With Iraq on his mind, US ‘savior-general’ points at a way to victory in Gaza
Hamas must be destroyed, argues ex-general and CIA director David Petraeus in Tel Aviv, and then Israel must pivot to a counterinsurgency
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
As the campaign to eliminate Hamas stretches into its sixth month, a storied American general credited with changing the course of the Iraq War now sees a clear path to victory for Israel in Gaza.
Thus far, though, the approach is one that Israel refuses to countenance.
General David H. Petraeus, who commanded the 2007-8 “surge” of troops in Iraq as head of the Multi-National Force-Iraq and later directed the CIA, says Israel must pivot to a counterinsurgency approach if it wants to keep Hamas from returning to power in Gaza.
“This is inescapable,” he told The Times of Israel on the sidelines of last week’s Institute for National Security Studies conference in Tel Aviv.
Insurgency, which became especially prominent after World War II, as local forces fought to overthrow colonial rule against conventional militaries, describes a campaign by “irregular forces to change an existing political order. These forces typically mingle with civilians to hide from the forces defending the political order.”
To defeat an insurgency, Petraeus champions an approach known as counterinsurgency — or COIN. “Population-centric” rather than “enemy-centric,” the strategy focuses on winning over the public to separate them from the insurgents.
In COIN, killing the enemy only helps if it increases security for the population to create space to develop legitimate economic and political institutions. But if eliminating insurgents breeds more new fighters than it destroys, then doing so is counterproductive.
When Petraeus took over the Allied effort in Iraq in February 2007, the insurgents seemed to be well on their way to victory. In Baghdad, sectarian violence was killing up to 150 people a day. The outgoing commander, General George Casey, wanted to cut his losses, steadily reducing the US presence and giving the reins to Iraqi forces.
Throughout his 19-month tour, Petraeus managed to drastically change the trajectory of the war.
“You have to get the big ideas right,” Petraeus said.
Moving to a population-centric approach was his big idea. He surged in more than 20,000 troops, and moved soldiers off large bases to operate among and provide security for the population.
Before the surge, US Special Forces commander Stanley McChrystal told Petraeus, “Boss, we’ve been banging away every single night in Ramadi and Fallujah, two to three operations a night. And the situation has gotten worse.”
“You’re exactly right,” responded Petraeus, “because you have to clear and hold and build.”
“The foundational concepts of counterinsurgency are that you clear an area, you hold it, and you hold it in a very significant manner,” Petraeus explained in Tel Aviv. “You wall it off. You create gated communities, as we call it,12 or 13 of them in Fallujah alone. You use biometric ID cards because you’re trying to separate the enemy, the extremists, from the people. That’s the fundamental idea.”
The COIN approach produced undeniable results during Petraeus’s time in Iraq. US deaths dropped from a high of 126 in May 2007 to an average of less than 11 a month after June 2008. Civilian deaths also plummeted, from 1,700 to 200 a month in the same time frame.
For that effort, historian Victor Davis Hanson included him in his book, “Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost — From Ancient Greece to Iraq. ”
Petraeus wants to see Israel move toward that strategy in Gaza.
But first, he says unequivocally, Hamas must be defeated.
They have to be destroyed, just as we had to destroy the core al Qaeda.
“Hamas is irreconcilable,” he said. “This is a very, very fundamental idea. Some will debate it. I think it is not debatable. I think they are the equivalent of al Qaeda or the Islamic State.”
“They have to be destroyed, just as we had to destroy the core al Qaeda and how we helped the Iraqi security forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces destroy the Islamic State,” he said.
For now, with IDF troops still involved in heavy fighting in Khan Younis, and yet to tackle Rafah, Petraeus recognized that the campaign is still a classic unit-on-unit fight.
But Petraeus, like many friends of Israel, is worried about what will happen in Gaza after Hamas’s military structure is blasted apart.
“When you have destroyed Hamas as a military organization, there will still be remnants, there’s still individual terrorists, insurgents, extremists, call them what you will.”
Secured, gated neighborhoods
In February, Hamas began to resurface in areas where Israel withdrew the bulk of its forces a month before, deploying police officers and making partial salary payments to some of its civil servants in Gaza City. Thousands of Hamas terrorists remain in northern Gaza, and the IDF has had to return to neighborhoods it captured previously.
Petraeus called for secured, gated neighborhoods, where locals provide basic services: “It’s to keep them from having Hamas reinfiltrate themselves into their communities, which at this point they presumably no longer want, especially once they get basic services.”
A Palestinian poll from late November and early December showed Hamas enjoying 42 percent support in Gaza, up slightly from 38% three months before.
A major drawback of the COIN approach, especially for Israel, is that it is manpower- and time-intensive.
In “The Western Way of War,” a work that influenced Petraeus’s thinking as a young man, the historian Hanson argued that because ancient Greek hoplites were also farmers, they sought short, bloody, and decisive engagements to get back to the harvest. This shaped, in Hanson’s thinking, how the West approaches war.
It is an apt description of Israel’s classic doctrine, which seeks to win as decisively and quickly as possible to allow its reservists to return to their jobs.
