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Retired Army Lieutenant General And Yale Professor William E. Odom Urges Quick Withdrawal From Iraq

Tuesday October 17, 2006

By Ed Barna

    Lt. General William E. Odom, who came to Middlebury College on 10-11 to speak about “American Hegemony in Light of the Invasion of Iraq,” is among those whose thoughts on war are quoted on antiwar.org’s website.

He’s there after the Dalai Lama proclaiming that “All forms of violence, especially war, are totally unacceptable as means to settle disputes between and among nations, groups and persons.” He precedes William Ramsey Clark’s conclusion that “The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”

Odom’s contribution, which he repeated for more than 100 students, faculty members, and others in packed Dana Auditorium, was that “Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.”

Odom also reiterated his April 2004 call for the earliest feasible withdrawal from Iraq, and his declaration in the fall of 2005 that the invasion of that country is likely to be “the greatest strategic disaster in American history.” Asked about Afghanistan afterward, he said we should abandon that costly and unwinnable conflict as well.

In his address, Odom noted that Sen. Joseph Biden and Peter Galbraith have advocated partitioning Iraq into Kurdish, Shi’ite and Sunni sections, while maintaining an American presence there. “It will be a bloody foundation (of the Iraqi nation),” he said, with much ethnic cleansing in major cities. “I don’t see why the United States should take credit for initiating it, so I consider it a worthless policy.”

Odom saw some hope in the formation of a study committee, headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, that is considering what to do next in Iraq. However, the day after his talk, veteran international observer Carmen Gentile reported for ISN Security Watch that the Iraq Study Group “is said to be preparing a report that calls for splitting the country into three separate regions for Shi'ites, Sunni and Kurds.”

“Every day longer that we ‘stay the course’ the cost goes up and makes the eventual defeat much larger,” Odom said. Recalling the image of helicopters airlifting the last Americans from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon after Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese, he predicted there will be a similarly ignominious exit from Baghdad’s heavily defended Green Zone.

But the heart of Odom’s talk was not the quotable sound bites, but his insights into the larger trends of U.S. foreign policy. In his view, we have strayed from the course, veered into ideological and unilateral actions that represent a far different strategy from the one that did so well after World War II.

As an example of his insights, Odom said it is less accurate to compare 9-11 with Pearl Harbor (as many have done) than to relate it to June 28, 1914, when a member of the Black Hand touched off World War One by assassinating the Archduke of Austria and his wife during their trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina. “That’s Al Qaeda,” he said: a marginal group gaining far more status and power than it should have because of great power counterreaction.

The term “liberal democracy” was one key to Odom’s analysis. He said that neither he nor the Founding Fathers had much respect for democracy (“Iran is a democracy”), but the countries that share stable constitutional system, reliable laws and courts, and enforceable trade obligations control about 70 percent of the world’s gross product with only about 17 percent of the world’s people. That’s because the costs of doing business are so much lower and the processes so much easier that those economies prosper, he said.

The United States has maintained world leadership more by reducing antagonisms than promoting them, Odom said. Contrary to the popular impression, the real reason for having U.S. troops in Europe (he was there as one of the commanders) was to keep down old conflicts like the one between the French and the Germans--not to fight Russia. It was very difficult, and required brilliant diplomacy, to bring Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1955, because that means German sovereignty and the right to rearm--but that was the key to what we now know as the European Union and the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe.

Odom contrasted the elder George Bush’s war with Iraq, which liberated Kuwait but did not seek regime change, with the younger Bush’s invasion of a sovereign nation on what proved to be a false pretext. We have real allies with us in Kuwait, Odom said, and in the end, our financial cost was negligible--not the possible $500 billion of indebtedness that will limit our ability to act beyond our present deployment.

No, we can’t just cut and run, Odom said--we also have to restore the former tradition of collaboration with other liberal democracies (some of which, like Singapore, actually aren’t so liberal), realistic diplomacy, and support of international organizations. Military power does matter, and is essential to projecting political power, but we can’t go it alone, he said.

“Hegemony,” for those unfamiliar with the term, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.” The American preeminence still exists, Odom said, and “only its direction is in question.”

We will not lose that position of world leadership because of China’s or India’s growing strength, he said. The determining factor will be “the quality of  American leadership.”

 


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