Exiting Iraq: A General's View

Weekend Edition Saturday has this straightforward interview with retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (9/16/06 - 7:17). Odom was the director of the National Security Agency under an earlier Republican President, Ronald Reagan. This is part of a series of interviews that includes interviews with Ambassador Peter Galbraith, University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, historian Frederick Kagan, and former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Musings

• Odom is what might be called an old-fashioned Republican, a group that in foreign policy liked to pride itself on its sense of realism (sometimes referred to by the German term realpolitik), an approach that basically avoided ideological debates (about good and evil), and instead sought to manipulate others as a way to minimize one's own costs, risks, and exposure.
  
  
• One of the more interesting points Odom makes is that a country cannot have a strong army without a strong central government. We will will never be able to build an army in Iraq, in other words, if the warring parties do not trust each other, since the group that ended up controlling the army would then control the country, which is something that the other party (Odom suggests) would never allow.