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Transcript of THE ASPEN INSTITUTE - Aspen Ideas Festival · Franklin, I work with the Aspen Institute in our ......
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THE ASPEN INSTITUTE
ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2017
AROUND THE WORLD IN 60 MINUTES
Aspen, Colorado
St. Regis Hotel Ballroom
Thursday, June 29, 2017
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LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
JOHN DICKERSON
Political Director and Anchor
Face the Nation, CBS News
DAVID PETRAEUS
Partner, KKR; Chairman, KKR Global Institute
* * * * *
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AROUND THE WORLD IN 60 MINUTES
(8:30 p.m.)
MS. FRANKLIN: Good evening, everyone. I am
going to get started. Wow this is a great crowd, thank
you all so much for being here. My name is Libby
Franklin, I work with the Aspen Institute in our
Washington D.C. office. And I can say after a week out
here that this is the better end of the deal for sure.
Anyway, I'm just here to welcome you on behalf
of the Institute and The Atlantic. Whether you've been
coming to the Festival and supporting the Festival for
years, or maybe this is your first evening with us, we're
really pleased to have you here for what we think is going
to be a really -- really important discussion.
We're going to take a world tour of sorts, of
the most vexing security challenges facing the US. And
we've got two of the very best here to help us think it
all through and they can tell us what we should lay awake
tonight thinking about. And they really don't need much
of an introduction.
SPEAKER: No sleeping.
MS. FRANKLIN: Okay, no sleeping. We've got
General David Petraeus here with us who, as you all know,
was director of the CIA and held many top military posts
in the US Military for over 37 years. He's now a partner
in the investment firm, KKR. And joining him is John
Dickerson, political director of CBS News, I think we all
know him best as anchor of Face the Nation.
I think that's all I have to say so I am going
to let these guys take over and again, please help me give
them a warm welcome.
(Applause)
MR. DICKERSON: Welcome everyone, this is a
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thrill for me not only to be here with General Petraeus
but to be able to speak to him in more than a seven minute
time period. So we've got a whole hour, it is a big world
and there are a lot of places that make people nervous and
that are complicated in it.
But I want to start, General just with this
first very broad question. What does the world look like
to you right now from the US perspective?
MR. PETRAEUS: Well first of all, look thanks
it's a privilege to be on stage with you, we've done this
before, it's always fun, this is the extended version of
Face the Nation obviously. And thanks to all of you for
being here this evening, you do, do us really a great
honor. Look, I think the world looks to us as the most
complex array of challenges and threats and issues that
we've seen since the end of the Cold War.
And you know you're all familiar with the
challenges of, say the Islamist extremists of al Qaeda of
the Islamic State. You're familiar with the revisionist
powers, if you will, the countries in the world that
aren't satisfied with the status quo; Iran and Russia,
arguably and North Korea, revolutionary powers in that
regard; China, both our number one trading partner and a
strategic competitor in the most important relationship in
the world.
There are emerging cyber threats that I think
get more and more diabolically difficult all the time.
And these are not just the criminal threats and the nation
state threats, which we've seen in various forms. What
I'm worried about there is the threat of extremists
getting the cyber equivalent of a weapon of mass
destruction. And they are people who are willing to blow
themselves up to take us with them; what keeps them from
hitting the send key? We can deter, I think, some of the
other actors in cyberspace.
I think there are a populist pressures out there
thankfully, they were turned back in France, they were
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turned back in The Netherlands; they were not, obviously,
in the UK, with Brexit, arguably the election of our own
President was this -- a big manifestation of domestic
populism. There are concerns with some other major
countries as they face elections, I think Germany will be
okay; Italy though, does -- it does matter, it's a big
economy in the EU and we'll see how that goes.
And then, you know, we have a Washington D.C.,
which by rights with one party in charge should be able to
come to grips of some of the issues that -- in a course
that I taught for three and a half years at the City
University of New York called the North American Decades,
we identified what were called policy headwinds, and
legislative headwinds.
These were issues that were preventing us from
capitalizing fully on the extraordinary opportunities that
our country has, leading the world in the in the IT
revolution, the energy revolution, in the life sciences,
in the manufacturing, or among the leaders in each of
those. So it's really quite a bright prospect for us.
But because of some of these headwinds we weren't able to
fully capitalize on those opportunities. I'm talking
about issues like comprehensive immigration reform, tax
reform, getting the debt to GDP ratio going -- continuing
to go down rather than starting up here and in another
year or so a whole variety of different issues that need
to be addressed.
And so at the end of the day again you see this
extraordinarily complex array of threats, it may not be
the most dangerous period in post World War II history,
certainly the Cold War had some episodes that were very,
very close to the edge of actual nuclear exchanges. But
it is very, very challenging.
MR. DICKERSON: Let me ask you -- and we're
going to go through all of those complex challenges but
give me your sense of this administration and its capacity
without -- you know, I'll get specific on those individual
places -- but the general capacity, what's your
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assessment, what gives you pause, what's getting better,
what's getting worse.
MR. PETRAEUS: Sure. Well, I'm going to focus
obviously on the foreign policy, the national security
policy and I'm happy to leave the domestic policy issues
to others. I -- you know, this may stun a few of you but
you know the military is famous for giving the bottom line
up front and my bottom line up front to you would be that
the policy that is emerging is more continuity than it is
change.
And in a number of ways the continuity, I
actually like the changes to the continuity if you will.
Now, there are some exceptions to that and I'll tick them
off, climate would be one that is clearly a change. You
can argue it's more symbolic it doesn't happen till 2020
we'll meet our guides -- or objectives anyway because of
states, municipalities and -- but I think that's a
significant symbolic change. And it gets at something
I'll talk about in a second.
The second would be immigration, we're really
not sure where we're going yet with that. We do need
comprehensive immigration reform, we need more smart
people and we may need more unskilled workers. And we've
got to come to grips with how to do that, and to do it
safely. And certainly the Muslim ban, which is -- springs
from the reservations about what's happening with
immigration and refugees and so forth, I guess,
understandable but again I'm not sure what the -- the
message it sends is totally helpful.
And then the final issue is trade. President
Trump, as he said he would during the campaign, has left
the Trans-Pacific Partnership, something I thought I
argued was very, very important, not just in terms of
actually adding maybe a half a point to GDP growth, which
is not insignificant for the world's largest economy but
more important in terms of geostrategic respects and also
bringing countries like Vietnam into the fold rather than
leaving them out there to be perhaps plucked off by China
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with their alternative trade opportunity that they're
pursuing.
