Two-wars strategy doomed U.S. prospects in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gen. Petraeus tells World Leaders Forum

By Tom Siebert

Retired four-star Army Gen. David Petraeus, who led U.S. and coalition forces in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, said Friday night that shifting military resources from one country to the other in 2003 led to failure on both fronts.

“We did not get the inputs right in Afghanistan,” said Petraeus, speaking before Judson University’s World Leaders Forum at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center. “The leadership of our country very quickly focused on Iraq. We devoted our attention to that. Then that went badly.”

The 37-year military veteran did not directly criticize then-President Donald J. Trump’s agreement in February 2020 to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, nor President Joseph R. Biden’s decision to carry out the mission last August, resulting in the collapse of the government and takeover by the Taliban terrorist militia.

 

“It was absolutely chaotic, and certainly not the way that those of us who served in that war would have wanted to see it end,” Petraeus told an audience of about 500 veterans, active military personnel, Judson students, faculty, and community members.

 

The general lamented the loss of 13 U.S. troops and 169 Afghan civilians killed by an Islamic State suicide bomber at the Kabul airport on August 26. But he praised the American-led airlift that rescued 123,000 people from the war-ravaged country.

 

Petraeus admitted that the Afghan war was unwinnable but would have preferred a “sustainable commitment” to the country to solidify U.S. gains in countering terrorism, building infrastructure, establishing press freedoms, and guaranteeing women’s rights.

 

“But at the end of the day, we ran out of strategic patience,” he concluded. “It was tragic.”

 

As for Iraq, the 69-year-old Petraeus defended the 2007 counterinsurgency, colloquially called “the surge,” in which he commanded the deployment of 20,000 additional soldiers to prop up government troops and quell terrorist attacks in the four-year-old war.

 

“Iraq was completely out of control,” he recounted. “Nation building gets some criticism from time to time but it’s absolutely essential.”

 

According to the U.S. Dept. of Defense, 2,401 U.S. troops died in the 20-year war in Afghanistan, while 4,431 American service members were killed in the 18-year war in Iraq.

 

Human rights organizations estimate that more than 170,000 Afghans and 180,000 Iraqis died in the two wars.

 

Petraeus also recalled his 14-month tenure as CIA director under President Barack Obama, highlighting the capture and killing of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden in May 2011.

 

“I spent ten years of my life chasing that guy,” Petraeus said of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group leader who organized the hijackings of four U.S. airliners, two of which crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon, and another into a field in Shanksville, PA. The coordinated attacks killed 2,977 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

 

The World Leaders Forum, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary, usually convenes at Judson’s Elgin campus, except when audience capacity exceeds its smaller Herrick Chapel.

 

Television reporter Lisa Chavarria of NBC 5 in Chicago moderated Friday night’s discussion, while Petraeus was interviewed by conservative commentator Mark Vargas, a 2004 graduate of the university and president of the forum.

 

Previous speakers at the forum were former President George W. Bush; ex-Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev; former British Prime Minister Tony Blair; ex-Mexican President Felipe Calderón; Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan; author, attorney, and diplomat Caroline Kennedy; and jointly, former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and ex-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who also served as chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Over the past decade the forum also has heard from inspirational speakers such as evangelist Nick Vujicic, who was born without arms or legs; U.S. Olympic champion Mary Lou Retton; illusionist Jim Munroe; actor Terrence Howard; and Mark Cuban, host of ABC-TV’s “Shark Tank” and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.

Proceeds from the World Leaders Forum fund Judson's leadership scholars program, innovative entrepreneurial activities, and ongoing operational purposes.

The university is a fully accredited, private Christian institution representing the church at work in higher education. Nestled along the Fox River, 36 miles northwest of Chicago, Judson is home to more than 1,200 students from 43 states and more than 37 countries.

 

It offers degrees in more than 60 different majors and minors for traditional, graduate, and adult students, ranking consistently among the best regional universities in the Midwest by U.S. News & World Report. Judson has also been recognized as a "Christian College of Distinction."

 

 

Bob Dylan lives up to his legend in Chicago concert

    Bob Dylan recently performed at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago (photo by Anna Maurya).

By Tom Siebert

 

I am the least objective reviewer of a Bob Dylan concert, having devoted endless hours listening to his genius music since college days, having literally lived for his next album, and having now seen him live for the fifth time Wednesday night, along with nearly 4,000 faithful fans at the landmark Auditorium Theater in downtown Chicago.

The Shakespeare of song, who began this so-called Never Ending Tour in 1988, was forced to cancel its Japan dates in March 2020 due to the pandemic, but resumed it last Tuesday night in Milwaukee.

 

Mr. Dylan and his five-member band opened the Chicago show with "Watching the River Flow," a rollicking romp from 1971 whose lyrics perfectly describe our nation's current cold Civil War.

