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Lt. General William Odom and the march back to Realism
Written by Henry Midgley
Monday, 12 February 2007
Yesterday's Washington Post carried a stinging rebuke to President Bush concerning the latter's policy in Iraq. Lieutenant General William Odom though cannot be dismissed as a simple minded anti-war protestor- an experienced officer in the United States Army who was a member of Jimmy Carter's National Security Council and served under Ronald Reagan as head of the National Security Agency and Director of Army Intelligence, the General has an impressive CV. Not to mention the fact that he presently teaches at Yale and is a member of the Hudson Institute.
It is hardly news that Odom opposes the war in Iraq- in April 2004 he argued that the war in Iraq was "one of the great strategic errors of the post-Cold War era" and he has also described the war as potentially "the greatest strategic disaster in US history".
Jonathan Cutler in a typically discerning piece on his blog names Odom as one of the leading advocates of a detente with Iran in Washington and he recommended leaving Iraq back in 2005.
As a former official under Reagan and a former Vietnam veteran as well- Odom's scepticism about Iraq and his public criticism of the war from a thinktank that receives much of its support from conservative sources in Washington, Odom's scepticism becomes much more interesting- it points to some of the ideological differences that the war in Iraq has brought to the fore. Ideological differences which are very evident in the way that he casts his criticism of the Bush administration in the article yesterday in the Washington Post.
Odom's analysis
So lets turn to that article and try and understand why Odom does not beleive that the Bush strategy for Iraq will or can work. There are a number of objections here- but in reconstructing the thought pattern and where the dissent comes from it is neccessary to take Odom's article out of sequence and try and analyse what his key insights into foreign policy are and how they differ from the administration's way of looking at the world and at the way that American interests are best protected throughout the world.
Odom's primary insight from which all his other insights into the way that Iraqi politics work and the input that America can make is contained in these sentences in the Washington Post article,
the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly "constitutional" -- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.
For Odom the argument that the United States could impose a democracy upon Iraq is a false one. He argues that rather than imposing democracy American foreign policy would be much better turned towards the objective of increasing stability within the Middle East. A stability, that Odom beleives, is the objective of the Europeans, the Arab states and the Arab peoples. In his view- withdrawing from Iraq will incentivise stability within the region and make Iran come to the table and negotiate with the United States, or as he puts it
Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.
Analysing Odom
Odom therefore in many ways reminds one of a typical realist. His view is that stability trumps all other concerns in the Middle East. He doesn't argue that the governments of the Middle East produce their own chaos- rather he suggests a stable international environment including a peace for Israel will lead in the end to a pacification of the entire region. This kind of position you might say rises from a preoccupation with the workings of governments- for Odom unlike say Bill Kristol or Michael Ledeen- other governments matter and they matter precisely because he treats the problem of Middle Eastern terrorism not as a problem of the systemic organisation of the Middle East, but as a law and order problem. If you see the issue in that light- you begin to see the virtues of propping up governments even if you dislike them.
But the argument between Odom and Kristol and the others goes much deeper than cynical realists versus idealist neo-conservatives. There is also an argument going on here about the nature of democracy. Kristol and his allies beleive that democracy is very simple- it is the people's will reflected in the government. In an interesting exchange with Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review, Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan for example used the word Democracy almost totemically:
Lopez: How does postwar Iraq look in your estimation? Could Iraq, postwar, realistically become a democracy?
Kaplan & Kristol: Iraq should become a democracy. After all, the president has repeatedly cast the impending war as an effort to bring democracy to a land that for decades has known only dictatorship. Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower.
Odom though isn't as concerned with democracy per se as he is with the institutions surrounding democracy- he raises within the article the interesting question of a division between democracy and constitutional democracy. In many ways what Odom says in the Washington Post strikes me as very similar to Fareed Zakaria's 2005 article in Newsweek where Zakaria argued that elections in Iraq did not mean that the country had reached democratic nirvana. Odom wants us to beleive that democracy means more than elections but means both institutions and also a popular spirit in favour of democracy- at one point he suggests that the major problem with the Iraq war was in trying to democratise a part of the world which in his opinion has never sustained democracy. Furthermore he makes a cogent case that a democratic Iraq may not be a pro-American Iraq- noting that even as of 1914 the majority of Americans opposed the British in the first World War.
Conclusion- Why should we care?
It might seem a little quixotic to dedicate so much space to analysing the reaction of one ex-general (no matter how well connected) to the Iraq war and its aftermath but I do think that what we are seeing here is some of the strands of an emergant critique of neo-conservatism in the international arena. Basically Lt General Odom argues that the neo-cons failed to understand the region that they invaded. He suggests that in this region of the world pro-American sentiment may only be sustained by stability not by permanent revolution. Far more cuttingly though he argues that they fail to understand the very nature of democracy, rather than being produced as it is in the fantasies of Michael Ledeen by invasion and occupation, it is more likely to be born by indigenous efforts from the ground up. It also in Lt. General Odom's view has to be related to the contexts of the region- and it has to recognise constraint. The Jacobin model of the people's will being ennacted is not in his view democracy and simply holding an election does not mean that the people rule. Rather it is the practise of consistant law and the power of civil society which make a democracy.
Lt. General Odom is a long standing critic from the right of American foreign policy. His criticisms do to a degree make sense- there is something puzzlingly simplistic about the Neo Conservative narrative. His own influence I would suggest is minor- but the arguments he advances can be heard elsewhere and furthermore the way that he attacks neo-conservatism and particularly its understanding of what democracy means is very cogent.
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