William E. Odom, 75; Military Adviser to 2 Administrations Dies

[Purveyor]

Source: Washington Post

Sunday, June 1, 2008; Page C08

William E. Odom, 75, a retired Army lieutenant general who was a senior military and intelligence official in the Carter and Reagan administrations and who, in recent years, became a forceful critic of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, died May 30 at his vacation home in Lincoln, Vt. An autopsy will be performed, but his wife said he had an apparent heart attack.

Gen. Odom was a career Army officer who was also a serious scholar of international relations and a leading authority on the Soviet Union. He was the military assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and director of the National Security Agency during President Ronald Reagan's second term.

He had a reputation as a military hard-liner who opposed any compromise with the Soviet Union, which made his vocal opposition to the current involvement in Iraq all the more cogent and surprising.

"Among senior military people, he was probably the first to consider the war in Iraq a misbegotten adventure," Brzezinski said yesterday. "He believed that we're just stoking hostility to the United States in that region and developing an opposition that cannot be defeated by military means. He was very outspoken."

Well before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Gen. Odom warned that military action in Iraq would be foolhardy and futile. He outlined his positions in The Washington Post's Outlook section Feb. 11, 2007, in the essay "Victory Is Not an Option."

"The president's policy is based on illusions, not realities," he wrote. "There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq."

Gen. Odom became a fixture on news programs and never altered his critical stance toward the Bush administration's policies in Iraq and Iran. On Tuesday, he and Brzezinski wrote an op-ed article for The Post in which they stated that the White House's "heavy-handed" approach toward Iran would backfire and "almost certainly result in an Iran with nuclear weapons."



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/31/AR2008053102193.html

[Renew Deal]

1. That's sad to hear.

:patriot:

[rusty_parts2001]

2. He was a true patriot unlike that 4 star prostitute

[NC_Nurse]

3. A true patriot. I'm sorry to hear of his passing.

RIP, Gen. Odom. :patriot:

[alfredo]

4. A good spook. I bet he was sad to see what bush did to his NSA.

[AnnieBW]

5. He was one of the good guys

Old soldiers really do die.

:patriot:

[bemildred]

6. RIP soldier.

Real patriots have been hard to come by lately.

[LynnTheDem]

7. Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends…"

"I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defense and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaeda. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091704Y.shtml

[bdamomma]

8. too bad to loose him

he spoke the truth about the invasion of Iraq, RIP General Odom.

[Ilsa]

9. RIP, General Odom. It is sad to lose him. nt