Gen. Petraeus: ‘Sorry’ for Affair, Sharing Info

Retired Gen. David Petraeus, the former top military commander and ex-CIA Director, apologized Tuesday before a Senate committee for an extra marital affair as he returned for his first public hearing since he resigned from his post in 2012.

David Petraeus apologized again for sharing classified information with his mistress, Paula Broadwell, NBC News reported. As part of his testimony, Petraeus, who masterminded the Iraq surge under George W. Bush, laid out the strategic framework he would implement today.

“Some elements of the right strategy are in place”, Petraeus said, referring to partnering with local forces on the ground and pressing political unity in Baghdad, but the overall effort has yet to produce sustained progress. “We are not where we should be at this point”. “That means protecting them from the unrestricted warfare being waged against them by Bashar Assad, especially by his air force and its use of barrel bombs”. If Russian Federation really wanted to fight ISIS, it could have joined the US-led coalition and asked to be integrated into the air war, Petraeus said.

Petraeus said he will “go forward with a greater sense of humility and objective”.

And further, Petraeus called for Sunni “enclaves” where moderate rebels would be “protected by coalition air power” and refugees could relocate. Eventually, he said, USA advisers could be deployed there as boots on the ground.

He urged the USA to boost support for Iraqi security forces, as well as the Kurdish peshmerga and Sunni tribal forces.

The most forceful statements from Petraeus came in addressing the more than four-year-old civil war in Syria, which he described as a “geopolitical Chernobyl, spewing instability and extremism over the region and the rest of the world”.

In an interview with Press TV on Wednesday, Don DeBar said, “While Petraeus talks about setting up safe havens we have to look back to his own history to see how skilled he is on that particular subject”.

He said Washington had the capability to stop Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s planes dropping bombs over civilian populations.

“The fallout from the meltdown of Syria threatens to be with us for decades”, he said.

“It was a violation of the trust placed in me and a breach of the values to which I’d been committed throughout my life”, he said.

Obama was unpersuaded, but in 2014 authorized the Pentagon to do so after the rise of Isis, a plan that yielded only “four or five” active fighters, the general in charge of Central Command – the USA military command in charge of forces in the Middle East and South Asia – testified on 16 September.