William Odom Quotes
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.
Odom, William E. Interview. PBS NewsHour, Public Broadcasting Service, 2003.
What makes the situation even more complicated is that most of the land of the Middle East has been governed by a succession of Empires who may have drawn the lines differently from the previous governing dynasty. For example, the land that is Israel today, has been governed by Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Romans, various Arab dynasties, Turkey, England, and the Jews again. Turkey governed it for the longest period.
He was a brutal, sadistic war criminal who was assassinated by one of his many enemies in 2000 before he could be brought to trial. This statement was typical of his outlook and behavior. He tortured and murdered Croation and Muslim prisoners. His reference to the “slaughterhouse” was to the Second World War in which the Croats were allies of Nazi Germany and created their own concentration and extermination camps where hundreds of thousands of Serbs were murdered. In the eternal memory of the cycle of revenge in the Balkans, Arkan, tried to retaliate against the Croats who had never been called to account for their crimes and even the leadership of Croatia after the Camp David accords celebrated the Fascist times when they were dominant and were able to settle accounts with the Serbs.
This is an interesting quotation because it illustrates the antipathy that Sunni Muslims hold towards Shiites and their concept of the problems of democracy. While most fundamentalist Muslims oppose democracy in principle, others, not wanting to oppose majority rule outright, have used the rationale in Iraq that the Shiites are not in the majority in the country, and that the Sunnis who controlled Iraq for so many years are the rightful rulers.
At the time Turkey and the Ottoman Empire included Egypt and most of the Middle East, Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, Usbekistan, Ajerbaijon, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and other countries.
William Eldridge Odom was a United States Army lieutenant general who served as Director of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, which culminated a 31-year career in military intelligence, mainly specializing in matters relating to the Soviet Union. After his retirement from the military, he became a think tank policy expert and a university professor and became known for his outspoken criticism of the Iraq War and warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. He died of an apparent heart attack at his vacation home in Lincoln, Vermont.
