[Infowarrior] - Tribute to LTG William Odom

[Richard Forno]

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/sep/08/00006/

General Principles

While other top brass played press agents for the administration’s  
war, William Odom told the truth about Iraq—though few listened.

By Ron Unz

Much as the capital loves ceremony, Washington won’t pause on Sept. 8  
when Lt. Gen. William Odom is laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery.  
While he is worthy of his laurels, he did not court the favor of the  
Beltway political class. Instead, he disdained their blindness to  
history, their partisan fixations, their herd mentality. Brave men  
often stand alone.

Those with knowledge of military affairs recognize different types of  
courage. There is combat courage—the resolve to storm a position or  
hold a trench against heavy odds. There is command courage—the  
willingness of officers to take decisive action and sustain losses to  
secure victory. And there is a third variety, crucial at the topmost  
ranks of America’s officer corps but increasingly rare—political  
courage, the willingness to speak truth to political power. Bill Odom,  
whom I greatly admired and respected, exemplified this last, most  
elusive kind of courage, which is why his death of a heart attack on  
May 30 leaves such a void in America’s foreign-policy debate.

He passed away too soon, but in some ways Odom had already lived past  
his time, the era of Cold War liberal internationalism. After  
graduating from West Point in 1954, he served in Germany and Vietnam  
and was later posted to the Moscow embassy. Following several years of  
teaching at West Point, he came to Washington as an aide to Zbigniew  
Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser. There, he  
gained a reputation as “Zbig’s superhawk” for his staunch opposition  
to détente and his prescient speculations about the possible break-up  
of the Soviet Union before the end of the century. He went on to serve  
as assistant chief of staff of the Army for Intelligence and director  
of the National Security Agency under President Reagan.

In the wake of Sept. 11, this retired three-star general, long a  
pillar of the foreign-policy establishment, seemed uniquely qualified  
to be heard. Indeed, he was one of the earliest senior military  
figures to issue public warnings as the hysterical drive to invade  
Iraq eventually became a calamitous occupation, an outcome that he  
later described as “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.

< - >

As a serious scholar, Bill Odom knew his Thucydides. But the country  
he leaves behind does not.

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/sep/08/00006/