I have spent with your diplomats, with your development workers, with your intelligence officers.

There are lifetime friendships there that are founded on periods of real adversity. When I most needed help I knew that I could call, for example, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston and [get it] even more rapidly than I could get forces from my own country.

Although we have vast forces and they would respond after you submitted the request for forces and it went through the chain of command, the services fought over who would do it and it went to the secretary of defence the one day a week that he signed these things if he was there and then they gave him an order to deploy and then they had to prepare for deployment, Angus Houston had 60 Aussies in Baghdad within a week of my calling him.

And it was that kind of relationship that we enjoyed and [with] many, many other individuals over the years.

You heard [tonight] from one of my wartime prime ministers, for whom I had enormous respect and still do, [former] prime minister Howard. I should note that is was a prime minister of the other party, Julia Gillard, who made the first commitment of any national leader to extend the mandate of the international security force in Afghanistan and that really opened the floodgate to something that was enormously important, which is making sure the mandate literally did not run out and it was affirmed at the summit in Lisbon that year, and her leadership was also very, very important in that.

So, this is an extraordinary relationship between our two countries.

By the way, could I offer one quick anecdote? One of the times I was here, I remember [I] was hosted for lunch by your then minister of communications at his lovely place overlooking the water outside Sydney. And we had a great conservation and at a certain point I said, now minister - you ask these things when you’re trying to make conversation - so I said: where do you see yourself five or ten years from now? This is a little less than two years ago and he said, well let me put it into military terms for you, and he looked and he got quite serious and he said, I may be approaching the up or out moment of my career.

He flew back to Canberra that night and was Prime Minister two or three days later.

Brendan Nicholson: You obviously gave him some good advice.

DAVID PETRAEUS: Only in Australia.

BN: General Petraeus, as many of you would know, is an example of a class of very highly educated soldier scholars with a deep knowledge of history in an understanding of the role and responsibility of the military in a democratic society. … In 1987 while he was studying at Princeton University, he produced a thesis on the American military and the lessons of the Vietnam, a study of military influence and the use of force in the post-Vietnam era.

One of your conclusions was that the Vietnam experience … had led to a pattern of caution in the US military leadership when it came to advising the government of the day whether it should use armed force to deal with situations abroad.

The second concern you raised was a lack of focus on counterinsurgency training, which you went on to rectify.

But you’ve had four decades, an extremely crowded military career - much of that time in command in both Iraq and Afghanistan. If you had the chance, how would you mark that thesis now and would you have written it differently with all the experience you’ve had since?

DAVID PETRAEUS: It’s a wonderful question. Another one of the conclusions was that in crisis decision-making … what tends into to weigh on you most heavily are experiences you had personally and particularly those that were most visceral.

And I think I would actually use recent events to really affirm that further, because I think what’s happened in the United States and arguably in other, particularly democratic, countries in the world is that after a frustrating, tough, difficult experience like more recently Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s an understandable aversion to this and there’s a tendency to swing and [the] pendulum goes back and forth.

Arguably after 9/11, one could say we got perhaps a bit more, I don’t know if the term would be adventurous, but more willing to intervene and then it swung with the next administration I’d argue a bit too far the other way and it has come back somewhat to what I think is actually a reasonable balance.

I’ll tick off five lessons that I think we should have learnt from the past 15 years, particularly in the Middle East, but elsewhere as well.

The first is that ungoverned or even inadequately governed spaces in the Islamic world will be exploited by extremists. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when and how big will it be.

The second is that unfortunately Las Vegas rules do not apply in these areas: what happens there does not stay there.

Rather, they tend to spew violence, instability extremism and a tsunami of refugees, not just into neighbouring countries, but in the case of Syria, a geopolitical Chernobyl meltdown of a country that has actually spewed them into Europe causing the biggest challenges domestically for our allies there.

By the way, you have to do something. You can’t do what we tried to do in Washington. I’m sure it would never be done in Canberra, but that is to admire a problem until it goes away. These problems aren’t going away. So you have to do something.

And the third is, in doing something in most cases, not all, but in most cases the US is going to have to lead - and that is because [of] the way that we’ve learned how to do this now, where we are enabling others, they’re doing the fighting on the frontlines. That’s hugely significant because of when I get to the fifth lesson - that these have to be sustainable.