And then there is this seeming ambivalence at
times and obviously, you know, this is not an
administration that has had the most stellar message
discipline, shall we say.
(Laughter)
MR. DICKERSON: What's the military term for
euphemisms?
(Laughter)
MR. PETRAEUS: So and the reason I mention this
is because what you will find me doing repeatedly tonight
with John is asking you to come back and look at follow
the money, follow the troops, follow the actual real
policies on the ground. And if you do that, I think, we
actually the policies are of a US continuing to lead the
world but we've sort of gotten there with a lot of bumps
and so forth. And I'll walk you through the little bit of
that.
But I am concerned, I do believe that the rules
based liberal international order that's described, which
came into being in the wake of World War II, we helped
midwife it with the other victors of World War II. It
established financial institutions, multilateral
organizations, norms, principles and so forth. And this
all was brought into being because we've just been through
50 years that had two horrible world wars and the worst
economic depression in history. And it's done a
reasonably good job, not without shortcomings, the
institutions have flaws, the organizations have
weaknesses. But again, I think, by and large has done a
reasonably good job, and is worth sustaining.
And again let's not forget we brought it into
being because it does serve our national interests but we
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also do have the national interests of others, at least in
the forefront of our mind, and we believe that you can do
best by all working together. So that is something that I
think -- I hope will see emerge in brighter relief over
time.
But if you now look at the different issues,
let's take China. Of course, the President famously took
a phone call from the President of Taiwan, I mean it
hadn't been done in 48 years or so; tweeted about it
afterwards, which added a little bit of insult to injury.
Was sort of questioning China of a currency manipulator et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera ultimately embraces the one
China policy, calls President Xi, invites him to Mar-a-
Lago has the summit, fortuitously, during the summit, of
course, gives orders to launch cruise missiles into Syria,
you know, you can't make that stuff.
And by the way one of the areas of change is
that we had Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his
citizens and we did something about it, and we did it
within 36 hours and we didn't even have a red line
established formally. And you know the history of the red
line before which was a blow to our credibility around the
world when we did not act on it.
So China ultimately, again there's a dialog now
we just had the first of the four working groups that were
established, this is the one of Mattis, Secretary of
Defense Mattis, Secretary of State Tillerson, and their
two counterparts addressing issues like North Korea and so
forth.
If you look at Israel, Bibi Netanyahu is sitting
there in the White House, President says one state two
states, you know whatever they want. Ambassador Nikki
Haley, the next morning is out, you know, affirming that
the United States still embraces the Two State Policy that
is our policy going forward and you've seen this pursued
by the special envoy together with the President's son in
law.
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You can just keep working your way through each
of these frankly and in many cases we may have a
circuitous route to it, we may again, you know, you see
the policy and there maybe a discordant tweet or something
like that, keep focused on the policies, except when the
tweets actually do announce policy. And one well -- when
he said, will not happen, about the North Korean nuclear
program, I think that's where you -- that is policy.
MR. DICKERSON: Right.
MR. PETRAEUS: And so -- but I'm relatively
heartened, I think the team is terrific.
MR. DICKERSON: Tell me --
MR. PETRAEUS: And by the way the -- you know, a
lot of people make a lot of it, Trump and his generals,
look these generals are from a generation that know that
every problem out there is not a nail, and every solution
can't be a bigger hammer. I was mentioning to John
backstage, when we had the surge, this -- the campaign
plan for the surge, there wasn't an embassy plan and a
military plan. Ambassador Crocker and I merged the two of
them and we had a civil military counterinsurgency
campaign plan.
This generation -- every single person, Mattis
lived through that, obviously a great shipmate, he helped
write the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs was on the ground, then ultimately was a
commander in Afghanistan, he was a Marine three star for
me, the commander in Iraq was a brigade commander during
the surge, the commander in Afghanistan was a two star ops
officer during that surge. Again, these are individuals
that know that that the military cannot solve every
problem at all. And desperately want --
I remember, you know, there's a -- when I went
to see President Bush, before going to the surge, having
been confirmed, and I thought I would come in and I'd get
some, you know, great wisdom and all this stuff. And then
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I got some guidance. But the truth is in the Oval Office
it's often about the photo op and this was. And so he
said, "Well we're doubling down, General." And I said,
Mr. President your military is going all in and we need
the rest of government to go all in with this.
So again, these generals understand what that
means and the team I think is terrific. McMaster ran four
civil military strategic reviews for me alone just in the
surge, and then at Central Command, and then went with me
to Afghanistan, I mean it's publicly known the only
promotion board I ever sat on my life, and believe it or
not came back from the surge to be the president of a
board, it happened to be the one star board that picked
him for brigadier general. That was not a mistake or a
coincidence. And Stan McChrystal was JSOC commander that
-- you know the ultimate killing machine taskforce came
back.
And so again these are terrific people. The
deputy national security adviser doesn't get much
attention, hugely important because he runs the deputies
committee. Many of the policies don't have to go to the
principals, much less to an actual National Security
Council meeting chaired by the President if they can be
resolved there. This is a guy named Ricky Waddell, very
high in his class at West Point maybe first Rhodes
Scholar, Ph.D. from Columbia University, highly successful
businessman, and a two star general in the Reserves, and
served multiple tours, of course, in Iraq and in
Afghanistan. Real, real talent there.
Yes, a lot of the foreign policy elite that you
know was busy signing letters last year this time and all
through the fall are essentially ineligible and in many
ways that's a shame. And especially for the State
Department because that, you know, one area there is a
change is we just haven't populated that. And we see it
now with this crisis in the Middle East, who can Rex
Tillerson send out to the Middle East to deal with this
issue? I don't know.
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MR. DICKERSON: Let me -- I had so many
questions cascading out of that.
MR. PETRAEUS: Sure.
MR. DICKERSON: Let me just -- on the generals
though, I want to just -- having spent some time with your
Counterinsurgency Manual and your -- and the surge and --
what it strikes me is, all those generals who were -- who
implement that I mean, McMaster, Mattis --
MR. PETRAEUS: Yes.
MR. DICKERSON: What always interested me was
the fierce use of force when necessary but also there was
a significant element of restraint.
MR. PETRAEUS: Absolutely.
MR. DICKERSON: And of risk taking.
MR. PETRAEUS: Absolutely.
MR. DICKERSON: Taking off the armor and walking
down the street in order to create those bonds. And I
think that just -- can you give a little bit more on that.
MR. PETRAEUS: Sure.
