Respectfully Disagree

It says a lot about the intellectual credibility of those that manage Hudson Institute, a neo-conservative thinktank, when one office can hold General William Odom, who in today's Wall Street Journal calls the Iraq war a failure and down the hall you find a hawk like myself who doggedly supports the Bush Administration's policies to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East.

Odom says:

"Anybody that's pro-American cannot gain legitimacy. It will be a highly illiberal democracy, inspired by Islamic culture, extremely hostile to the West and probably quite willing ... to fund terrorist organizations."

The longer U.S. troops hang tough, he reasons, the more isolated America will become. That in turn will place increasing strain on international economic and security institutions that have undergirded the emergence of "America's Inadvertent Empire," as Mr. Odom's latest book calls it. "I don't know that the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, [or] NATO can survive this," he says.

First off, do we want them to survive? And secondly, these multilateral institutions have weathered much worse -- Vietnam, the reunification of East/West Germany, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I'm sorry Mr. Odom takes a stand that even John Kerry won't -- cut and run. We did that once in Vietnam and 79 million people still live in tyranny.