The US has more of those enablers, more of those intelligent surveillance reconnaissance assets , the unmanned aerial vehicles and other systems, the precision strike, the industrial strength ability to fuse intelligence. If you total up all of the drones in these platforms, of all the other possible allies and partners multiple times six, you might get to what the US can bring to the fight and these are all integrated and connected with a global satellite communication system.

So, the US is going to have to do this, but we’ve got to have a coalition. Coalitions do matter. I’ve long believed in the validity of what Churchill observed that the only thing worse than fighting with allies is this fighting without them. And allies like Australia - particularly important countries that punch way above their weight class and shoulder far more of the burdens of ensuring freedom, prosperity and this rules-based international order than others.

We also, by the way, need Muslim partners. This is more of a struggle within the Islamic world - within the Muslim civilisation. It’s an existential threat to them, so more of that than it is a clash between civilisations - harking back to Sam Huntington and his book.

The fourth is that in responding you have to have a comprehensive approach. You cannot counter terrorist forces like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda with just counter-terrorist force operations. You’re not just going to drone strike or Delta Force your way out of this problem. You’re going to have to have forces on the ground.

You’re going to have all of the elements of the civil military campaign plan that we had, frankly, in Iraq, but we don’t want to be doing all of them and we’re able now to do that in places like Iraq and in Syria and some others.

The reason that we don’t want to do that is because again it has to be sustainable - lesson number five is we are engaged in a generational struggle. … And it’s really important that be communicated to populations, but they understand that we can carry out this generational struggle in a manner that is sustainable and sustainability is measuring the expenditure of blood and treasure.

So, you have to have a sustainable, sustained commitment. That is not easy, but we’re showing how that can be done now in these places that I’ve listed and also in others. Now there will be some, like in the Philippines, let’s say, where Australia will either lead or play a very significant role; Mali, where the French took the lead. But you will still even there find very substantial contributions from the United States.

So those five lessons I think provide the intellectual foundation on which you will build policies and again if you come back to this, I think we’ve shifted back and forth arguably too much because of the influence of these very visceral experiences.

Vietnam weighed on that generation of officers inordinately. And I think you can be overly cautious, actually, and miss an opportunity when you should have intervened and then you have to come in later when it’s a much worse situation. But that’s the challenge and that’s the challenge that a wartime prime minister like prime minister Turnbull bears and has to grapple with.

BN: From half way around the world we watched with some astonishment for the best part of two years, while Americans fought this incredibly ferocious election campaign. There was dire warnings in Australia about the possible consequences, the possible return of a sense of isolationism in the United States and then the election of Mr Trump appeared to herald a more isolationist US policy. With the benefits of several months of hindsight, do you believe that its allies in Europe and in this region can rely on America?

DAVID PATREAUS: I do. Look, I think what you have to do is jettison the campaign rhetoric or at the very least contrast it very considerably with what has actually taken place.

In some cases, it is taking a little while to get to a certain location like the presidential declaration of the Article 5 commitment in the NATO alliance that an attack on one is an attack on all. And ironically that opportunity to do that was not taken at the NATO Summit ….

And then if you follow the money and follow the troops, don’t follow the tweets, follow what’s going on the ground, you’ll see the NATO forces are moving into the Baltic states and into eastern Poland. There’s more resources from United States being provided to a European support initiative that will restore actually some of the capabilities that we took down after the Cold War now that there is a resurgence of an aggressive, adventurous Russia led by President Putin.

If you look at China - most important relationship in the world - lots of accusations about China. A lot of trepidation. A phone call from the Taiwanese president was accepted without some sense of perhaps the historic nature of this and then a tweet followed that added a little bit of insult to injury.

Ultimately, there is a phone call between the President and President Xi. Then there’s the Mar-a-Lago summit. There’s the embrace of the One China policy and just this week, the first of four different groups that were charted by the Mar-a-Lago summit met. This was between the secretaries of state and defence of the United States and their counterparts from China to start grappling with the really serious issues - the most prominent of which is North Korea and the desire to see China do more to squeeze, if you will, crimp down on this umbilical cord that basically keeps the lights on in Pyongyang.