MR. DICKERSON: Because when people hear about
the generals, there is this view of kind of -- you know,
it is a constant, always military thing but all of the
generals, you're talking about, were educated in your --
and you as well --
MR. PETRAEUS: We lived this. And you know, in
the counterinsurgency guidance that I published and I do
it -- republish it about every month -- it was always open
on my laptop, and I'd tinker away at it from time to time
every now and then hit the send key. One of them was,
walk -- and by the way they're all admonitions. So you
know, secure the people, promote reconciliation. Promote
12
initiatives, walk. And it was get out of your Humvee, you
cannot communicate and engage the people through ballistic
glass of an armored vehicle, and take off your sunglasses.
So again there was a huge consciousness about that and
there was a huge awareness.
In the counterinsurgency manual we had what were
called counterinsurgency paradoxes, it said sometimes the
best weapons in counterinsurgency don't shoot. By the way
originally they came to me and said the best weapons in
counterinsurgency don't shoot, and I took it to the guys
and I said, "You've obviously never been shot at."
(Laughter)
MR. PETRAEUS: Because when you are being shot
at, the best weapons really do shoot. Or you know or
another one was, that originally, it was, money is the
best ammunition. I said again, "When were you last shot
at?" I mean try throwing money at the enemy. Money is a
great ammunition once you get a certain situation going.
So I think they're very, very nuanced on this. And again
McMaster runs a great study strategy review policy process
and I think that's ongoing.
And we see again in Iraq, yes certainly the
previous administration gets credit for getting the
initial concept going, you can argue it took too long, and
I would in time matter because the sooner you can show the
Islamic State is a loser, is the sooner they're less
effective in cyberspace and in the Internet in recruiting
and all the rest of that. But they're building on this
and pushing down the authority to increase troop levels a
little bit here and there, I think there's enormous wisdom
in that.
It was very frustrating to see the micro-
management and it got more during the course of the
previous administration. I'll give you one quick
anecdote, in Afghanistan there was a troop camp
established, I think it's 84 or 8800, you see different
numbers. That's down from 100,000 Americans by the way.
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So there was an aviation brigade, went over and the
commander, Mick Nicholson, again great guy, who's the ops
chief, when I was there, needed the additional helicopter.
So they sent them over but then they said but
you know you can't bring everybody in that brigade because
you're going to run up against a troop cap. So you've got
to bring the pilots, you got to bring the crew chiefs. So
you leave behind your maintenance workers. Now by the way
you're flying at a tempo, an operational tempo of probably
four to five times what you do in peacetime. So you're
just flying the blades off the helicopters, you
desperately need all the maintenance people you can get
and you had to leave them behind because they couldn't fit
under the troop cap.
Not only does this fracture unit integrity, the
readiness because they're not getting to do what they
normally should be doing, and their morale is, you know
their dog tags are dangling in the dirt as we say. You
then have to hire hugely expensive civilian contractors,
you have no idea what it costs just to find the people,
and then to convince them to go spend six months at Bagram
air base in the middle of nowhere, in Afghanistan and get
the occasional incoming rocket or mortar round.
So I -- a lot of this is good, don't get me
wrong, and by the way you all -- I hope you remember, I am
truly nonpolitical, I served in Senate confirmed positions
twice for President Obama and multiple times for President
Bush. And you know I'm not out to shill for anyone or to
criticize anyone. I'm just trying to objectively assess
what's happening on the ground, follow the money, follow
the troops, follow them into the Baltic states, where they
are now, for the first time, NATO, now an agreement that
was made on President Obama's watch, wisely. But has been
followed through, actually reinforced a bit, there will
even be more money in the budget this year.
Now Congress of course influences some of this
in a good way, they're proposing Russia sanctions for
example that I think would be good. So this is evolving,
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you know, in a way that is, I think, more heartening
especially if you remember some of the campaign promises
and the fears of those who were criticizing at the time.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah and so I want to get to
Russia and ISIS and -- but just staying for a moment in
Washington, you've got one of the concerns that people
have, and they had during the campaign was, the
impulsiveness of the President, you mentioned the tweets.
What allayed people's fears was that he would
have good people around him, I mean you've just talked
about this pretty strong team that he's got around him.
But you've also been in the room when these kinds of
decisions are made. Give us a sense of your -- does that
theory work, I mean at the end of the day it's a
President, by himself making a decision no matter who's
around him. So are people right to think, well his
decision can be shaped, when you've got a President who's
who is that impulsive?
MR. PETRAEUS: There's no question that it can
be shaped because we have seen it play out with again a
number of these decisions. I think the most obvious one
is again the strikes against Bashar al-Assad which were
taken quite quickly, decisively, were not out of
proportion too and so forth. And quite thoughtful in how
they went about it. You know now, let's not kill
Russians, we don't want to start World War III just yet.
But let's certainly take out a number of the aircraft that
were engaged in this, which they did.
And it does matter who's around him in the room
and that is where you do see a tug of war that is ongoing
and people have characterized this as MMT, McMaster,
Mattis, Tillerson. And then on the other side usually
they will pick Bannon and Steve Miller and a couple of
others.
And I think you saw them win, the latter one,
actually with the speech that was delivered at NATO
headquarters. And ironically, this is the unveiling of
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the 9/11 Memorial at the new NATO headquarters in
Brussels, the first time they actually had a summit there.
The only time that the Article 5 collective self-defense
agreement has ever actually been announced and implemented
was in the wake of the 9/11 attack. So it was for us.
And we did not take that occasion to affirm our commitment
to the Article 5 collective self-defense, even though it
was in the official speech that had been prepared.
Climate, the decision to leave climate, again I
think, Tillerson actually said it would've been his
decision, that would not have been his advice. On that
one, I think, you have a -- you do have a play here.
Obviously, a President who realizes he's got to make good
on some of his campaign promises. And to be fair on NATO
later it did come out that the Article 5 he personally
said that after Nikki Haley did as well.
By the way Ambassador Nikki Haley, I have been
hugely impressed by. As you know, a Southern governor,
not -- I wouldn't have thought would step right on the
stage as she has, very decisively, very effectively, very
eloquently. And in a number of cases has been the one who
is, you know, there's always in any administration, heck,
I had spokesmen that would go out after I fumbled
something and say what the general meant to say was this.
And there has been a bit of that, obviously,
with this administration. And she was the one who went
out after the One State Two State, she went out the next
day and announced that the Two State solution is still our
policy.
MR. DICKERSON: On the One State Two State, not
specifically with Israel but on the -- as you know, if
there is uncertainty, let's stay with -- let's stick with
NATO, if there is uncertainty in the US commitment to
NATO, other countries start behaving different ways.
