General William Odom Passed Away

One of the foremost critics of the war in Iraq, General William Odom, has passed away.

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."

No other general spoke so forcefully and so correctly so early in this war. He will be missed.

--WS

Massive bomb blast in Iraq kills at least 117

A boy is taken to a hospital in Kirkuk, Iraq,
after a suicide bomber attacked a village market.

A massive suicide truck bomb, loaded with two tons of explosives, detonated today in an outdoor market in Amerli, a village predominantly populated by Shiite Turkmen and Kurds, about 100 miles north of Baghdad in Salaheddin province, near Tuz Khurmatu . At least 117 are dead, and at least 265 were wounded. Witnesses said the truck looked like it could have been an Iraqi military vehicle.

Two Iraqis who survived the blast spoke with the AP “Some are still under the rubble with no one to help them. There are no ambulances to evacuate the victims.” Said one witness. “I saw destruction everywhere, dozens of cars destroyed, about 15 shops and many houses, even some more than 700 meters (yards) away," another witness told the reporter. (CNN has video of the aftermath)

Salaheddin province has been relatively restive in the past, experiencing sporadic violence, not approaching the levels seen elsewhere, and certainly nothing like todays attack.

My heart goes out to all the victims of the violence unleashed on Iraq, and to the families of the fallen, and to the wounded and to all of the victims of George Bush's splendid vanity war.

It is time to listen to the Generals who are not beholden, the ones who have been there, who understand the context, and who have determined to speak out and demand an end to it. Who do you trust? John Batiste, Antonio Taguba, and William Odom; or George "Mission Accomplished" Bush, Lindsey "I bought five rugs for five dollars" Graham and Joe "Dukakis Moment" Lieberman?

For the sake of the gene pool, I hope you didn't have to think about the answer to that question.