You can work your way through a whole host of these different issues. The Iran nuclear deal that was going to be torn up on day one, we’re not walking away from. And it’s very pragmatic. Unless there is really sufficient cause and a violation of that agreement, abrogating it would isolate us more than it would isolate Iran. We will counter malign Iranian influence more sufficiently and I applaud that. The America First does not turn out at all to have been America alone.

Frankly, I think the overall way to characterise American foreign policy that’s emerging is that there is more continuity than change and that even a lot of that continuity I see is improving. You see a commander-in-chief devolving authority down to the Pentagon or the battlefield commanders for decisions that I think should appropriately be made at those levels.

Now don’t get me wrong and by the way, again I remind you I’m non-partisan. I don’t vote. I don’t register. I don’t endorse. I don’t contribute. There was an op-ed that did appear in the Daily Arizonan that talked about saluting an American patriot - Senator John McCain - two weeks before his election. But you know, you have to do these kinds of things for truly extraordinary people every now and then.

But so to show that, there are three areas that I do have concerns about and then one major issue that a lot of you have touched on.

Those would be climate …. pledging to come out of the Paris Accord in 2020. Look, the US is going to meet its obligations anyway because of market forces, states, corporations and municipalities, but it does have enormous symbolic value and it is not something that I would have welcomed or advised.

Immigration policy - we’ve still got to work our way through that. You don’t see the wall going up yet between Mexico and I think there will be some wall.

I was asked actually when I had my audition, I guess you’d call it - my reality TV moment - with President-elect Trump to discuss the secretary of state job and he asked me, should we build a wall, general? And I said: sure we should build a wall, Mr President where we don’t already have a wall - you know, we’ve got hundreds of miles of wall - where it would actually do some good and in the context of a comprehensive approach that would include a variety of other elements that would actually improve security on our southern border, noting that the flow of people between Mexico and United States is actually been from United States to Mexico slightly, rather than the other way in each of the last three years.

I did not note that perhaps therefore Mexico should demand that we pay for the wall. I thought that might be a bit untoward.

And then the other issue is trade and this is a very serious issue. This affects you very much. TPP, now it’s the TPP 11 - Trans-Pacific Partnership - because the twelfth, the US has pulled out. We’re going to have to see how that can go forward. We obviously have bilateral trade agreements with many of the countries … but this would be hugely significant for Vietnam and for some others. It would be enormous advantageous. Our labour movement should want to see labour treated better in some of these different countries, as would have been required ….

And then the last issue is one that I think that is a still very much a legitimate issue for discussion and that is the occasional ambivalence of the United States to continue to lead the rules-based international order. I truly believe in it …. That was established in the wake of the worst 50 years of world history imaginable: two horrible world wars and the great economic depression. And it has stood the world in quite good stead since. The institutions, the financial structures, the norms, the principles, again, have really done well, but as your great foreign minister observed, [at] no time certainly since the end of the Cold War has there been as much strain, as many stresses, as many challenges to this.

And at such a time I do believe the United States has to continue to exercise its leadership and actually I think that it will.

I think first of all you have to have a pragmatic president. He’s somebody who’s showed that he would do what was necessary to get elected and I think he will do what he needs to do to be successful and he will come to define that if he doesn’t already in part in that way.

Beyond that, I think the national security team that has been established is arguably the finest in recent memory: a terrific national security advisor [H. R. McMaster]. He and his deputy both had many tours together on battlefields, battlefields on the Potomac as well. [Defence secretary] General Mattis, long time combat, comrade, buddy, boss, at one time he replaced me when I went down to Afghanistan; stayed close even after government.

The secretary of state I think is very good, superb. You just have to understand he’s an engineer. He takes things apart painstakingly. He wants to understand how they operate then he puts them back together and he doesn’t necessarily love the press. He’s not, you know, a retired four-star, you know. Never stand between an retired four-star and an open mic. You can do that with Rex Tillerson and not fear for your life.

Our US ambassador to the United Nations, former governor Haley, has proven to be superb. She’s the one who has in the early weeks been the one to go out and clarify what came out of the White House in a previous day, such as when the President said with Bibi Netanyahu there, you know, one state, two state for the Palestinian issue eh, you know, whatever they want and she came out the next day and announced that the US policy has been and continues to be support for the two-state solution.