Either Russia feels that it has an opportunity to be more
aggressive or NATO countries in the -- you know, right on
that border, start to think, well we need to start
thinking about our defense differently. We need to think
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about our alliances differently.
So in that sense the ambiguity or the lack of
re-upping the commitment on Article 5 does have a cost.
Or do you -- or would you argue that basically --
MR. PETRAEUS: I would say there is nothing
ambiguous about the battle groups that have been added in
each of the three Baltic states and an armored brigade
from the United States in Poland with another battle
group. And we have our forces I think spread throughout
each of those, there's a lead nation for each one, I think
it's Germany, UK, Canada and the US. That speaks volumes.
MR. DICKERSON: Right.
MR. PETRAEUS: By the way there's some pretty
extraordinary, you know -- that there's nothing like boots
on the ground to show your commitment. And I think it
would be very foolhardy for Russia to try something now
with that particular situation. Yes there are scenarios
with little green men and all this stuff that could be
very challenging. But that is a very significant
statement.
I personally think we should have given lethal
assistance to the Ukrainians long ago. It was actually
authorized by the Senate Armed Services Committee and
appropriated by the Appropriations Committee for shoulder
launched anti-tank guided missiles. These are not super
long range, you're not going to -- these are not
offensive. I mean you're not going to run to Moscow with
these things on your shoulder, I can assure you. But it
will make the separatists pay a very heavy price if they
use these advanced tanks that Russia has provided to them.
By the way Russia has dialed it back up in the
last 48 hours, there are two very important colonels in
the Ukrainian forces, one in the intelligence, and one in
security services who were assassinated basically with car
bombs. And then there also was the additional cyber
attack was largely focused on Ukraine and really taking
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down some very important government networks for the
Ukraine.
MR. DICKERSON: So sticking with your idea of
watch what the administration does.
MR. PETRAEUS: Yes, watch the money.
MR. DICKERSON: Not what it says.
MR. PETRAEUS: Follow the money and follow the
troops.
MR. DICKERSON: Follow the money and the troops.
So give us your assessment of Russia.
MR. PETRAEUS: Look Russia --
MR. DICKERSON: Russia policy.
MR. PETRAEUS: I think what is evolving first of
all is very different from what was hinted at during the
campaign that you know I can deal with this guy and we
understand each other, and he said nice things about me,
so he just got to be a good guy. I don't -- I think
there's been a real recognition there that Russia is
causing major problems and that we're going to have to
confront them in various ways, as we also have to still
come to grips with the whole investigation over what they
did during our election, needless to say.
Having said that I am somebody who believes that
there should be strategic dialog even with our enemies,
and I have been heartened to see the strategic dialog
between President Trump and Xi. Trump has been calling a
lot of leaders, he's been fairly assiduous. Now
occasionally he's hung up on them a bit prematurely. And
you know he had the -- he remedied that with Prime
Minister Malcolm Turnbull and you know on the Intrepid,
the boat up in the -- New York.
By the way I was just in Australia last week and
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I did meet with Prime Minister Turnbull and the foreign
minister and so forth. They had just had a very good
meeting, the counterpart the minister of defense and state
meet with our secretary of state, secretary of defense,
and frankly found it very, very heartening.
And they see the activities in the South China
Sea. We are not doing what we did actually a few years
ago, were very robust speech at the security -- big
session called the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
Secretary of defense is all but pounding on the table.
And then it took us -- said we will sail anywhere, fly
anywhere and it took us seven or eight months to sail
through the South China Sea. We're just doing it.
So again we'll see how it all plays out but I
think Russian policy, in the end of the day, we will find
that we have to work with them on Syria, it's either going
to be tacitly or maybe even explicitly. Look the solution
to Syria, it got to defeat the Islamic State and the al-
Qaeda affiliate; putting that on the side.
The solution is going to end up being a series
of local cease fires, and you see some of these already
and so our second objective actually, for an interim
solution at least, should be to stop the bloodshed. So
it's defeat the extremists and stop the bloodshed. And do
that by again we will have to guarantee some of these
areas, which again, I have argued in Aspen for two or
three years that we should had safe zones so that you can
get humanitarian assistance in and then get the refugees
going home and not have the continued exodus of the
refugees.
So that I think is what's going to happen and
Russia will have to accept that tacitly or even perhaps
explicitly at the end of the day. I don't think you get
rid of Bashar al-Assad, as much as I abhor the individual,
and as much as I hold him responsible, and we all do, the
world does for the death of 500,000 of his citizens and
he's used chemical weapons on them repeatedly. But also
at the end of the day, I think, you really need to be sure
19
who's going to follow. We do have some recent experience
of toppling a dictator and without clear plans about what
would follow.
MR. DICKERSON: Before we untangle Syria because
that's -- there's some complexity there. With what
happens how you how you can still go after ISIS if Assad
is still there. But before we get to that, recently -- so
the US shut down a Syrian plane last Sunday. The Russians
said we're now going to follow any drone or plane that
flies. And the rhetoric seems to be heating up between
the US and the Russians in Syria right now, so.
MR. PETRAEUS: Yeah, it has a bit. But my
understanding is the communication is still going on
between -- so you have, you know, air to air
communication, can command -- headquarters to headquarters
communication. I don't think you're going to see a
mistake. Now, if they start to threaten our forces that's
not a mistake.
And there's some very interesting dynamics here
because there's going to be a race for one particular
city, Deir ez-Zor, so once you take Raqqa and they're
making quite impressive progress in Raqqa, it's clear that
-- nowhere near the kind -- first of all, it's not
remotely the size of Mosul, which is some 2 million
people. Remember, I spent the first year after the fight
to Baghdad, up there as a two star. It's much, much
smaller you know, it's a fraction of that, and it didn't
have the kind of very extensive preparations, it does not
appear, we'll see.
But so once you take that capital of the Islamic
State, they're moving down the Euphrates to Deir ez-Zor.
Deir ez-Zor has enormous geostrategic importance because
that's how the Syrians are trying to connect up with what
could be a route from Iran, a ground line of
communications. And Iran has always wanted to be able to
connect Tehran with Baghdad with Damascus and then down
into southern Lebanon, Lebanese Hezbollah. They can't do
the shortest line between two points and it appears as if
20
they're actually coming in north of Baghdad, hitting the
Tigris for valley. By the way, they changed the sectarian
composition of this particular province to Shia favor.
And then hit.
