The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 107. General David Petraeus: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US military's role in the world

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Was the surge in Iraq a success for the United States? How critical are alliances to maintaining global stability? How can leaders maintain resilience and integrity in the face of public scrutiny? Rory and Alastair are joined by General David Petraeus, ex-CIA Director and United States Army general during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolitics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistaira. And today we're going to be interviewing a friend of mine, I'd say almost a good friend of mine, General David Petraeus. And General Petraeus was the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. He was also the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a commander in two wars.

He was the director of the CIA. He is probably one of the, yeah, I think the best known American General in the last 30, 40 years. And for younger listeners, he is an amazing insight into these three trillion-dollar wars. Between 2001 and 2021, the United States spent three thousand, billion, deployed at any one time 150,000 soldiers onto the ground in those places. And he, more than anyone, was the architect, the kind of intellectual justifier and ultimately the commander of those wars. And those wars, I think, will go down in history as the high point of American power and maybe the moment from which American power began to decline. So we are really

encountering history. Buckle in for the right. He's an extraordinary individual. tells you a lot about generals, tells you a lot about leaders, and tells you a lot about the American mindset that brought us through those wars. Thanks for fixing this one. I enjoyed talking to him. I should just say to people that we recorded this a few weeks before the presidential election. So there's a couple of points where you may think it's a bit weird that we talk about if Donald Trump becomes president, because we now know that the if has become when he becomes president. And if you listen to the end, you'll find me giving General Petraeus a bit of career advice.

Should Donald Trump pick up the phone as he did the last time and ask him to come in for a chat about possibly having a job? You might also enjoy those of you who think that we should be talking more about Brexit, that General Petraeus has very strong views about Brexit. Anyway, hope you enjoy it. Here we go. General, thank you. Great, great privilege to have you with us. General, so many different things to think about. Can I start with a sort of cheesy, obvious question, which is tell us a little bit about your childhood.

I mean, who was General Petraeus growing up? What kind of child were you? What kind of places did you grow up in? What would you have been like if we'd met you at 14, for example? Well, I grew up about 50 miles north of New York City, a beautiful little town, about seven miles north of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where I eventually went to college. My dad was a Dutch-American sea captain. He came to the United States from Holland. when he was on a Dutch ship down in the Caribbean, the Nazis overran Holland. They couldn't go back to Rotterdam, which is where he'd gone to the Dutch furs and Merchant Marine Academy.

He sailed up with a ship along the eastern coast of the United States, turned into New York Harbor, turned into the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and said, we heard you're hiring and you need crews. And the U.S. desperately did need crews as the war went on. In fact, the Merchant Marine, which was part of the Department of Defense during the war, war took the highest per capita casualty rate of all of the different military services. So they could build ships rapidly, Liberty Ship every week or so, but they couldn't build

crews. And as a result, at the age of 29, he was the captain of a Liberty ship that did a rarmansk run over a course of many months. The convoy was told to scatter when a German battleship and submarines appeared among it. They couldn't defend against them. Miraculously, they made it. His ship did. half the ships did not, and then came back. So again, a very, very challenging war. And my mother was

growing up in Brooklyn. She was helping with the Siemens Institute to show our appreciation for those sailing on the seas, met, married, moved up north of the city. And eventually my dad, who was doing civil merchant ship captain after the war, decided that 11 months at sea and one month off was just not a way to raise a family, became an operating control engineer in a generating station. Every ship's captain knows how to generate power. Settled in this lovely little town. We had sailboats always great athletic programs for kids, terrific schools, wonderful churches and community activities. So just a lovely place in which to grow up, I played a lot of different sports. My parents were very much into reading intellectuals. They would take me, my sister, every summer.

we'd go to historic locations and we'd retrace the Paul Revere's ride and go around Walden Pond again and put another stone and Thoreau's grave and then go up into Maine and Vincent Ballet and all again. So it was a wonderful childhood. When did you know, General, that you probably would go into a life being a soldier? Yeah, I think if you grow up in the shadow of West Point, I had a newspaper route, for example, for two and a half years in the morning. It was great. But about half of my customers were either serving U.S. Army on the staff and faculty at West Point, retired U.S. military products of West Point, former instructors there. So you have a tremendous footprint, if you will, tremendous influence, tremendous shadow that is projected by West Point. And I think you

do a lot in life to be like Mike, as the saying here, you know, I want to be like Mike. And in this case, Mike was West Point cadets, products of West Point. And that's what I wanted to. to be like as I decided at a certain point in my high school years, and then did go there, obviously, and found, frankly, that the three components that are valued at West Point, the academic component, obviously, because it is, after all, one of America's best colleges, the leadership component, and then the athletic, the fitness component.

And I realized that I did all three of those really pretty well. In fact, I think it was one of two members of my class that had a varsity, the letter in a sport that had in the top 5% of Starman, as it's called, and then also a cadet captain, again, on the brigade staff. So, and then I think you enjoy the mix of these different challenges as you go through an army career. It was a very interesting time to come into the U.S. military because you were coming in right at the end of the Vietnam War. Yes. And that had been a bloody, messy, messy, horrifying again.

experience, which had had people in the streets protesting in their hundreds of thousands. The U.S. military must have been very bewildered by the experience. There must have been many people, presumably most of your instructors will have served in Vietnam. Yes. They will have had very mixed feelings about the way that war was conducted and the withdrawal. So how did that mark you as a young man? I guess getting into West Point just after the end of the Vietnam War, is that right? No, I actually entered in the summer of 1970, and certainly that was the height of the anti-war protests, also race riots.

The country was really torn. There was an awful lot of anti-institution sentiment. But again, this is growing up in this little town. We weren't riven by all of this. Even Woodstock, which took place, I think, either the summer before, you know, it sort of bypassed us. The cars went on the throughway, not through Cornwall. We sort of knew this thing was going on, but it wasn't something that many of us participated in. And the student body, there was a little bit of activism, again, 69, 70 when we graduate, but not a huge amount.

It was not the kind of place where this, and it was a very patriotic area again, again, very heavily influenced by its proximity to the U.S. military academy. And then when you enter West Point, you're sort of shielded from all of that. I don't think we even had leave during the entire first year. If so, it was maybe to go to the Army-Navy game. But you're basically in this cloistered existence. In fact, one of the challenges for the military has always been, you live in a somewhat cloistered existence, and you have your nose to the grindstone, and you don't often look out and up.

In fact, you famously, you work really, really hard. You never leave until the boss leaves, that kind of approach to life. And it's not necessarily the most contemplative or reflective. form of life unless you can get out of your intellectual cumper zone. Actually, at a critical juncture where I went to graduate school at Princeton instead of going to another infantry, in fact, to go to the Ranger Battalion. You said when you realized you wanted to be a soldier, when did you realize that you had it within you to be what you went on to become? When did you realize, I guess I'm saying

that you weren't just going to be another officer, you were going to be something a bit special? I think everybody has sort of, you know, some designs in mind and think that they could do this or that. But this is why I mentioned earlier the three components of, if you will, success in the military, particularly if you're in infantry and airborne and so forth. So there is a very significant emphasis on the physical. And it turned out I was pretty darn good at that. There is the leadership component. And that evolved as well and became a really confident and, you know, reasonably competent leader.