So again, I think this is a very good team and I think American foreign policy has been reassuringly impressive, actually, in the ways that it has evolved with those caveats that I mentioned.

BN: So, I’ve got ask you what sort of people are crossing the American border into Mexico?

DAVID PETRAEUS: Mexicans going home.

Mexico has a manufacturing miracle underway. Monterrey is the hub of this. Anybody who hasn’t seen Monterrey, you should. This is Detroit on, you know, steroids and anything else you could possibly inject into it. They’ve done extraordinarily well. I think they’re already now the fourth largest car exporter in the world and obviously, they have ground access to the largest economy in the world…

Now, I should note the problem with that border is that’s where Central American country refugees come through and Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have sent various substantial numbers because of the violence, the instability and the lack of rule of law in those countries at various points.

BN: General, the- some years ago the Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War ended. I think we all thought we were in for decades of peace and harmony and prosperity. Relatively recently, some smart people have warned that we might be fighting Islamist terrorism for a century, which is a pretty daunting idea. Do you agree that the threat is likely to be that prolonged and what sort of impact is it going to have on our democracies?

DAVID PETRAEUS: Well, as I mentioned earlier, I think this is at least a generational struggle and the impact therefore is you are going to have to a sustained commitment against it, but in a way that is sustainable.

I’d offer as an example: I’ve never doubted that Iraqi forces once reconstituted and supported by the US, Australians and the other coalition members would be able to defeat the Islamic State. I think, literally, within weeks if not days the final old city part of Mosul in which they barricaded themselves and [have been] fighting to the death will be cleared and essentially the Islamic State by and large will have been cleared at least in its army form.

There would still be terrorist organisations that are carrying out bombings, but that will have been completed. … We’ll put a stake through the heart of [Abū Bakr al-]Baghdadi [the leader of the Islamic State] at some point in time and they’ll be defeated in Syria.

But even after the ground caliphate is taken in those two countries, they’ll still be pockets of them in a number of others - North Africa, East Africa, now the southern Philippines, some other places out in the far east, Afghanistan.

They have an affinity for eastern Afghanistan where the 9/11 attacks were planned. Let’s not forget that the reason we went to Afghanistan and the reason we have stayed is because that’s where the 9/11 attacks were planned. That’s where the initial training of the attackers was conducted and we don’t want that to ever allow that to be a sanctuary for transnational extremists again so that they can do what al-Qaeda did.

So, this is going to be a long fight and the difficult area in particular is the so-called virtual caliphate. You could eliminate all of the ground vestiges of this and there’s still going to be on the internet this extremist propagation that recruits, that shares lessons on how to make explosives, on tactics, that proselytises, that tries to encourage. One [message] now is to conduct attacks in the United States.

There’s going to be a very small number of a very large population that will unfortunately be attracted by this and carry out what are termed lone wolf attacks, but typically it turns out the lone wolf got inspiration from the internet or from some other form.

And so I think we do have to get used to this in a sense, while doing everything we can, obviously, to eliminate the risk of this, to mitigate the risk of when it does happen and so forth, but we are going to be seized with this problem for a very long time I fear. And again, that implies a lot about how it is that we’re going to have to take this on and again it is always going to take a comprehensive approach. There’s no silver bullet that you can shoot that will make this go away.

BN: The citizens of both our countries would be deeply concerned if they felt that their personal information and transactions online - your banking information and everything else - wasn’t fully and effectively encrypted, but at the same time that would be in conflict, would it not, with the need for various agencies to have access to information right across the internet? How do you deal with that conflict and are those two ideas heading for collision?

DAVID PETRAEUS: They do collide and so my view has been that on the one hand - CIA, NSA and others - I mean, look, we get paid to steal secrets, to recruit sources, to chase bad guys. That’s what our governments pay us to do and you should expect us to do that.

And I think we ought to have the ability to crack anything, anywhere, anytime when the legal circumstances obtain. And I generally think we shouldn’t talk about it too, which is a little more difficult.

The second though, is that I don’t believe we should be able to compel Apple or other producers, manufacturers of devices to have a back door, for the simple reason that the criminals will find this very, very quickly.

It’s actually criminals that are finding the so-called zero-day defects and exploiting them before the firms themselves find them. There’s a whole industry of this now and you can go to the dark web and find this kind of stuff.