Israel could theoretically surge back in tens of thousands of troops by recalling the reservists who fought in the months after October 7. But they were released for a reason — they have jobs and studies to get back to, not to mention the strain long reserve services places on young families.
Petraeus recognizes the challenges.
“It takes a very substantial number of forces to do the hold, to conduct hold operations,” he acknowledged. “But if those aren’t conducted, then you end up with the enemy reconstituting.”
Not all US experts see the counterinsurgency model as relevant to the current fight in Gaza.
“You don’t fight a counterinsurgency against an enemy army,” argued John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute in the prestigious US military academy West Point.
“You fight a war against an enemy army. Yes, Hamas is a designated terrorist organization, but Hamas was also a political group with a military that owned terrain. Hamas was a military organization that sent over a brigade force to invade Israel. Israel declared war.”
Earlier in his trip, Petraeus had been invited by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and ministry director-general Eyal Zamir for a long conversation on the war. Petraeus was impressed by the discussion.
“They recognize that reconstitution is the challenge,” he said. “They understand these dynamics.”
However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been reticent to lay out detailed plans for the post-Hamas future of Gaza, fearing this could lead to fractures in his hard-right coalition.
In mid-February, he presented to the cabinet a plan that calls for installing “local officials” unaffiliated with terrorists to administer services in the Strip instead of Hamas, for Egyptian cooperation to end smuggling into Gaza, for Arab countries to fund reconstruction of the Strip, and for the shuttering of UNRWA.
It also calls for Gaza to be demilitarized and for its population to be “de-radicalized.”
The plan was received coolly in Washington.
‘Fiendishly difficult’
While the White House has warned that a major Israeli operation in Rafah would be a “disaster” and a “red line” — at least under the current circumstances — Petraeus doesn’t see any option other than an offensive in the southern Gaza city at some point.
“Benny Gantz, my old comrade and friend, is exactly right when he said that you don’t send the fire department to extinguish 80% of the blaze,” he quipped, referring to comments the war cabinet minister made in Washington. “You have to deal with all of it.”
Israel has said it will evacuate the residents of the city, which lies along the Egyptian border but has yet to approve the military’s operational plan or publicly announce where civilians will go.
Petraeus called US concerns over the civilians sheltering around Rafah “legitimate.”
At the same time, he shares Israeli concerns about the opportunity for Hamas to use the movement of civilians northward as cover to regroup.
Despite sharp criticism from Washington and other capitals over the growing civilian toll in Gaza, Petraeus recognized “the lengths that the IDF has gone to in order to try to get civilians out of the way; text messages, leaflets, other communications, to try to minimize that.”
Petraeus added that he was “reassured” by his conversation with Gallant on Israel’s plans to get civilians out of harm’s way.
Looking at the ongoing ground campaign against Hamas, Petraeus called it “more difficult and more challenging than anything that we ever did.”
“This is the most fiendishly difficult context for urban operations since 1945 at least,” he argued. “You have 350 miles of very well-developed tunnels, subterranean infrastructure, factories, headquarters, all these different facilities underground. You have high rises that have to be cleared. You’ve got to clear every building, every floor, every room, every cellar, every tunnel.”
The IDF has lost 249 soldiers in the ground offensive in Gaza.
“You have an enemy who doesn’t wear a uniform in most cases,” Petraeus continued, “who uses civilians as human shields, still holds over 130 hostages, which obviously complicates a very complex situation.”
It is believed that 130 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — not all of them alive — after 105 civilians were released from Hamas captivity during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released prior to that. Three hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 11 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military.
Saudi deal back on the table
After multiple commands in the Middle East — and a post leading the CIA — Petraeus knows personally many of the players in the region, including Mohammed Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince.
The Biden administration has been working to secure a landmark deal that will see a normalization in ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The kingdom and other Arab countries are seeking steps toward the creation of a Palestinian state as part of the potential agreement.
A normalization deal is “by no means off the table with the Saudis,” said Petraeus, “but obviously there is an even greater emphasis now on a commitment to the two-state solution.”
He said that a Palestinian state was “issue number one, two and three” when he met the Saudi king in the mid-2000s. “And then it sort of fell off the table.”
Since October 7, said Petraeus, “this has returned very significantly to the public consciousness and the kind of arrangement that the Saudis would like to reach. I think that becomes an even more prominent condition than it was before 10/7.”
Israel has an opportunity for a game-changing deal with Saudi Arabia, in Petraeus’s telling.
With Hamas in its tunnels, there is also an opportunity for Israel to replace the terror group on the ground with a new authority to run Gaza’s affairs.
Petraeus believes in grabbing opportunities with both hands.
When he commanded the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, Iraq, he recognized that the local economy depended on the renewal of trade with Syria, but he didn’t have the authority or time to start trade negotiations between the two countries.
Instead, he took the initiative and ordered his troops to unilaterally open up the crossing on the Iraqi side, and trade started again on its own.
“You have to jump through windows of opportunity and exploit windows of opportunity while they’re open,” Petraeus said of his decision, “and not study them until they start to close, and then you try to wriggle through and force them back open.”