And then there is the intellectual component, if you will, the academic component, which is hugely important. And further you go, of course, the more important that becomes. Because at the end of the day, as you get to the senior levels, you're the one who has to get the big ideas right. So it's all very competitive. Everything is competitive in the military, in the Army. And, you know, there's a basic course you go to. Well, I was an undergraduate of that. Then there's a ranger school.

There are three awards in ranger schools is the toughest of the courses in the U.S. military. And I won all three of them. And one of them was for peer rating. So it wasn't just that you climbed over the back of your fellow ranger students, but they actually said this guy is also best ranger buddy. Then you go on and a few years later, as there's a staff college and 1,200 students, I was literally the youngest in the class and ended up number one in that. So you, you know, you're constantly being evaluated.

And, you know, if you're performing at the top, it's pretty apparent at a certain point in time. You have a sense that I can actually do this. The truth is, in fact, people will have said at various times, you know, Petraeus was lucky. He just happened to be here and there and everything else. And I would contend that, yes, there is something to the timing that is, you know, without question. That has to be there. And I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. But the reason I was there in some cases was because people had put me there.

So that phrase, that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, I think is very, very valid. And I spent a lifetime really preparing for these opportunities that did come along. In particular, by the way, a fascination from a very early age with counterinsurgency. My dissertation at Princeton was on the American military and the lessons of Vietnam and so forth. And by the way, they sent me to get a master's degree. And I said, you know what, I'll try to get a PhD. And you have two years. That's all I had.

So you have to race to get all of the master's courses and general exams and all that stuff. stuff and manage to do that. So again, you have a sense that there's a capacity there, and then it's a question of being prepared. Did any of this wind up your contemporaries? I mean, did this provoke jealousy? Did people get irritated with this? Yeah, I mean, again, if you're seriously competitive individually and the units you're leading are seriously competitive because you're building a culture of competition, but you try to be the best team player you can be. I've always said, you know, the young aspiring officers, is life is a competitive endeavor and you need to embrace that and you need to be the very best

that you can be. But as you're trying to do that, you also need to be the very best team player that you can be as well. And there are episodes where we subordinated, say, my unit's objectives or goals or vision, say during the fight to Baghdad, the 101st Airborne Division, I was a two-star commanding this great historic organization, which had 254 helicopters. It's the biggest fleet by three times bigger than any other in the world at a division. And we wanted to air assault onto Baghdad International Airport. That was going to be our air assault into history. Rendezvous with destiny is the term always used for the 101st because General Order

No. 1 stated the 101st Airborne Division has no history, but it has a rendezvous with destiny. And this was on the eve of its entry into World War II by jumping into Normandy. But again, life is competitive, but you've got to be the best team player you can be. We subordinated our desire to air assault onto that and recognized that the armored division, third infantry division mechanized, was the one that should actually take it. And they said, we're going to do the follow and support mission for them. We're going to put our attack helicopters in front of them.

They asked for one-five-five millimeter howitzer ammunition. I gave him the entire unit that we had with the rounds all uploaded on it. I asked him, what else do you need? He said, how about an infantry battalion? I sent in the battalion I had actually commanded. We air-assaulted it right to where he. he needed it and it proved to be a decisive element in sending off the Iraqi counterattack on Baghdad International Airport.

So again, you have to recognize at times that you have to subordinate your sort of real inclination or desire for the greater good. But yes, some of this, you know, the guy's just Uber competitive all out for himself and his unit. You have to contend with some of that. But you try to mitigate that to the extent you can. But, you know, when your unit at the end of two years of command, of the battalion in the 101st Airborne Division, we had three times the enlisted Rangers

of any other battalion in the entire division, and just about any other battalion in the conventional US Army. Look, there's no arguing with that. That is a really extraordinary accomplishment as because of the way we went about it. Yeah, it grates a little bit for some of the others. Are you aware, General Petraeus, of a condition which I was once told that I had known as maladaptive competitiveness, where you have to compete even when there is no competition taking place. So are you like this when you play cards? Are you like this when you are playing with young children at Scrabble? I mean, do you have to win everything? I am generally able to subordinate some of my competitive instincts when playing cards with kids and others, but not always

completely successful. But no, look, my aide when I was a commander of the 1001st Airborne Division said that I was the most competitive person on the face of the earth, in part because he had to run with me every morning and we were training for the Army 10-mile or he got tired being beaten by somebody who was 30 years old and he was or 20 years older. So no, I mean, there is some of that that makes its way at times when you should be able to subordinate it and you can't. But again, welcome to competition and those that pursue it. You also had a couple of near-death experience. So in 1991, you were accidentally shot, and that was quite a serious accident. And then in 2000, you were involved in a skydiving accident.

So talk us through what you took out of that and how you dealt with those kind of near-death experiences. You have to exercise or demonstrate a considerable degree of resilience. You also, by the way, have to be careful not to try to come back too rapidly. So I got shot through the chest, as I used to say, it was great that it was over the A in Petraeus, rather than the A and army, which would not have gone as well. Didn't bleed out, obviously. So it didn't sever an artery, in which case you last a minute and a half or so. It did nick an artery, though.

And so they medevac me or medevac. This is a freak accident and a very aggressive lie fire exercise where a soldier tripped. I was following the unit together with then-bring general Jack Keene, later four-star general, big mentor of mine. And he saw it happen, the soldier trip coming out of a bunker that he'd knocked out with a grenade. and he tensed up as he hit the ground. He was knocked out for a moment and squeezed off a round that went right through my chest. And the soldiers did a magnificent job dealing with a sucking chest wound.

They put battery plastic over it, tape it up, so it's not a gaping hole and oxygen is running out of you. Then they got me to the post hospital where they put a chest tube in with suction so that you're not going to suffocate on your own fluids, which is the next big fear. That was the most painful experience in my entire life because no kind of anesthesia at all. they just cut an X in your side right to the bone, pull the skin apart and jam this tube into you. Then they put me back in a helicopter, sent me down to Vanderbilt Medical Center in nearby Nashville, Tennessee. And then of all things, the doctor called in, this is a Saturday, was none other than Bill Frist, who would eventually be the Senate Majority Leader.

And as I used to jokingly say, I was dying to meet Bill Frist. So he came in when he did a magnificent job and we became lifelong friends. The recovery, though, I tried to take too fast. First of all, I convinced them to let me out of the hospital by doing 50 pushups after pulling all the tubes out. And they were tired of me doing laps on at a wheelchair that I put all the tubes in and do laps around the hospital, bumping into people. And they finally said, let's get this guy out of here. But I came back too rapidly, actually, and then had other running injuries that were difficult. So you learn that lesson as well.