And they go up the Tigris River Valley. There's
all Shia militia still there, even though these are Sunni
provinces. And then you go west, south of Mosul, you go
out through the border and ultimately you hit Deir ez-Zor.
And by the way, the Shia militia are all along this area
as well. Maybe coincidence, I may be given the conspiracy
theories after spending too long in the heat in Iraq, but
that seems like the likely route and --
MR. DICKERSON: So when this isn't --
MR. PETRAEUS: -- then it goes to Palmyra, then
Damascus or up to Homs and then down into the Beqaa Valley
in southern Lebanon.
MR. DICKERSON: And that's a supply line, I mean
that's a highway.
MR. PETRAEUS: They'd love to have that.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: Again, whether they can keep it -
- whether they can establish or keep it and so forth I
think is in question, but it is certainly something that
they would like to do. They've always wanted to turn the
Shia crescent into the Shia halfmoon which is of course a
huge concern of our Gulf state partners, of our Sunni Arab
partners.
MR. DICKERSON: Talk about Raqqa, what's
happening with ISIS and bring back in --
MR. PETRAEUS: Yeah, good question.
MR. DICKERSON: -- that you talked about
micromanaging earlier --
21
MR. PETRAEUS: Yeah.
MR. DICKERSON: -- because, you know, the
President has said he has given total authorization to the
military.
MR. PETRAEUS: No, to the Secretary of Defense.
MR. DICKERSON: Okay, sorry, yeah. Well --
MR. PETRAEUS: And General Mattis is in a suit
these days, however uncomfortable --
MR. DICKERSON: That may be for him, right.
MR. PETRAEUS: -- that may be for my shipmate,
my great marine buddy.
MR. DICKERSON: But what is the -- how is the
operational tempo different and how will that play out in
Raqqa and in the fight against ISIS?
MR. PETRAEUS: Well, first and again to be fair,
over the last six months in particular the previous
administration was gradually doing what a lot of us had
recommended, which is relax the level at which decisions
are made for the use of force. You have established rules
of engagement. Everyone knows them and the question is at
which level do you have to bump something for a decision
as you're interpreting the rules of engagement. The fact
is there are fleeting targets out there and if you don't
get these bad guys, keep in mind this is an enemy that is
so barbaric that it literally surrounds itself with
innocent civilians. They live in apartment houses. And
any time they leave, they are sprinting because they know
that the unblinking eye is up there and may well have
something with their number on it.
So when you have an opportunity, you've got to
take it and that's where it's good to have the authority
pushed down. There is a keen awareness still obviously of
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the need to minimize collateral damage and innocent
civilians' deaths and injury and indeed infrastructure
because we're going to have to rebuild it. And that's why
it's going so slow in Mosul.
But with Raqqa, I think this brings us to a
really important point and that is that a lot of us have
never had a doubt that once we reconstitute the Iraqis,
got them back on their feet, took advantage of all of the
infrastructure, headquarters, equipment, all the rest that
would provide them over the years and they had purchased,
and then provided them the enablers, what we've built as a
result of demands frankly from the battlefield during the
surge and in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular is a
constellation of intelligence surveillance and
reconnaissance assets, many of these unmanned aerial
vehicles. And we can put them in the sky 24 hours a day,
that means for every one of these you probably have to
have three platforms because there's one out there, one is
putting back because they're not very fast, the other one
was putting out. And you've got this incredible
communications architecture to push slow motion video all
over the world, actually to have them flown from a base
outside Las Vegas, Nevada; they skip satellite back to
there. That's where the pilots in the payload operators
are.
So you've got all of this and this enables these
-- enables us to understand what the situation is after a
while and then you fuse all of that with all of the other
intelligence that we have from signals intelligence, human
intelligence, you name it, other overhead systems and
we're providing that to our partners. And we're giving
them advice, we're giving them assistance and then we're
providing the precision strike assets for them as well.
This is a game changer. It's really much more
revolutionary than I think people realize because this
enables us to do what we were talking about backstage,
which I have contended we need to do in the future and
that is to have a sustained -- or a sustainable sustained
commitment in the fight against the Islamic State, Al-
Qaeda, perhaps some other enemies.
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Sustainability is measured in blood and
treasure, and if you can keep your troops out of the front
lines and they're the ones doing the fighting and dying
for their country, if we can keep the cost down because we
don't have a huge footprint, I mean we're doing this in
Iraq still with probably somewhere around 6,000 troops.
We had 165,000 when I was privileged to command, that are
just Americans privileged to command the surge. By the
way, we had a similar number of contractors. So if you
can do that, you can then sustain it for a long time and
we need to do that.
Make no mistake about this, we are in a
generational struggle. We will take away the geographic
caliphate that the Islamic State occupies in Iraq and in
Syria. They'll still have insurgents and terrorists cells
which we'll have to focus on then. But we will not be
able to take away the virtual caliphate. That's the
caliphate in cyberspace. They're extraordinarily
effective at using this for recruiting, for educating, for
teaching how to make explosive devices. Many of the "self
radicalized" actually got the inspiration and the
instruction and so forth from something in cyberspace.
So this is going to go on and it will
metastasize. Wherever there are ungoverned or even
inadequately governed spaces in the Muslim world, we are
going to see extremists take advantage of them. The
problems will not go away. This is not something -- you
know, in Washington we're sort of famous for trying to
admire a problem until it goes away. This is not going
away. And beyond that, Las Vegas rules do not apply.
What happens there does not stay there.
(Laughter)
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: And, you know, you have the case
of the geopolitical Chernobyl that is Syria, a meltdown of
a country which ultimately spews violence, extremism and a
24
tsunami of refugees, not just into neighboring countries,
but all the way into the countries of our NATO allies
causing the biggest domestic political challenges that
many of them have had since the end of the Cold War. So
we -- this is enabling us to do that now. We'll see this
in Afghanistan. I hope that we will, I've called for
publicly an additional for 4,000-5,000 troops added to the
8,500 or so that are there now. NATO does a like number,
but still in the advise and assist, relaxing the rules on
our air power for a long time until relatively recently
before this administration. We were not allowing our
commanders to use our air power to help our Afghan
partners whom we had trained and equipped unless we happen
to be with them and we were actually in danger against the
Taliban.
We could use it against Al-Qaeda and ultimately
against the Islamic state, but there is a distinction
made. Now keep in mind that it was under the Taliban that
Al-Qaeda had the sanctuary in Afghanistan where the 9/11
attacks were planned and so that logic escaped me a little
bit, but now we're able to use that.