So, I do think this a bit in conflict. I should also note that the Snowden revelations were enormously damaging to the relationship that we had between the intelligence community and the internet service providers, the social media platforms, the CEOs and all the rest of it.

It used to be that you could go to them quietly and they would help us and we would help them occasionally, that broke down because these revelations cost tens of billions of dollars just for say Google alone. And we’ve got to rebuild that trust and confidence and that’s going to be very important in the way going forward.

There’s also a very significantly debate that has to be had I think, and I’ll be interested in the prime minister’s view on this, and that is on what prime minister May has raised: enough is enough, how far will people be allowed to go in the internet? Where does free speech end and incitement to extremist violence begin? And I think that you will see a pendulum moving on this.

The key, of course, is to get it to move far enough, but not too far because then it will be, you know, come back the other way. But I think there is going to be a very significant debate on this in the UK in the wake of the attacks that they’ve suffered, which have been linked back to activity on the internet.

And I think that will be instructive for all of us, and you and we and the UK all share not just a common language, but common values, common heritage and a shared future. And I think that debate is going to be one to watch and I assume that there is going to be something like that here in Australia as well.

BN: Australia is in this sort of paradoxical situation that affects many countries in the region of finding itself in a region that is the subject of some aggression from the main trading partner of most of the countries in that region.

What do you think of China’s activities in creating artificial islands, militarising them, the muscular use of its fishing fleet?

DAVID PETRAEUS: Yep, which have the most sophisticated communications we have ever seen on any fishing fleet.

BN: Well, how do we deal with this? And how important are things like freedom of navigation exercises?

DAVID PETRAEUS: Hugely important and I think we have to be firm. You know, let’s get the big idea right - better be firm.

And I would acknowledge that I think there have been times in recent years where the rhetoric at the Shangri-La Dialogue … several years ago when I heard for example, [then] secretary of defence Ash Carter, and his inaugural speech there literally pound the podium and say we will sail anywhere and fly anywhere - and it took us eight months to sail through the South China Sea.

That’s not firmness. Teddy Roosevelt did, I think, have it right on this. You know, speak softly and carry a big stick. We should just state it, we should just do it and frankly there were opportunities when those islands were first being constructed where we could have said, okay fine, you know, and we’ll help the Philippines build there’s and we’ll help Vietnam here and if Malaysia wants to get into the act. Every single country that has a maritime border with China has a dispute with it.

And the Nine-Dash Line is an outrageous assertion that is completely without foundation in international law, as we found when the Philippines took their case to the World Court if you will and the case was decided in their favour But you know as Thucydides or the Melian Dialogue said the strong do what they will and the weak submit. I think the weak don’t have to submit, we have to collectively be firm in response.

I do think that Australia has done quite an admirable job in acknowledging this curious duality where their number one trading partner is also, arguably the number one security cause for concern and the number one security partner is the United States, which again has China as its now number one trading partner, but also our number one strategic competitor.

This relationship between the US and China is absolutely crucial. There’s a wonderful new book out again by the professor up at the Belfer Center at Harvard, Graham Allison. It’s titled Destined for War - there’s no question mark. You know, it’s about can China and the United States avoid the so-called Thucydides Trap, and it’s called that because Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War - Sparta is the established power, Athens is a rising power and Thucydides writes they inevitably went to war. And so, of course, we don’t want that in this case. He then reviews a number of cases that go back about five centuries - 75 per cent of the time there was war in that situation - and we need to obviously avoid that this time.

So, I think is where the strategic dialogue with China is crucially important and this is where again I think you see heartening development in the relationship between the President of the United States and the President of China, and now these relationships at the levels below and I think that’s very important.

By the way, I’m the one that believes we should have a strategic dialogue with Russia as well. Yes, we have many conflicting interests. Yes, they have been extraordinarily over-aggressive against Georgia, in Crimea, south-eastern Ukraine, flights that come very near to our aircraft, a variety of other actions. But in Syria, the ultimate resolution is going to require Russia to be at that table.