And it's hard to learn if you want to get back to it. And, you know, you're serving battalion commander. you need to get the rucksack back on. The skydiving injury was a very, very serious one because a fracture of the pelvis front and rear is pretty destructive and it required major surgery to put you back together, plates and screws and all the rest of that stuff. But again, managed to come back from that. And very grateful there that my then commander, I was a one-star general at Ben Fort Bragg,

North Carolina, having just been in the 82nd Airborne Division, and followed my boss to 18th Airborne Corps, Lieutenant General Dan McNeil. And he was called by the army and said, you want somebody who can jump because I couldn't, I was on parachute jump status, but I couldn't jump for about, I think it was six or eight months. And he said, nope, Petraeus on crutches is better than anybody you're going to send me. So it was really wonderful of him. And of course, he went on to four stars as calm, ISAF, in Afghanistan and so forth, and a great man and a great mentor. John, let's jump forward into Iraq.

So I first met you in 2003 in Baghdad. and then I saw you taking over command in Iraq and then going on to be the sentcom commander and then I saw you again in Afghanistan when you're commanding in Afghanistan. Thinking back to that, give us a sense first of what went well and what went wrong in Iraq. Well, what went well, I think, was the frankly takedown of the Saddam Hussein regime. It was much more rapid than people expected, far fewer casualties. It was a real tribute to the training and equipping and, frankly, leadership of our forces, particularly at the tactical and operational level.

The division that I mentioned earlier, a third-imper division mechanized was just a juggernaut. The thunder runs were incredibly audacious, demonstrated extraordinary professional skill initiative and so forth. And I'd like to think the same was true of our forces that were conducting air assault operations clearing the major cities that they had blown by, which we needed to do to ensure that our lines of communications, which were critical because that's the fuel that is fueling those tanks in our Apache helicopters and so forth. So that was really quite impressive. And again, it lasted far less time than was at all anticipated and far, far fewer casualties. But then,

of course, we were wholly unprepared to consolidate the piece. And not only we're, we're were we unprepared, we then made catastrophically bad decisions when the coalition provisional authority, which was a successor to the Organization for Reconstruction humanitarian assistance that had been essentially fired by Rumsfeld when he didn't think they were moving quickly enough. And the challenge here was that the new administrator comes in, the Besser, and immediately doesn't consult any of us. We've been on the ground now for months. We already had run an election in Mosul, which is where the 100 first ended up ultimately.

We had an interim province council, an interim governor. We were rebuilding even security forces, police academy. All of this is actually going really well, 24-hour power up there and everything else. And he comes in and he fires the entire Iraqi military without telling them how we're going to enable them

to provide for themselves and their families. That was the really big mistake. You can argue that they needed to go through a DDR process, disarmament, demobilization, reintegration. but there was nothing like that. And just you're fired and you're on your own jack. And of course, they all had military training, took their weapons home when their forces collapsed.

I remember a meeting. I was working for Bremer in Misan in Alamara down in the south. And we came up to a meeting in Baghdad. I guess we're probably talking October 2003. And I remember you being quite outspoken already in that meeting. And I'd like to get a sense of how is it that Ambassador Bremer could possibly have made that kind of decision. And it wasn't just you. I remember General Audiano being very wound up about it as well. And Graham Lamb, the commander, the British commander of my comrade in so many of these different

operations starting in Bosnia, two-star in Iraq, three-star in our respective. Then he is my deputy during the surge. I asked Tony Blair to leave him there longer because I needed him to help convince our own soldiers at reconciliation was something that needed to be done. And he had experienced that in Northern Ireland, of course. Well, the truth is that Bremer came. There's a lot of debate about where the actual order originated. It appears to have originated in a certain office in the Pentagon. Bremer took it with him. There was not an explicit decision made actually in the White House by this. And in fact, the CIA station chief said to Bremer that if you do this, you're going to have a million enemies in the morning or something like this. And of course, it's hundreds of thousands of men in uniform

who now have an incentive to oppose the new Iraq, which has just fired them rather than to support it. So this is planting the seeds of insurgency. And then this was compounded by firing the entire Bath Party, Saddam's party, all the way down to level four, which included tens of thousands of bureaucrats, many of them Western educated, who we needed to run a country we didn't sufficiently understand. And we were already using them up in the north. We'd gotten them all back into position. We were mentoring each one of the ministries, reviving them, rebuilding, and all the rest of this. And so this cut our knees off. Now, I was fortunate to be given an authority to conduct reconciliation because the critical element here was you didn't just fire them.

There was no process announced for reconciliation, for appeal that you could say, hey, look, I'm just a level four bureaucrat. I had to do this and it was advanced to that level and let me perform my job. We had the authority up in the north. I got it from Bremer fairly early on. It's one reason why Mosul went so much better than the rest of Iraq for so much longer. But again, this created tens of thousands of individuals whose incentive was to oppose the New Iraq rather than to support it. And, you know, I had a sign on the wall of my command post in each of my general officer commands. There are five general officer commands in combat.

And it asked a question, will this operation take more bad guys off the street than it creates by its conduct? If the incident is no. In other words, you're going to create more bad guys trying to take a few off the street. You're not supposed to do the operation. The same is true of policies. And that question clearly was not raised at that time. Again, I felt very strongly about these issues. Eventually, five weeks into the firing of the military, after facing down a huge demonstration

in between 10 and 15,000 former soldiers in the square around the governance center in Mosul and addressed them on a public address system and everything, and I said, I will go to Baghdad if you will just stand down. There were killings by now in these riots. And I went to the airport, got in the helicopter, flew two hours to Baghdad, found the individual responsible for that. I said, your policy is killing our troops. We have to pay them stipends. But again, this is serious. This is life and death for our soldiers. And that's why you saw the animation. It was earlier than October, I'm pretty sure.

And I suspect it may have been the meeting in which Bremer unveiled a new strategy, which had never been circulated with those of us on the actual ground. And it was going to fire all of the government state-owned industries. And I said, you know, you fired the military, you fired the bureaucrats, the government structure, and now you're going to fire the final employment. Yeah, I got it. They're inefficient. I got it. It's not free market capitalism. But, you know, could we just hold off on that until we address the issues that have resulted from these earlier to catastrophically bad decisions? My vantage point through this period was working alongside Tony Blair, you mentioned there in relation to Lam, and I'm glad you paid tribute to him as a

wonderful man. I wanted to get your understanding as to why what you've just described happened. So I agree with you. I felt that the military operation to bring down Saddam was unbelievably effective. And like Rory, I went to Saw Bramer who struck me as being almost in a state of panic at the scale of what he was being asked to look after. But what became clear was that decisions were being made, not necessarily by George Bush, but certainly by Rumsfeld, certainly by Rumsfeld, certainly by Rumsfeld, certainly by Cheney, and that they were being pushed down into a system which hadn't been prepared to implement those decisions. Is that a fair assessment? It is, and they did not consult those on the ground who actually had been dealing with it,