MR. DICKERSON: I want to go back to Afghanistan
in a second but just staying with Syria, there are a lot
of people who think that you cannot have a successful
Syria if Assad is around still and that it will -- so but
you think --
MR. PETRAEUS: I don't know -- well, when I
talked about the object of being to defeat the Islamic
State, Al-Qaeda affiliate and stop the bloodshed now,
that's as opposed to trying to achieve diplomatically a
democratically elected multi-ethnic multi-sectarian
pluralist democracy in Damascus that is going to rule all
the people in a country where 500,000 of them have been
killed. I just don't see how that happens. In the
majority the country, keep in mind, of course is Sunni
Arab but it's been ruled by the Alawite Shia and which is
why you have a Shia Iran with their Revolutionary Guards
Corps Quds force on the ground, the Lebanese Hezbollah
Shia funded by Iran Shia militias from the region, and
25
then ultimately Russia comes in because Syria was a client
state and that's the only naval base they have in the
Mediterranean and the only air base they have there as
well.
MR. DICKERSON: And I guess --
MR. PETRAEUS: So I think you end up -- you
don't end up with Syria being back. I don't think you can
put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I think you end up
with a variety of zones, so in the north you'll have one.
This is actually in existence. Remember the Turks and
then our air power ultimately helped them that they took a
city called Al-Bab. So they pushed all the way down.
This is Sunni opposition and there's a road that runs
east-west south of Al-Bab that has actually become the
line of demarcation between the regime forces of Bashar al
Assad and these opposition forces supported by Turkey, and
they're not coming across it.
Over here you have the Syrian Kurd area which we
have helped the Syrian Kurds to clear and to hold. And
now we're moving down towards Raqqa which is a -- that's
where the Sunni Arab part starts and we'll do that with
many more Sunni Arabs than we've had available for the
Syrian Kurds, but we're going to have to guarantee that
area. Down in the south there is there's an area. Now
some of this is very contested and there are some others
over here very contested, but that's starting to -- you
can you can actually draw it on a map. I have -- there's
in fact a great guy who stayed on, Ambassador Brett McGurk
is the special envoy for the fight against the Islamic
State took over from General Allen; he was his deputy
before that. We've actually looked in a map and sort of
said, Okay, you know, what do you think? I think it will
be okay here and how? And the question is who gets Deir
ez-Zor.
MR. DICKERSON: Right.
MR. PETRAEUS: Who ends up with that and I don't
know because that's going to race and that is where
26
General Mattis wisely said, you know, the closer we get,
the dicier it becomes. And that is something the regime
forces will want to take before we can get there. There's
actually still an enclave of regime there, but it's
something we would want to take because the Sunni
opposition is very strong there as well.
MR. DICKERSON: And the Iranians obviously have
--
MR. PETRAEUS: And the Islamic State and the
Iranians would like to see that connection.
MR. DICKERSON: On Afghanistan, Secretary Amanda
said we are in a strategy-free time in Afghanistan. What
does that mean to you?
MR. PETRAEUS: What it meant, this is -- she was
talking to Congress and what it meant was we haven't yet
finalized the civil military campaign for that and he is
working with Secretary Tillerson on this. He has just
been at the NATO ministerial, the defense ministerial
talking about that, presumably getting some commitments
from NATO countries -- if we provide X number of
additional forces, can we get a like number something like
that from you all. And then he said publicly he wants to
go back, sit with Tillerson again and work out some of the
issues.
You know, there is a really good relationship
between the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of
State. If you think back, that has not always been the
case and there's a great relationship between the two of
them and the National Security Adviser. Again not always
typical in these very -- you know, sometimes you term
these, the challenges there, ego management.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah. But some people would
look at Afghanistan and say 16 years and we're sending
3,000-5,000.
27
MR. PETRAEUS: Yeah, fair enough. And the
answer to that is, look, we went there for a reason. It's
because that's where the 9/11 attacks were planned and
we've stayed for a reason to ensure that that won't become
a sanctuary for Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State again.
There's a certain affinity that the Islamic State even
already has and Al-Qaeda definitely has for eastern
Afghanistan. And for the life of me, I'm not -- it
escapes me. I've spent time out there, a fair amount of
time on the ground as a commander and before that as the
Central Command commander after CIA. And, you know, the
attraction of Tora Bora and these mountainous areas is a
little bit elusive. It's not quite Aspen on a good day.
(Laughter)
MR. PETRAEUS: And --
MR. DICKERSON: Very hard to get a facial.
MR. PETRAEUS: It is, it is, it is. So but
there is this attraction and they keep trying to come back
and we therefore need to stay. Now again this is where to
come back to what I was alluding to earlier, you know
we've had tens of thousands of troops on the Korean
Peninsula for over 65 years. Now I'm not saying we need
to do this for 65 years, I'm merely saying that if you can
have a strategy that is sustainable -- and again we're not
losing troops in Korea, we haven't lost him for a long
time -- and you need a sustained commitment, then maybe
that's appropriate. So I think one of the challenges with
the previous administration and the previous
administration was there was always, of course, pressure
to drawdown and you have to.
Again, what we were doing in Iraq was
unsustainable, that we had everything possible out there.
I mean if it was anything else, I would have asked for it.
And we had to extend our tours to 15 months from 12 months
which is long enough for the Army already. I end up doing
19 and a half that time. These were long, long grinding
experiences. But if you can get those numbers down and
28
then keep him in that range as opposed to trying to just
go to zero, and President Obama wisely did halt, he did
not carry out what he had intended to do and so that's why
I think -- and I do think that additional number with the
relaxations on the use of our air power and perhaps some
augmentation of some of the platforms that we have. By
the way, keep in mind also that Afghanistan is the
platform for our "regional counterterrorism" effort.
Without going into what the CIA might do from there's,
certain members of the press have certainly reported that
there are certain things that emanate from Afghanistan
that may actually terminate in, say, North Waziristan of
Pakistan and so forth. And of course, it's publicly known
that the raid to get Osama bin Laden was launched from
eastern Afghanistan as well.
MR. DICKERSON: Speaking of Pakistan -- we're
going to get to North Korea, but -- we used to talk all
the time about Pakistan.
MR. PETRAEUS: Yeah.
MR. DICKERSON: And they do have nuclear
weapons.
MR. PETRAEUS: Yeah.