By the way, I think the ultimate resolution is not going to be what is sought through diplomacy, which is a democratically-elected multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian government in Damascus for all of Syria. I think it’s going to be something that basically just tries to stop the bloodshed with a series of local ceasefires around the periphery of a rump Syria. Some will be guaranteed by Turkey, some by the United States, some by Jordan and the US, and so forth. But Russia is going to have to at least tacitly, if not formally accept that.

BN: Do you think countries like Australia should carry out freedom of navigation operations within the 12 mile perceived boundaries round those artificial islands?

DAVID PETRAEUS: Look, I do, but these are tough calls for national leaders. The fact is that the islands have been constructed. I talked to Ash Carter about this. I said don’t use the term “reclamation”. They’re not reclaiming anything. They’re building islands. These are on rocks that were below the level of the sea at high tide, which gives you no justification for anything if you actually had a claim to use them in the first place, which they don’t.

And so, yeah, absolutely, I think that should be the case and again quietly done. We don’t have to have brass bands and fanfare, but it should be done and I think countries of the world should indeed do that, and I again if it can be done as a coalition I think it obviously says much more.

BN: Again on a subject you touched on: the recapture of Mosul and the capture of Raqqa, which appears to be likely, will clearly, significantly reduce the power of the Islamic State terror group in terms of major military operations, but what comes next?

DAVID PETRAEUS: I’ve actually written about this, that the battle that matters most is the battle after the battle.

There’s been no doubt again that we would enable our Iraqi counterparts to defeat the Islamic State on the ground. The question is: after that can the Iraqis achieve governance that is sufficiently representative of all the different groups? And by the way Nineveh Province, which Mosul’s the capital, is where I spent the first year of the war after the fight to Baghdad and it is the most complex human terrain of all of Iraq? Can you get adequate representation of all, reasonable responsiveness to all those groups within means and most importantly guarantee minority rights, not just majority rule? That’s a tall order and it will not be easy. But if you don’t get that right, there will be once again fertile fields for the planting of the seeds of extremism and the rise of ISIS 3.0.

BN: You worked closely with Kurdish fighters in your time in Iraq. Now those Kurdish groups are playing a major role in the campaigns to recapture significant parts of Iraq. They’ve recaptured significant parts of Iraq all by themselves with help from the United States and allies, but also they’re playing a major role in Syria. Is that likely to lead to the creation of a Kurdish state?

DAVID PETRAEUS: No, and that’s a great point. One of the strategic revelations of what’s happened is recognition that the Syrian Kurds do not want to be part of a greater Kurdistan - i.e. part of the Iraqi Kurdish regional government. In fact, the Iraqi Kurdish regional government has significant political disputes ongoing right now. They will have a referendum on independence. Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish regional government, has pledged this.

But I literally don’t think they can afford to be independent. We calculated at one point - the CIA - that they needed to export about 800,000 barrels of oil at $105 per barrel. They are only producing 800,000 barrels on a really good day and exporting a subset of that now in the forties per barrel. So, they still need some of what they get from Baghdad.

Keep in mind that Iraq for all of the centrifugal forces pulling it apart has a huge centripetal force and that is the central government’s distribution of the oil revenue. That is absolutely crucial and that is keeping that country together. The Sunni Arabs, for all of the differences they have with Shia-led government in Baghdad have no alternative, but to getting that. So maybe you get a new deal with Baghdad, gets greater devolution of power to the provinces, the Sunni provinces, as they have and some of the others. But I think they stay part of Iraq and I think that the Kurds will stay part of Iraq for some time longer as well.

I think ultimately, they probably do have a right to an independent state and an independent people, but again they’re going to have to get a good deal. This has to be an amicable divorce with Iraq and a good deal with Turkey before they can risk that.

BN: You were able, I think, in Iraq to negotiate with diverse and opposing tribal factions. Do you believe that after all the violence and bloodshed that we’ve seen in Iraq and Syria that that sort of rehabilitation is possible again?

DAVID PETRAEUS: I do. And look, by the way, when I was negotiating that I had a great position. I was the sheik of the strongest tribe in Iraq. Having 165,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and then tens of thousands of additional coalition forces and others, was hugely helpful. But I do actually think, I think the prime minister of Iraq, Haider al-Abadi, knows that there has to be inclusive governance and I think that he is determined to that and I see breakoff factions within the Shia, who I think will enable that as well.