and actually had learned a bit about how to move forward in the wake of the collapse of all of the government. So, you know, what's interesting is to ask, why was there a coalition provisional authority at all instead of just right away establish a U.S. embassy? And at the end, answer, I think, is that the Pentagon, Rumsfeld, wanted to run the war and didn't want any competition from Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and so convinced him to have this kind of interim authority. How does that make the military feel when you were there on the ground being expected to make sense of decisions, which you clearly are understanding are being driven by politics rather than military strategy? It was maddening. It was infuriating. It was very, very

serious. And we made our views note, but we were not consulted at all, actually, not just inadequately. We were consulted on issues that we would have recognized immediately, as did the CI Station Chief, that these are going to be catastrophically bad. Yes, I understand the need for a DDR policy, say, for the military, but it should have been organized and structured and take care of them while you're going through this and try to provide jobs and alternatives, as we ultimately did with our Reconciliation program. And then the same with the Bath Party. Certainly the top two levels. We're proud, frankly, to kill Saddam's two sons when they shot back at our soldiers when we tried to attain them. And some of the other major figures that I got the former Minister of Defense

to surrender to me and so on. All that absolutely right. But when you get to level four and tens of thousands of essentially bureaucrats, many of them again, Western educated, spoke good English. Some of them drank. I mean, what more could you want in partners to run? in Islamic country and yet we were deprived of this. Now in the north I was given the special dispensation the only one that had it to do a reconciliation process and we did this in mass scale, tens of thousands that we brought in and reconciled with and then tried to put to productive work once again had it interrupted. Sadly, all of the cases that I ultimately took to Baghdad, we took a huge Chinook helicopter and flew them all down and gave them to Dr. Shalabi, who was the head of the

debathification committee, and he refused to approve the actions of our reconciliation process, which was a huge setback, and why Mosul then went down hill, just like all the others, just about right after I left. And then they also fired the interim governor that I had, who was really quite an effective guy. Of course, Shal had me a very Shia in Mosul, again, a Sunni majority area. You then came back as the commanding general on the ground and then commanded the search, Brief summary of the surge, and then I'd like to move on to what happened after the surge. But tell us a little bit about what works with the surge. Well, the surge that mattered most was not the surge of forces, as important as they were

in enabling us to implement more rapidly the essence of the surge, which was the surge of ideas. So it's a complete reversal of what we had been doing. We had been clearing areas and then leaving them or handing off to Iraqi forces that were increasingly unable to deal with the escalating violence of a Sunni-Shiya civil war. that characterized 2006 in the wake of a bombing of a Shia mosque in a Sunni area that set off a cycle of Sunni Shia violence that just was escalating out of control. This is 180-degree shift. We're also going to pursue reconciliation. We needed to sit down with people who had our blood on their hands.

That's how you end this. Now, not the irreconcilables. We had a whole intelligence apparatus set up to determine who was irreconcilable, had to be killed or captured, ideally captured because you want to interrogate them in accordance with the Geneva Convention and learn more about the organization. you're trying to take down. And so the biggest of the big ideas is live with the people, 77 additional locations for our soldiers just in the Baghdad area alone. And they were all under enormous pressure initially, but then we drove violence down.

And then the combination of that plus reconciliation, all of a sudden we're flipping entire areas where the local Sheikh says, you know what, if you'll come secure us and help us, we'll help you because we don't want al-Qaeda in our area anymore. And then we do the same with the Shia militia supported by Iran. And ultimately, we drive violence down by nearly 90 percent. And it actually continues to go down over the subsequent three and a half years of the withdrawal. And tragically, then the prime minister within 24 hours of our final combat forces being removed, the prime minister takes highly sectarian actions. He tries to take down the vice president of Iraq. The senior Sunni figure prefers charges against him in his security detail, the minister of finance and their prominent parliament. from Sunni Arab-onbar province, catastrophically bad, big ideas. And it forces the Iraqi security forces to focus on these massive Sunni demonstrations. They're abusive. And they take their eye off al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is by the end of the Islamic State. And all of a sudden you have them

reconstitute, drift into Syria, gain additional power, come back into Iraq, of course, several years later and establish the first ever Islamist extremist caliphate in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria. General, then, Afghanistan. So looking back at Afghanistan now, looking at Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, looking at President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, I mean, what do you make of this? One and a half trillion dollars spent 20 years on the ground to get rid of the Taliban, and now the Taliban's running the country again? I mean, first of all, to be accurate, of course, it was the previous administration, Trump administration, that reached this, the worst diplomatic agreement in our modern history, I believe, giving the Taliban

what they want, which is our withdrawal, and actually forcing the Afghan government, which is not at the table for the agreement, to release 5,500 Taliban detainees to get the Taliban to accept what they want us to do. Again, it just is mind-boggling. I said that at the time we will come to regret this decision, and I certainly believe that we have and we should. And then, of course, the conduct of it, obviously absolutely, absolutely reprehensible. Now, the challenge in Afghanistan is that it took us nine long years to get the inputs right after yet again a brilliant campaign toppling the Taliban when they refused to hand over the al-Qaeda elements that planned the night 11 attacks in their sanctuary under Taliban rule in eastern Afghanistan and then conducted the initial

training of the attackers there and so we had to take down the Taliban regime and again those who say well mission was accomplished we should have gone home you know I mean you walked across Afghanistan you have lots of literally boots on the ground time there had we left at that point in time, country would have gone back into a civil war. So we had to do nation building. That wasn't optional. It wasn't a mistake. It was inescapable. You have to build security forces and institutions that can take over the tasks that we were performing in Afghanistan. But it took us far too long to get the big ideas right. That was about eight years into it, General McChrystal, that comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign, which is again, inescapable.

Vice President Biden at the time wanted to do a counterterrorism campaign. I pointed out that we weren't actually fighting terrorists in large numbers. Yes, Al-Qaeda would try to come back, the extremists. We were fighting insurgents. So we needed a counterinsurgency campaign, which is conducted by large conventional forces, not the special mission units that are conducting maybe at most 10 to 15 highly focused operations every night. Something you said in your PhD thesis that you mentioned, you said, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply. And that was when you were talking

there, I think about Vietnam. But is that a lesson on which nothing was learned for both Iraq and Afghanistan? No, actually, not entirely, because I was writing about a time when we had a massive commitment, well over 500,000 troops and a drafty army. And just on that, I guess if we're talking about the draft, we're talking about this suddenly being a very, very big deal. That brings it home and the size of that commitment. So noted many times that Vietnam literally was unsustainable for the United States. Afghanistan was actually sustainable. We have a professional force. We're rotating. We had lost a soldier in 18 months. Again, the cost was not that high. So in this case, in the case of Afghanistan, yes, I get it. There's this shibboleth that we must end endless war.

