14 Quotes by William Eldridge Odom

As many critics have pointed, out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

Military officers from different countries, when they meet each other, tend to sort of fall in love, become mutual admiration societies, at the expense of realities.

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

While people out there on the spot certainly have to be held accountable for what they’ve done personally, the chain of command responsibility for this strikes me as just as important and should be dealt with.

In reality, I don’t think that many of the policies we’ve attempted to apply to deal with it are going to have any serious effect.

Second, recent polls over there show that the majority of Iraqis want us to leave precipitously.

I will make a general statement that we have not had anything like the policy of holding people in high office responsible for their acts that I think we should.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

To say that you now trust the Russian military command and control system because some Russian general told you from the bottom of his heart that’s the case, strikes me as most unrealistic.