Petraeus reviews Trump’s start
David Petraeus expressed some reservations about President Donald Trump on Wednesday, but the former Army general and CIA director praised the new president’s “firmness.”
Speaking as part of the New Albany Community Foundation’s Jefferson Series, Petraeus acknowledged that Trump, who interviewed him for the post of secretary of state, has been slow to fill positions in his administration. That’s partly because Trump wasn’t prepared to be elected in November, Petraeus said.
“This is a case of the dog catching the car,” he said.
Petraeus added that some candidates for national-security jobs have been passed over because they signed letters opposing Trump during the election campaign.
“There are some very, very good people who would have been hired in a New York minute had they not signed these letters,” Petraeus said.
Even so, the general-turnedinternational-businessman praised Trump’s resolve in launching a missile strike this month in retaliation for Syrian President Bashir al-Assad’s chemical-weapons attack on a rebel area.
By contrast, Petraeus said, President Barack Obama’s inaction on his “red line” after a 2013 Syrian gas attack undermined U.S. credibility on the international stage.
But it’s unclear what can be achieved in Syria, regardless of perceived firmness.
Petraeus said that Western leaders need to abandon the notion that there is a democratic solution to problems there. Instead, he said, they should try to cooperate to set up security zones for warring groups — which he acknowledged is a tenuous undertaking.
Russian President “Vladimir Putin can put a lot of sticks in the spokes of that,” Petraeus said.
On the topic of Russia, Patreaus said that the FBI appears to be conducting the most-credible investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The House and Senate investigations “don’t have the same degree of assiduity as the committees that (held) the Benghazi hearings,” he said, referring to congressional Republicans’ probes of the Obama administration. Critics called those probes political in nature.
Petraeus, 64, had a distinguished career in the military and national security, but it ended in scandal.
After graduating in the top 5 percent of his class from the U.S. Military Academy, he earned a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University. Rising to the rank of four-star general, Petraeus commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan and international forces in Iraq.
In 2011, he was named CIA director, only to step down a year later amid allegations that he’d had an affair with his biographer and improperly shared classified documents with her. In 2015, Petraeus pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information.