But do we really have to? I mean, look at your own country's experience over the years. Look at our experiences, places like Korea and elsewhere. We had troops on the ground for, you know, 70, 80 years or so, or even Europe. Yes, they're not in combat. But in this case, our forces actually in Afghanistan were no longer on the front lines. We were conducting what's termed, advise, assist, and enable operations, not fighting on the front lines, with the exception of the occasional special mission unit operation to go after

Islamist extremists somewhere. Alice the General, let's take a quick break, back in a second. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research, UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs.

Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchukuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Sauerich here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away

and I was filling in and enjoying Alastair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise.

People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a feeling. few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues, and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we're looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in

our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts.

Give us a sense of where you think the world is going in the next five years and what the US should be doing and what Europe should be doing about it. I think it starts with recognizing that we, now I'm talking from a U.S. Western perspective, we, Europe, other allies in the Indo-Pacific and so forth, we face the greatest number of challenges and the most complex challenges, at least since the end of the Cold War and arguably since the end of World War II. If you use the metaphorical image of the guy in the circus that has a bunch of plate spinning simultaneously, the leader of that effort has to be the United States, but we also want all of our allies and partners in there helping us keep those plates spinning too. But there's more

plates in that tent. And some of them represent more complex issues than ever before. The China plate is obviously more important than all the rest put together. It's larger than all of them. The Russia plate much more menacing. Still in North Korea nuclear plate. Iran probably three plates. Missile and drone programs, support to nefarious, malign actors in the region, Hamas, Shias, Shia, militia, Houthis, etc. And also the nuclear program that is closer to the possibility of a nuclear weapon than at any time in their history. There are cyber threats of various types out there. There are still Islamist extremist organizations that have to be kept an eye on and have pressure on them because we know if we take that off, they can reconstitute the way the Islamic State did in Iraq and

then you have to take greater action against them. There are populist challenges out there. There are manifestations of climate change. The storm of the century now seems to happen every other year. Worst fire than ever before wildfires, the desertification of the Sahel, which results in such enormous migration of humans and so on. So the list can go on and on, and there are others that I could provide. But that presents a very, very challenging situation. And I think it is absolutely in America's cold, hard, national interest in that of our allies and partners. to provide the leadership, to work with our allies and partners, to deal with these challenges, to keep them from getting worse or trying to even make them much better, and to preserve the

so-called rules-based international order for all of its flaws, shortcomings, and so on, against those that are trying to make the world safe for autocracy rather than for democracy. With all these plates spinning around, what you've been describing in relation to Afghanistan, in relation to Iraq, and a lot of the experience you've had, seems to me to be a kind of almost chaotic political leadership that you as military leadership have always been struggling to deal with. And I just wonder what that's like, because in all of those situations you've described,

and plenty more to come, particularly I would worry if Trump came back, there isn't necessarily the reliable political leadership that we need. And you've had experience, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, be it American political leadership, Iraqi political leadership, Afghani political leadership, where the lack of clear leadership has led to the sort of chaos that you've been describing. I don't know that it's quite as clear cut as that in all cases, Alistair.

I think it was uneven. I would contend that the leadership provided by George W. Bush, in the wake of his firing of Secretary Rumsfeld, where he took over the conduct of the war in Washington was extraordinary. That's my point in a way, is that he had to take, Fumsfeld out in order to provide the leadership. That was the chaos. In fact, I remember he called me in. I thought it was going to give me a guide and she realized it's just a photo op and that's fine. We didn't need guides. We knew what we needed to do and he knew it.

That's why he selected me. So after my confirmation, I go to the Oval Office and he's making conversation. He said, well, generally, you know, I know our military is doubling down in Iraq and I said, Mr. President, your military is going all in in Iraq and we need the rest of government to go all in with us. And he said, I will ensure that that is the case. And he starts every week with a 7.30 to 8.30 a.m. National Security Council meeting, he's in the chair directly with the ambassador and me that is totally unprecedented. I mean, just the fact that you do something before 10 a.m. in the morning officially like that is extraordinary. But to do it at 7.30, do it every single week. And by the way, the next day at 7.30 to 8.30, he does a video teleconference with the

prime minister of Iraq. He's starting to feel Iraq like this at a certain point in time. He was a really extraordinary influence. That kind of leadership was absolutely invaluable and hugely impressive. But it's true. There were two different George W. Bush's on the Iraq war. There was the one who decided to invade and largely subcontracted the conduct of the war to his Secretary of Defense and then the one who took it over, replaced the commander, ambassador, secretary of defense, and others, and drove that campaign from Washington as we were trying to drive the campaign in Iraq. different, obviously, with his successor, nowhere near us committed on Afghanistan. Again, stunned us by announcing the drawdown date in the same speech in which he announced the buildup.

We were always doing exit seeking, if you will, it seemed, as opposed to just being committed. Again, you're in a contest of wills with an enemy. At the very least, don't tell them that you're trying to go home or you want to go home. And President Bush empowered me to refuse to tell Congress the pace of the drawdown. And I did. Showed, again, our commitment. Following up with Alastair, he often talks about this, and I'd love your thoughts on this. So we often reflects, obviously, on how good China is on building infrastructure.

And of course, since 2012, we've had a single leader in China. And you're describing a situation where you have an approach from George W. Bush, and then you have an approach to President Obama, and then you have an approach from President Biden, then you have President Trump, then you haven't approached President Biden, and going to have a new president yet again, right? How does the United States manage to maintain clear, consistent, strategic direction geopolitically when you're lurching around in this way. Oh, it's a challenge, obviously. I mean, there's no question about that. Although the system,

of course, at the end of the day, until this time, at least, continues to move forward. I mean, our economy is doing great. Our universities are the envy of the world. Innovativeness is propelling productivity to all new levels. AI is going to transform everything we do, and it's all right here. So there's something very very. very, very special here. But yes, there is a degree of noise, chaos, whatever it may be that's associated with our democracy and many others around the world. Your own country has experienced. Some of that, obviously, as well. At the end of the day, I think, as Churchill said, you know, you can count on the United States to do the right thing after we try all the other things. And I

still have faith that that will be the case. It does remain to be seen. And it's difficult. But I would also caution that centralizing power in the way that China has, yeah, it gives you an opportunity to have, you know, a five-year plan and a this and of that and all the rest of that, that hasn't actually turned out all that well. Their economy is really faltering. They pursue policies that have led now to a very significant demographic decline. You don't see the kind of innovation in some areas. Again, no going to be wrong. This is a formidable country with an extraordinary economy. It's become the manufacturing center of the world, et cetera, et cetera.

But the policies they're pursuing in many cases are counterproductive. And you're seeing the effects of that. The EU puts the investment accord on the shelf because of Wolf Warrior diplomacy. Other countries pushing back, the Philippines back into the Western fold, etc., etc. So Indians beaten up in the line of actual control and killed in three different encounters that forced Prime Minister Modi who would like to have a balanced policy in India first, from some understandable reasons from their perspective, and makes it much more difficult for him to do that.