MR. DICKERSON: And it is highly unstable, but
what's your --
MR. PETRAEUS: And trying to develop tactical
nuclear weapons which are particularly dangerous, because
these become much shorter range they become use them or
lose them, you know, and then you have to, by the way
because it's only a short range and if the enemy is coming
at you, gee, can you take the time to get the pit, the
igniter if you will and put it in or maybe you actually
store it with it now. And so that -- this is -- it's
inherently dangerous, and it's dangerous in a crisis,
because again you never want something that is a use or
lose --
MR. DICKERSON: Right.
29
MR. PETRAEUS: -- situation. And then the other
side knows it so they make -- you can see where that goes.
Look, I -- in you know the latest piece I did in
Afghanistan I said it is time to be firmer with Pakistan.
I went through with Ambassador Holbrooke, we were a team,
we got more money for Pakistan, $6.5 billion for various
development and economic assistance and so forth. We have
more money on the military side. We were actually flying
intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets for
the Pakistani army to help them as they did -- they did a
-- a really impressive campaign to go after their version
of the Taliban not the one in Afghanistan when it
threatened Islamabad, the capital of the country. But
they sort of ran out of gas, closing the jaws on North
Waziristan.
And that is the heart of darkness; that's where
Al-Qaeda is, that's where the Haqqani Network which is
affiliated with the Afghan Taliban and truly
irreconcilable I think and indeed there have been certain
operations reported in the press in there. If that's the
case the platform for that would be in Afghanistan. So we
need it for that purpose as well. Keep in mind, again, we
-- you cannot put a stake through the heart of these
movements.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: You can put a stake through the
heart of Osama bin Laden, we'll put one through the heart
of Baghdadi the leader of the Islamic State; it will not
end the threat that those organizations pose. And of
course, you have to get at all the other issues that might
give rise to -- that allow recruiting.
MR. DICKERSON: Yes.
MR. PETRAEUS: So this is the battle after the
battle which we should talk about very quickly. After the
Battle of Mosul is over and it's just about is --
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: -- the prime minister has
30
reported it, what really matters is governance.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: Because what gave -- what made
the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq fertile ground for the
planting of the seeds of ISIS was the alienation three and
a half years after the surge -- it went really well for a
good three, three and a half years and then the prime
minister basically undid what we did in reconciling with
the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. Some less than 20 percent but
very important in a Shia dominated country and government.
And when he did that and when the Sunnis peacefully
protested after their vice president was sought the
Minister of Finance was charges preferred the
parliamentarian and then violently put down peaceful
demonstrations then put leaders back in charge that I'd
insisted be fired before we would reconstitute units
during the surge on and on.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: That was bad governance. And so
the question is can the governance, once the Islamic State
is cleared from Iraq, be sufficiently inclusive that it
gives the Sunni Arabs a reason to support the new Iraq
rather than to continue to oppose it or to support those
tacitly or actively who do oppose it and we did that
during the surge. That was one of the huge achievements
of the surge, was reconciliation.
MR. DICKERSON: Right.
MR. PETRAEUS: You can't kill or capture your
way out of these industrial strength problems.
MR. DICKERSON: Thank you --
MR. PETRAEUS: So we've got to get that kind of
governance.
MR. DICKERSON: Thank you for this transition,
because what that requires is an attention to corruption
in countries.
31
MR. PETRAEUS: Yep, yep.
MR. DICKERSON: It's an attention to human
rights and democracy in the country. Maybe not democracy
in the sense of pressing it upon them --
MR. PETRAEUS: Yep.
MR. DICKERSON: But at least liberal
institutions.
MR. PETRAEUS: Yes.
MR. DICKERSON: And we see the budget at least
for the State Department has been significantly --
MR. PETRAEUS: Yep.
MR. DICKERSON: -- drawn down and also on the
question of human rights you know, okay, Cuba gets beat up
for their human rights record, but Saudi Arabia, the
President went there and so I'm not going to lecture you.
MR. PETRAEUS: Yeah, yeah.
MR. DICKERSON: How can people who see what's
happening in Yemen with -- where -- what happens just
inside Saudi Arabia, doesn't that create that (inaudible)
still that needs to be taken care of?
MR. PETRAEUS: I mean, it is -- it's a bit more
complex obviously than that and to be fair the now crown
prince of Saudi Arabia is trying to modernize the country,
he's trying to liberalize. Again you know, small steps.
He's the one you -- it observed to me one time when I was
with him you know women can drive in the Quran, but they
can't drive a car today. And he wants to do that; he
wants to have music, he wants to have amusement parks.
There is one university at which men and women go to
school together; the Science and Technology University.
Look, I signed a letter I don't do very -- much
of that, but I signed a letter with a number of other very
32
senior retired four stars calling for additional money for
the State Department in questioning and quoting Secretary
of Defense Mattis who backed -- in some unguarded moment
before he realized he'd be Secretary of Defense in this
administration said "if you don't give me diplomats you're
going to have to give me more bullets." So I'm very much
with you and I am concerned about the seeming drawback
from the embrace of, really I guess the idealistic
motivations for our foreign policy. But keeping in mind
that there is always this tug of war and we have to be
careful not to go too far. You know, we should remember
that we're the ones that insisted on an election in Gaza
and Hamas was elected, and there's not been an election
since then. So it's always -- you know, it's complicated,
and look at Egypt a democratically elected basically
political Islamist Muslim Brotherhood government wrote the
most exclusive exclusionary Constitution imaginable and of
course then is overthrown.
You know, we don't like a democratic government
overthrown, but maybe not all bad, because the new
constitution is much more inclusive you know with
protections for Christians and so forth. Yes, some of the
restrictions on the press and others give us pause, but
it's this kind of thing. I've been a fan for saying let's
work patiently with countries behind the scenes. There
was a great Arabist at Princeton who used to say that
"democracy in the Middle East is strong medicine; it
should be administered small doses at a time."
You know, it's simplistic of course but it is a
cautionary tale. And I think just trying to patiently
move forward -- I've had the conversations, for example,
with our Saudi friends about the influence of Wahhabism in
other countries and so forth and they're keenly aware of
that now too. So this is difficult, but I do believe -- I
fought for the values of our country. I remember when the
MoveOn.org went after me. And that full-page New York
Times ad on the morning of the biggest testimony you know,
in my life that we're going to report to Congress this 6-
month report on the surge and they attacked me personally
--
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
33
MR. PETRAEUS: -- not just over the policies or
you know how I was leading or something like that. And I
remember the next day at the National Press Club
Ambassador Crocker and I did a press thing together. We
did everything together; everything. And they said so you
know what do you think about that and I said I feel very
privileged to have defended the freedoms of MoveOn.org to
criticize me in the press. I just wish they hadn't gotten
a discount on it from The New York Times.
