![]() ![]() They’d be offered a second chance as long as they renounced violence. ![]() But lower-ranking fighters, who’d just taken up a gun for money or because of peer pressure, were sometimes treated as “reconcilables”. Petraeus gave similar treatment to many of the terrorist leaders he hunted down in Iraq, be they Saddam remnants backed by al-Qaeda or Shia militants backed by Iran. “If the Israeli Defence Forces are given the mission of destroying them, Hamas are not going to have many options – they are going to be either captured or killed.” “I’d tell them, ‘Come on in, with your hands up, for a reduced sentence’.” he says. ![]() Yet when I ask him what he would say if Hamas knocked on his door right now, even he doesn’t see much room for compromise. With 4,000 Americans dead in Iraq alone, it was proof of how principle had to sometimes bend to pragmatism, and helped earn the “Warrior Monk” his reputation as one of his generation’s best military minds. From insurgents in Iraq to the Taliban in Afghanistan, his door was often opened to those prepared to lay down their arms and talk – even when the blood on their hands belonged to his own troops. As one of America’s top generals in the War on Terror, David Petraeus spent a great deal of time talking to men with blood on their hands. ![]()
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