Ground troops

Petraeus warns against sending ground troops to Syria

By Nick Gass

Syria "may be a Humpty Dumpty that can't be put back together again," retired four-star general and former CIA Director David Petraeus said in an interview aired Monday night amid a discussion about the regional complexities in the coalition fight against the Islamic State.

"The Sunni Arab areas that are in Iraq have no oil or natural gas production in them, so where would the revenue to sustain them come from as well? So the Sunnis, there is still a huge centrifugal force in Iraq, and it is the distribution of the oil revenues. It's something that also keeps Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish regional government, tied to Baghdad as well. Syria, on the other hand, may be a Humpty Dumpty that can't be put back together again. And again, one doesn't know what the various outcomes could be," he told Charlie Rose on his PBS program.

Asked whether it is a place for the U.S., Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia to come together or whether he would limit it to just the U.S. and Russia, Petraeus opted for the former.

"No, I think a lot of groups have a stake, obviously, in what the outcome is there, and one of the challenges is going to be to get legitimate representatives of these different groups. One to have the challenges right now is there is no unified political leadership of the Sunni Arabs in Syria."

It's good that the diplomats from various countries are talking, he said, but "you should then ask, OK, who are representing the Sunni Arabs and do they actually have, again, support of those on the ground" who are trying to hold various areas of the country.

There are not enough moderate Sunni Arabs on the ground right now in Syria to make a difference in the other fight against ISIL, he said.

"There are some there. We have been enabling them, supporting them and assisting them for some time. Clearly, if we really get behind them and vow to protect them again from Bashar's air force and so on, I think you would see a lot more flocking" to that corner, he remarked.

Earlier in the interview, Petraeus urged against keeping American boots on the ground as "not sustainable."

"I would not at this point," Petraeus said. "Again, you need to have a hold force that has legitimacy in the eyes of people that has to be Sunni Arab forces."

Asked whether it should be American forces, Petraeus said, "it should not be."

"Again, you can envision — you should have some contingencies if there's some real urgency beyond what we even have now, which is quite a great deal, have some contingencies for taking action, but I would not, I wouldn't take that at this point," he said.

Instead, he added, "I would make sure that there is a headquarters established, a joint task force, say, up in Incirlik or up in Turkey, that is unifying all of the efforts in Syria under a combined joint task force commander," who is currently Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, whom Petraeus noted was the colonel outside Ramadi "when we had the very first of the awakenings, the one that actually preceded the surge by a couple of months."

"He is now the three-star [general] in charge of this overall campaign and making sure that his organizational architecture and all the relationships — the command, support and operational relationships — are sorted effectively is yet another issue that probably needs to be reexamined as we look at what could be done in the wakes of the attacks in Paris," he said.

Petraeus' warning over sending American ground forces to Syria comes amid a U.S. political debate over how best to attack the Islamic State, whose stronghold is in Raqqa, Syria. Republican presidential candidates have urged President Barack Obama to bolster the U.S. commitment beyond the publicly announced 50 Special Forces troops, while Obama has pushed back, saying it would be a "mistake" to do so.