 

People disagreeing on just about everything

Makes you stop and all wonder why

Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street

Who just couldn't help but cry

 

The similarly sign-of-the-times follow-up was the marching band boogie "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" from the classic 1966 album Blonde on Blonde.

 

One of Bob's many lost-love songs, he slowed down the tempo as if to comment on our conspiracy-crazed country:

 

You say you're sorry

For tellin' stories

That you know I believe are true

 

But despite the first two dusted-off numbers, this was no nostalgia nor greatest hits concert. Mr. Dylan and his band decidedly did not play "Like a Rolling Stone," which Rolling Stone magazine twice listed as number one among the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

 

Nor did he perform "Blowing in the Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changing," which became anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s.

 

And no longer does Bob the bard play in sold-out sports stadiums, where critics and fans alike would complain that his serrated vocals were indecipherable and his rearranged instrumentations turned every concert into the gameshow "Name That Tune."

 

No, that was not the showcase at the ornate Auditorium Theater, which was built in 1889 and owned since 1946 by nearby Roosevelt University. The Romanesque concert hall, a venerable venue for everyone from Teddy Roosevelt to The Doors, has been renovated many times over to acoustical perfection.

 

The Baby Boomer-heavy audience, which included some Dylan devotees in their 20s and 30s, was completely locked in as the folk-rock poet went on to perform 16 more clearly enunciated songs, most of them from his highly praised 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, for which the tour has been renamed and billed to continue until 2024, according to concert posters plastered over venues at the next 19 U.S. dates through Dec. 2.

 

The initial new song was the introspective "I Contain Multitudes," demonstrating that the master still has the best words:

 

I'm just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones

And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones

I go right to the edge, I go right to the end

I go right where all things lost are made good again

 

Next up was the stomping blues-rocker "False Prophet," featuring the brilliant interplay of guitarists Doug Lancio and Bob Britt as well as the solid bass work of Tony Garnier, stellar steel pedal of Donnie Herron, and understated drumming of Charley Drayton.

 

It would be easy to say that this is the best ensemble of musicians that Dylan has ever had accompanying him, unless one forgets that his previous back-up players have included Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and The Band itself.

 

And speaking of prophets, Dylan had often been called one, that is, until the late 1970s and early 1980s when he was de-canonized for declaring himself a born-again Christian and putting out three contemporary gospel albums.

 

He later returned to secular songs, albeit some with continued biblical and apocalyptic imagery, and saying that the healing power of music itself was his guiding spiritual source.

 

At Wednesday night's show, Bob introduced practically all-new lyrics to "Gotta Serve Somebody" from the 1979 album Slow Train Coming, both Grammy Award winners. But he pointedly kept in the convicting chorus, suggesting that he is still a believer of some sort.

 

But you're gonna have to serve somebody

Yes, indeed, you're gonna have to serve somebody

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

But you're gonna have to serve somebody

 

For the record, Mr. Dylan has sold more than 125 million of them, won ten Grammys, and been awarded an Oscar, Golden Globe, Kennedy Center Honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Pulitzer Prize citation, and 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

 

"When I Paint My Masterpiece" from 1971 was a fitting song choice for the artist, who has published eight books of his drawings and paintings, and whose works have been displayed at major galleries.

 

It's also a bright signal that he is not ready for retirement. Dylan, 80, has survived drug addiction, relentless media scrutiny, stalker-like invasions of his personal privacy, and a devastating divorce that he sang about painfully in his 1974 magnum opus Blood on the Tracks.

 

And in the spring of 1997, Bob was knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door when he nearly died from a bacterial heart infection.

 

Now, in the autumn of his life, he no longer plays guitar onstage, alternating between a piano console and upright microphone.

 

This is an ironic twist of fate for a folksinger who set down his acoustic guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, strapped on an electric Stratocaster, and inspired all popular musicians beginning with The Beatles to write songs that were more serious, stream-of-conscience, and lyrically sophisticated.

 

But Bob can still play a mean harmonica, as he demonstrated for the Windy City crowd during a haunting interlude to "Soon After Midnight," a Fifties doo-wop turned murder ballad from his widely acclaimed 2012 album Tempest.

 

Mr. Dylan, who has been criticized for sometimes not addressing his audiences, proudly introduced his band members, adding, "We love Chicago just like you do."

 

And to show their affection, they performed two encores, the self-explanatory "Love Sick" off of Dylan's 1997 critical comeback album Time Out of Mind, and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," a world-weary blues song with a positive upbeat tempo, from 1965's groundbreaking Highway 61 Revisited.

 

Aside from the blessing of again getting to see an artist for the ages who changed the course of culture and music, the most poignant part of this magnificent concert was the simple joy of watching an elderly gentleman doing what he loves for the enjoyment of those who loved him back after each song with warm applause.