Lt Gen Odom's comments are interesting, given his
credentials:
Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute's Washington, D.C. office. He is also a visiting professor at Georgetown University and a Fellow at Berkeley College, Yale University. As Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, he was responsible for the nation's signals intelligence and communications security. From 1981 to 1985, he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer.
From 1977 to 1981, General Odom was Military Assistant to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski. As a member of the National Security Council staff, he worked upon strategic planning, Soviet affairs, nuclear weapons policy, telecommunications policy, and Persian Gulf security issues. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1954, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970.
That said, the Guardian article takes its point too far IMO, in that it paints the US military, or at least its leadership, as uniformly negative toward Scty Rumsfeld, something that is far from true in my opinion and observation.
I know a lot of officers and enlisted folks, and their opinions run the gamut from adamantly pro-Bush/Rumsfeld to anyone-but-Bush-in-2004. A lot of military members, frankly, tend toward complacency in matters related to politics and international relations, and don't have a strong opinion one way or the other.
I have observed, however, a growing skepticism toward Operation Iraqi Freedom, similar to that borne out by the poll numbers of the public at large - it seems people are starting to question
why their friends and collegues are dying, and whether their sacrifices are worthwhile when weighed against whatever benefit the US and the world community has drawn from OIF.
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