So I think the virtues of authoritarianism and the continuity that it enables can be overemphasized unless you have the kind of incredibly capable and benevolent figures such as Lee Kuan Yew or Sultan Kaboos and Say Oman. Those are very, very rare. General, you mentioned our country, my country, Rory's country there. You were one of a very small number of American figures who made interesting comments in the run-up to Brexit. And you set them in the context of a risk as you saw it to the military situation at the time of the war on terror. What was your take on that?

And why did you think it was important to say something? I actually do not do domestic politics in the United States. I don't even register to vote, much less support candidates of either party. And I engage with candidates of either party as a result because I'm not, again, political. But when it comes to international and international security issues, I think it's an area in which I have a degree of expertise. And I'm asked about it. I feel that I should answer questions. And I was asked what I thought the prospects were for the UK if Brexit was approved.

And I assessed that I thought it would be damaging for the economy. It would be damaging for Britain's influence, obviously, within Europe. I mean, the UK used to be a hugely important player within the EU. In fact, it balanced some of the other major actors that were trying to go in different directions, a very constructive role. You know, it would still keep its place in the world because of the UN Security Council seat and the tradition, the histories, and all the rest of that in the expertise. But that would be diminished as well.

But it really was about the effect in a. broadly macroeconomic way that you could just, you know, as the old saying goes, a blind man on a dark night can see that this is, in this case, was not going to turn out well. And tragically, sadly, that assessment has borne out. And it's provided that's the source of a number of the challenges that your party has dealt with, Rory, and not particularly well, in part just because they're so difficult as a result of this. handicapped the UK in a way that would not have been the case had they stayed within the EU with its privileges intact, of course, still controlling its own currency and the degree of

independence that many of the other countries didn't enjoy and perhaps could have gotten a little bit more of that. Just moving on from Brexit for a second, you could have become sexier state. In fact, possibly you may still one day become sexist state. But what would you have done over the last four to six years, which would have been different in relation to India, China, Russia, Ukraine. Yeah, I met with President Elect Trump, and it was actually a very good meeting, quite constructive. He had a list of questions. He read down them. I had questions for him. I said,

you get two. I get one. And I was called that night and told I was going to be announced the next day, actually. And I said, no, no, no. I had to hang on here. I need two more sessions, and these are the subjects. I need terms and references. And so forth, where this is before, it was obvious how non-standard, if you will, that administration was going to be. And that night, the president-elect happened to have dinner with Rex Tillerson, decided on the spur of the moment, much better to get the CEO of the largest corporation in the world than, you know, an old soldier term spy master in the investment world. And so that was that was it. So, you know, what would I have done different?

Actually, China, I think, by and large, has evolved in a reasonably good way. The big idea for China is that has to be a comprehensive integrated whole of governments with an S on the end, policy for China. the bedrock of which is to ensure that the elements of deterrence, military deterrence, are rock solid, and there's a lot of initiatives for that, to be tough on China when that is necessary, and this is what is severe competition, the description of our national security advisor, etc. There's one component missing, though, and it was a huge missed opportunity by the previous administration, which controlled not just the White House, but the both houses of Congress and had fast-track authority, and that would have been to do the Trans-Pacific

partnership. But populist forces scuttled that. You no longer have the fast track authority. You don't have control of all of government with one party. And that's a glaring absence in a comprehensive integrated system. With respect to some of the others, I would not have left Afghanistan. And by the way, I think the withdrawal from Afghanistan was one element. And the way it went was one element that led Putin to think that he could get away with Ukraine much more than was the case. I think the administration in the U.S. very impressively, together with the administration in the UK at the time, very impressively responded to that, albeit overtime, there have been a number of decisions that had been delayed far too long and have had consequences on the battlefield. The delay on the

M1 tank decision, which led to delay in the German Leopard decision, delay on F-16s, the Army tactical missile system, still restrictions on the use of those on Russian soil, the multiple launch rocket. A lot of these just took far too long. They were inevitable. and yet still delayed. Otherwise, I think, again, by and large, the current administration and trying to shore up alliances rejoining the World Health Organization, the climate accord, all of this generally, I think, in foreign and defense policy terms, generally fairly sound. Would you consider being Secretary of State for a second term President Trump?

I think not. First of all, I don't think I would be even considered at this point in time. The qualities this time will not just be expertise and experience. I think there will be a loyalty component that I would certainly not satisfy. Again, and frankly, on the other side of the administration, I was pretty forthright at various times, including with Vice President Biden, in the National Security Council in the situation room. And I think, again, that would ensure that I was not part of the consideration. So, look, I think, you know, I said after President Obama called me into the Oval Office when I was a four-star and sat me down and without any preamble said, I'm asking you as your president and commander-in-chief to take command of our forces in Afghanistan, which, and I hadn't realized that my predecessor had resigned at that time and that had been accepted. I said that the answer to that kind of question always has to be yes. But I'm in a different position. It's a different time. It's a different context. The actors are different. And I just don't think it's a realistic possibility, frankly.

But I think you would have to consider it. But I don't know that the answer would necessarily be yes. Looking back, do you think you dodged a bullet when he went for Tillerson ahead of you? So I've been a partner at KKR now for a decade or so. I've been with KKR for 11 years. It's been an extraordinary period, very, very intellectually stimulating. And again, really quite something to be with a company that goes from $83 billion under management to over $600 billion. So I'm extraordinarily fortunate to be doing what I'm doing and to have been able to continue to do what I have done, noting that not many of those in that particular administration had particularly happy endings. So that's a yes.

General, you've been at the, this is a show which we brand as leading. And you have led the U.S. military. You've led the Central Intelligence Agency with the director of the CIA. And you're now in a leading role in business. So can you give us a very kind of crisp description of what the difference is between leading an army, leading an intelligence agency and leading a business? Well, what's interesting is that leadership at the very top requires the performance of four tasks. And success generally is a result of superb strategic leadership. The first task of which is to get the big ideas right, to get the strategy right, to understand the context. In conflict, it's your forces, the enemy, the area of responsibility, the human terrain,

the physical terrain, the neighborhood, all of these dynamics. And that is actually true in the private sector as well. It's true in the nonprofit. It's true in other government organizations. It's that the context is different. You have to understand the differences. You know, one of those is you have almost absolute authority. If all else fails, you can give people an order and they,

generally will follow it in uniform. That's not necessarily the case in some of these other endeavors, but it's still about getting the big ideas right, which includes an understanding of the context in which you are actually leading. Then it's, by the way, communicating the big ideas effectively through the breadth and depth of the organization and all stakeholders, anyone who has a stake in the outcome of the endeavor. It's overseeing the implementation of the big ideas, the energy, the example, the inspiration, hiring the Rory stewards of the world. in allowing those not measuring up to move on to something else, the metrics they use, the organizational architecture you design, and then the battle rhythm, how you spend your time

as a critical element of this, because there's a limited amount of that, and you have to really allocate that, portion of that. And then there's a fourth task, which is to determine how you need to refine the big ideas as the context changes so that you do it again and again and again. And that is common. And I lay that out in the book in conflict with Andrew Roberts, this intellectual construct for strategic leadership. And as we look at these different wars since 1945, the side that typically prevailed is the one that had the best strategic leadership. And you'd think, of course, you'd get the big ideas right after all the years of

staff college and war college and all the other stuff, 13 years in Vietnam before we got the big ideas right. Iraq, we had them right, then we got them wrong. We started to get them right again. Then the situation changed. It took us too long. Then we did the surge. And the results prove it, violence down by nearly 90%.