MR. DICKERSON: Let's -- we have saved the
toughest problem for last which is North Korea.
MR. PETRAEUS: Yeah.
MR. DICKERSON: We just take a -- where do you
take a hold of North Korea? Where does it begin and end
for you?
MR. PETRAEUS: Well I, -- it's great to end with
this, because I do think this is the most pressing
problem. This is the potential crisis that could confront
the President of the United States with that most awful
and awesome of decisions which is to use really a
significant amount of force knowing that you know there's
no good option. So first of all let's keep in mind that
there is a different reality that faces this President,
and that is that on -- in his watch, his first term, an
impulsive, arguably mad, at times young dictator of the
hermit kingdom could have a nuclear device that could
actually strike Los Angeles or San Francisco, and that is
a really difficult conundrum, and he has said "will not
happen." Again policy making tweet. And so he's got to
figure out -- and what they're doing right now is they're
showing China how serious we are about this. And yeah, I
don't know if you saw today the next step, a bank, a small
bank --
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: -- modest bank, $12 billion under
management or something like that was designated by the
Treasury Department, I believe --
34
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: -- as a participant -- potential
participant in money laundering presumably for
facilitating North Korea's front companies in this kind of
stuff.
MR. DICKERSON: Right.
MR. PETRAEUS: That's the first next step.
That's -- and we'll see more secondary sanctions. And
this comes right before the G20. So this -- and it's a
significant step. It's something we certainly never took
in the previous administration.
MR. DICKERSON: And this is sanctioning Chinese
companies that are helping North Korea.
MR. PETRAEUS: It's a Chinese company that's
helping North Korea. So what we have to do is convey to
China as -- in every way necessary, that they have to
reduce the umbilical cord that is keeping the lights on in
Pyongyang. You know, 90 percent of the crude oil that
goes to North Korea, the entire 90+ percent of their goods
and so forth, the trade and all the rest of that and they
can turn the lights off in Pyongyang. If the -- now, they
don't want to, because they don't want the country to
collapse, because it's unacceptable to them to have a
reunified Korean peninsula, it'd be unacceptable to have a
hostile power in Pyongyang.
They don't want massive numbers of refugees
coming across the Yalu that's why they have two entire
divisions up there and now as you may have seen, and a
special airborne unit -- parachute unit -- presumably, to
deal with if there's some kind of collapse with perhaps
safeguarding nuclear weapons or something like that. So
then we've got to have -- continue the strategic dialogue,
and that's why I believe strategic dialogue is hugely
important, and why I support it for Russia as well as for
China. And you sit down and say okay, what are we going
to do together about this? This is not just our problem,
this is your problem, and you don't like the Theater High
35
Altitude Air Defense system that's going into Korea; it's
because of those guys. And if you don't like that you'll
really not like the one that goes into Japan, and you know
on and on, so --
MR. DICKERSON: Tell them what --
MR. PETRAEUS: -- how do we do --
MR. DICKERSON: -- if the theater would -- tell
them what THAAD is.
MR. PETRAEUS: The Theater High Altitude Air
Defense system is this massive radar array that gives very
good -- and the Chinese think it can look into China; it
can't. It's more limited, but it can take out some of the
missiles that can come at you. It -- and it's really for
Korean defense much more than anything else. So it's
going to -- it's when they're coming back down. So it's
not the ballistic missile defense that we would have in
the continental United States.
MR. DICKERSON: When the president says "It will
not happen." What is the "it," what's -- I mean --
MR. PETRAEUS: I -- the way I've interpreted
that is North Korea possessing an intercontinental
ballistic missile and a miniaturized nuclear warhead that
could be mated and could actually be launched and hit the
West Coast of the United States.
MR. DICKERSON: But there seems to be a lot of
ambiguity in -- and for obvious reasons between whether --
you know, there's a time in which it's going to just be 6
more weeks until they're going to have it, and so you
would act then perhaps. Or do you --
MR. PETRAEUS: I think this is years.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: Not months.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
36
MR. PETRAEUS: -- not weeks.
MR. DICKERSON: But I mean -- but years till
they could press the button and it would go, or years till
they have you know breakout capability.
MR. PETRAEUS: No. Years until they have that
actual --
MR. DICKERSON: Okay.
MR. PETRAEUS: -- intercontinental, at least.
And again, it will depend on the -- of pace of testing.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: Which of course they dramatically
increased in terms of their shorter and medium range
missiles. And of course, have continued nuclear tests as
well. So this is a real, real conundrum as I said. And
keep in mind this is a leader. And North Korea -- I mean,
how more inventive can you -- or horrific can you get than
to have your brother -- your half-brother killed by people
putting nerve gas on his face in a public airport --
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: -- and gunned down his uncle with
an air defense cannon. He is creative.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
(Laughter)
MR. DICKERSON: So -- the last question is, I
mean, it seems like all the options are bad, and the end -
- what is the end state? Is the end state him saying,
"Oh, okay, we'll give up our nuclear weapons." Well,
there's a number of different end states. I mean, you
might be satisfied with a freeze, and then we see where
that goes. It could go as far as to say let's figure out
how we could Finlandize China and the US. How could we
Finlandize North Korea?
37
MR. DICKERSON: What does that mean?
MR. PETRAEUS: It means, make them neutral. How
could you get there from here?
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: Obviously, that -- you're not
going to get there from here with Kim Jong Un still at the
helm. So how do you make that happen? I mean, these are
serious conversations that need to be had.
MR. DICKERSON: Are being had.
MR. PETRAEUS: Because this is -- and are being
had. But they're still in the exploratory stages. But
they're getting -- you know, they're moving on. By the
way, this is where you do need to populate the State
Department in particular. Defense is gradually getting
some of the additional individuals confirmed, but as you
have crises the one in the Gulf right now between the
Saudis, Emiratis and the Qataris, who you going to send?
I mean, you just got a deputy confirmed; he's really more
the admin guy, I think.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah.
MR. PETRAEUS: So he's not the policy deputy.
You have an acting deputy as the Undersecretary of Defense
or Secretary of State for policy. There's no unders
beyond that, and most of the assistant secretaries are
acting. And the one for the Middle East is a fine
ambassador, Stu Jones -- just came out of Iraq, but has
announced his retirement plans. So we've got to get the
talent pool restocked there.
MR. DICKERSON: Yeah. And the Secretary of
State is not happy about that delay.
MR. PETRAEUS: According to the press.
MR. DICKERSON: Yes, well, which means it must
be true.