WALLACE: General, you talked briefly before about the fact that you're trying to split off some of the Sunni insurgents from Al Qaeda, especially out in Anbar province, and in fact, you've even gone to the lengths of arming some of the Sunni insurgents to fight Al Qaeda.
How do you know — or do you worry that they are going to end up using those weapons to either attack U.S. forces or to fight their civil war against the Shiites?
And how do you respond — we understand that aides to Prime Minister Maliki objected strongly about arming Sunni insurgents to Defense Secretary Gates yesterday, so how do you respond to that concern?
PETRAEUS: Well, those are legitimate concerns, and we have the same concerns. We have a good discussion going with the government of Iraq.
As I mentioned, the process really is to identify these individuals, try to vet them as best we can. By the way, we do biometric data on all of them. We link that to serial numbers of weapons and so forth.
And then what you want to do is you want to get them linked into legitimate government of Iraq institutions, starting out perhaps as what are called police support units; then, as they prove themselves, getting a ticket to the police academy so they can become full-fledged police, or volunteering for the Iraqi army.
The fact is that over time in any of these conflicts, individuals at some point have had to end up sitting across the table from those who at best tacitly were aware of what was going on against their adversary, and that we perhaps aided and abetted it.
Interestingly, we have a British three-star general — my deputy is the head of our particular effort here, the engagement and reconciliation cell that we have established in part because they've had some pretty tough experience in this regard themselves, having sat down at tables in northern Ireland and other places with individuals who, say, 10 years earlier were swinging pipes against their lads.
That's been instructive for us. We think that it has been carried out with sufficient safeguards in Anbar province. It has certainly completely changed the dynamics of Anbar province.
And now, by the way, you see a bottom-up political activity that is also ongoing, where city councils, neighborhood councils and so forth are getting elected and are gradually tying into the provincial council which, of course, ties into the government of Iraq.
We're even seeing that in some of the neighborhoods in Baghdad where neighborhood councils had ceased to exist because of the security threat, and they are now coming back to life as well.
Again, those are legitimate concerns. They are legitimate discussions with Prime Minister Maliki. He supported strongly what was going on in Anbar province.
It gets much tougher when you get into the mixed neighborhoods near Baghdad in the Baghdad belts, and we're all working together to try to ensure that there are safeguards so that we're not arming individuals who eventually take up arms against the government....
Gen. David Petraeus on 'FOX News Sunday'
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