And then again, undermined by some actions of our host nation partner there. So again, I think it doesn't matter what the organization is, what type. If you understand the context in your authorities or responsibilities and how at all functions, and that's true, a founder of a startup or to 200,000 men and women in uniform with hundreds of thousands of host nation partners, as in the surge in Iraq. Your time at the CIA general came to a premature end because of personal scandal. And I just wondered how you look back on that period. I guess particularly in light of the fact that we might have a president-elected,

who has done far worse than you ever did in all sorts of fronts. But what was that like for you? Yeah, no, it's very difficult. And look, I felt that I'd exercise bad judges. judgment and that you shouldn't have a CI director who exercised bad judgment, which is why I took responsibility, acknowledged it, sought to make amends, resigned, and then, you know, over a period of time, you get back on your feet, dust yourself off and pick up the rucksack and start putting one foot in front of the other again. The truth is, look, I've dealt with all kinds of setbacks and

mistakes and shortcomings as a commander of forces. You're responsible for everything that everyone in that force does or fails to do. And so, again, intellectually, I knew that what I needed to do is understand what took place, figure that out. Again, take appropriate action, make amends, and then try to learn from it, and then move on. And that's true, I think, of any situation where there is a mistake in an organization for which you're responsible or if you are the source of the mistake as in that case. That's why I think we in Britain and other parts of the world find it's so difficult to compute the fact that America is thinking about putting Donald Trump back in power. The head of the FBI was being quizzed at a congressional inquiry committee the other

day. And he was asked the direct question, if somebody applied for a job in the FBI and they had 34 convictions, would you employ them? And he just said straightforwardly, no, they wouldn't get past the checks. So you, as you say, you took responsibility and showed leadership in that way. And yet, something has gone wrong, it seems to me in the moral compass of the United States of America, that people are even thinking that Donald Trump can come back. Look, turbulent times, different times, challenging times, an era of populism to some degree, a lot of grievance out there that can be played on expertly by those that can do that. Not the only place where we've seen that kind of activity.

But yeah, I mean, this is not the political party that was even as recently as saying, the George W. Bush era, much less the Ronald Reagan era. I mean, it has evolved very considerably in terms of positions, actual policy positions as well. But again, all part of life's great adventure. General, can I ask you, what are we not focusing on in the world? So we spent a lot of time obviously talking about China, Iran, North Korea, Russia. What would you think of as a couple of things that might happen over the next five, ten years that people are talking about less and that worry you? Well, there's a number of dynamics and developments in Africa that I think could be very important, could have ramifications for far more than just the country in which they're located or even the

continent. Certainly like to see greater attention to some of the situations there that could escalate further in particular. I mean, I'd like to see the resolved within the boundaries of the country where they're taking place. And in a number of cases, what you need to do is, again, keep an eye and pressure on a particular challenge, noting that. if you don't do that, it can metastasize and then you have to require much, much more. And, you know, again, the Islamic State is very instructive in that regard. I think it's the most instructive. So the challenges there, I think there are issues in some other parts of the world that, again,

we don't pay a great deal of attention to and where modest amounts of assistance, involvement, and so forth might keep a situation from getting worse, in some cases, might even be able to resolve it. So those, I think, would be the ones beyond that. I think we really have attention to the major issues out there, but whether it's enough attention or the right attention, I think, is the other question and how to keep it all in balance. You know, we have repeatedly tried to leave the Middle East, the United States, for example.

You know, we've had the pivot to Asia, the rebalance. And there are a couple of Central Command truths that are relevant here. One is, of course, always know who your enemies are and who your friends are and don't confuse them. And Iran is our enemy. Number two is that what happens in the Middle East doesn't stay there. Las Vegas rules do not apply. Rather than tends to be violence, extremism and instability in a tsunami of refugees way beyond Middle Eastern countries. And the third is that for the U.S. to try to leave the Middle East is like Michael Corleone trying to leave the mafia.

You just keep getting sucked back in. So why don't you just recognize it and have an efficient, modest force so that you're not doing these backs and force that we seem to be involved in. General, last question for me, because you've been very patient with time. Give us the sense of which of the roles that you've done you enjoyed the most. Do you enjoy most commanding at a battalion level, running the CIA, running a big army? What you're doing now?

Really is your most exciting, fulfilling role. Where were you happiest? I actually, I have enjoyed and been challenged and stimulated and been, and been in a way gratified, if you will, by almost all of these. And it's really hard to say that, you know, you enjoy this one more than, I mean, being the director of the CIA is the greatest job in government in the world. It's incredible. Commanding two wars is unprecedented, really, in modern time.

And I'm not sure it may be ever. But at the end of the day, I think the bigger question is which was the one that was the most important? And that has to be the surge in Iraq. Iraq was in an escalating spiral of Sunni Shia violence. It was in a civil war. And the great work of the extraordinary men and women of our coalition and of our Iraqi counterparts managed to pull that country out of a civil war, drive violence down by an enormous amount, and give Iraq the land of the two rivers an entire new opportunity,

which it did really quite well with for the first three and a half years after the end of the surge until the unfortunate decisions by the Iraqi Prime Minister right after our final combat forces left. But that one was, it was also arguably the most grinding experience of my life. It was as if you're in a boxing ring and you're just getting hit all over the place and all throughout a day and you just notes are slid in front of you multiple times. I said, we just lost four soldiers here. The bridge was just blown up, by the way, the bridge built by the British,

a century earlier between East and West Baghdad. Again, just every day, there are enormous challenges, setbacks, and mistakes, even as you are making progress, which ultimately turned out to be the case. But that one was really, really important, not just for Iraq, but really for the entire region. And so when I asked, what was the most significant, it clearly has to be command of the multinational force in Iraq. and what an extraordinary privilege that was.

Well, General Petraeus, thank you for so much of your time. You've come through it all pretty unscathed. I mean, looking at you now, you look young, you look smart. I just hope if the phone call does come from Trump second time around, just say no. Thank you for your wife, counsel, Alistair. And great to be with you again. Rory, I'm huge admirers of both of you, and it's a privilege to be with you on your show. Thank you, Your Honor.

Thank you, again. Thank you, General. Bye-bye. What do you think of my friend, General Petraeus? Well, I think he's a very, very impressive guy. He's quite a hard guy to interview because he's a politician should study his speaking style, because what he does is just when you think there's the end of that point coming, he just sort of he dips to the end of the sentence.

