MB Civic

By William E. Odom | Sunday, February 11, 2007 | The Washington Post

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan. He served on the National Security Council staff under Jimmy Carter. A West Point graduate with a PhD from Columbia, Odom teaches at Yale and is a fellow of the Hudson Institute.

This essay runs through the fallacies exploded by the recent National Intelligence Estimate and lays out a better set of goals. This guy knows what he is talking about. He was Chief Spook of the NSA, and a working general. It’s the best outline I have ever seen for an intelligent way forward not just in Iraq but in the Middle East in general.

Now for the weird part.

As some of you know, I grew up in Washington, DC, and politics is my first language. The military is a second language for me. Most of my best friends as a kid had military fathers, and I did a number of plays and concerts and talent shows at the many military bases that surround DC. Instead of serving as a soldier, I joined the cast of HAIR and became a different kind of soldier – one who fought in the campaign for peace with a microphone and beads, under the command of “General” Michael Butler.

I actually went to high school with one of General Odom’s daughters. She was the Anointed Genius of my Advanced French class (spanning 11th and 12th grades), having spent 6 years in France when her dad was stationed there. I will never forget the first day she spoke aloud. My jaw dropped. Here was somebody who literally spoke like a native. A Really Smart native, with a sense of humor and good manners. She raised the bar for all of us in that class by her example, but in a kind and generous and welcoming way, not a me-first, show-off, brown-noser way. In retrospect, I think it speaks volumes about her parenting in a family that really took advantage of its travels to inform themselves about the world…BS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/09/AR2007020901917.html