Then he starts the new one, almost before he's finished. A lot of it is really, really interesting. And so you kind of feel a bit of a hood when, as we both, we both did from time. I'd say, General, can we just cut in here? But no, listen, he's a very impressive guy. I think his life, if you look at his life experience, massive military career, and he said it was the greatest job in the world. And it was cut short, as we discussed, because he basically had an extramarital affair. And then I was also punished because he gave the woman with whom he had the affair, who was his biographer, giving her kind of classified documents and stuff like that.

The reason I mentioned Trump is, of course, Trump has, than both of those, he's had way more affairs, and he's had issues with use of classified documents. But then, of course, this sort of third career, what I got the sense of, you know I'm better than I do, what I got the sense of is somebody who was just permanently, his mind permanently rooted in all this really big stuff happening around the world. And I did think it was interesting that he, I wasn't sort of getting America so much as every situation he was in. And I saw this, and you'll have seen this as well. In fact, you experienced this, this kind of constant conflict between political leadership and military leadership and how

difficult it is when politics on a different time scale to a military that's much more focused on the long term. And it's the million dollar thing. I think it'll also for younger listeners be interesting to see what they make of the depth on Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, obviously, that was the kind of center of my life for nearly 20 years. So General Petraeus, and I have been kind of round the houses back and forth on the intricacies of counterinsurgencies and the surge and what Karzai was up to and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it must feel now to younger people in 2024 like a completely alien world, as though we're kind of talking about the Vietnam War or something.

So these things, which were so raw. But to step back, I suppose, for a second, I mean, I disagree with a lot of what he says. I think his analysis of Afghanistan was wrong. Just briefly, where do you think is wrong? Well, I think basically in the end, the military partly necessarily is so can do, so optimistic, that they always believe that they've got a new plan with a new strategy that's going to deliver a decisive year and they're going to sort this out. And structurally, the problems in Afghanistan were not going to be sorted out. Fundamentally, the idea of putting 150,000 troops on the ground, spending $150 billion a year,

was not going to create an effective Afghan government. It wasn't going to eliminate the Taliban. It wasn't going to eliminate corruption. And these are the things that in the end took the situation down. I think that actually Afghanistan was better off with a lighter footprint, actually better off with the situation it had in the last seven years from 2014 onwards when there were far fewer American troops on the ground when we were doing far-est. You do share his view that the withdrawal was both wrong in principle and wrong in practice.

Yeah, I agree violently with him there, but where we disagree very strongly is I think that the surge and the attempts to try to do these big counter-insurgency campaigns and actually created far more enemies than they solved. My sense is, you know, I was on the ground in Afghanistan 2001, 2, 3, 4, and my sense is the Taliban had largely vanished and that the worst thing we could do was put huge numbers of troops on the ground because actually that was simply going to create more support for the Taliban. But I also, I mean, you know, he's been very generous to me throughout my life. He's been with the all these disagreements and with all the competitiveness, he was unbelievably good about getting in critics like me again and again to sit down with his staff, have dinner with us, to listen to us, put up with us, attacking him in the media. And I think that's something that maybe America's quite good at. I mean, I think in Britain often, our civil service, our military, our government can be quite insulated, don't really want outside views, don't really want outside criticism. He was very good at always being open to that. But he's somebody who's absolutely clear and confident in the rightness of his own view.

And that's the thing that makes it quite hard to sort of push back sometimes because it's always like he gives these opinions as fact. But he's an impressive guy, he's an impressive performer. It was interesting. You were obviously seeing Paul Bramer around the same time as I was. He did strike me as being a very decent man. but who was given an utterly impossible task and was surrounded by political chaos, both American chaos and Iraqi chaos.

Yes, yes. It was a completely impossible job. And so Bremer was my boss. So he was running the CPA and I was initially his representative and then his deputy representative in Misan in a province in the south. And it was extraordinary. I mean, we were dealing with a situation in which the army had disappeared, the police force had disappeared, all the electricity had gone, was no oil at the pumps,

the schools had been stripped, the clinics had been stripped, there was several war breaking out in the streets. And we were plodding around with bags full of cash trying to sort this out, with the military enraged with us, thinking these civilians have got no idea what they're doing. The Iraqis obviously thinking, what on earth did this bunch of foreigners doing, running our country? And in the center of this, you know, I was doing this sort of mini-level in my province, but at the center of this was Bremer. I don't believe that the military would have got it right if they'd been put in charge. I still believe passionately in civilian control of the military. I think the military are very, very good at fighting wars, but I think it's very dangerous to think that with all their

confidence, and of course, that's the amazing thing. I mean, the money, you know, when I used to go to briefings with Petraeus, it was extraordinary. I mean, he's like a king. You know, he walked around with, I've never seen anything going much more than a prime minister. There'd be sort of 40 people walking behind him with little notebooks and when... And machine goes. And when he sits down this incredibly slick PowerPoint presentation, and he's been up since five in the morning running around the base, and we all have to run around the base with him if we want to chat to him.

And then by the time we get in, everybody else has been up all night getting the PowerPoint presentations together. And as you say, everything is incredibly confident, slick. They have the answer to absolutely everything. But the reality is that the knowledge is, of course, much thinner than any of us acknowledge. I mean, it would be like, I don't know, you or I. as Iraqis being deployed to try to, I don't know, administer Glasgow or something,

without speaking a word of English, without really having ever watched a British television program, without underknowing what Rangers and Celtic were. And we're producing these very confident PowerPoint presentations. You know, we've been there. You know, I really understand Glasgow. I've been here for six months and I can do a PowerPoint presentation. But he was also, I really enjoyed his frankness about Donald Rump. Now, Donald Rumsfeld is not here to answer back because he is RIP.

But that's what I felt. And you and I talked about this when we did that to our exchange when you were sort of grilling me about Iraq. I felt that very, very strongly that we kind of assumed that the Americans had a sort of grown-up thing going on. And in fact, what was happening there was very much part of this sort of American political struggle going on. You know, I enjoyed his brutal frankness about that. He clearly felt that they were not well treated by him. But he was very, but speaking very, very fondly still of

George W. And finally, of course, the only person possibly more competitive than you. I thought that was also a record on leading. No, I think he's more, listen, he's a guy. You know, we talked about him being shot in 1991. Yeah. He sort of downplayed it. And because he was so hard to interrupt, I wasn't going to correct his own narrative. Three days after having, surgery for this gunshot wound in the chest, he apparently ripped out all the tubes and did 50 press-ups in front of the nurses. He basically said, let me out of here. I would not do that.

But maladaptive competitiveness is where you, for example, if you were in a tiny argument about nothing with somebody that you just happened to bump into at the train, and you have to with that argument, I'm a little bit like that, but I'm not as bad as I was. I think he is maladaptively competitive. Roy Keane, the Irish footballer, is famously maladaptively competitive. Anyway, Alison, thank you for that, and it was a pleasure to do it with you. Well, well done for getting him. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

You know, I feel a little bit of sympathy for the editors, but they will get there. Thank you. Thank you, Alison. Bye-bye.