Victory in Iraq is a Secret

There’s a kind of viral phenomenon sweeping the nation, in the form of a DVD called The Secret. The essence of the Secret is, thoughts are a form of energy. Think good thoughts, and good things happen to you. Think bad thoughts, and well, you get the idea.

Case in point: William, E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, has just written an op-ed entitled, Victory is Not an Option. Odom quotes the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which he says “starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.”

Odom is not just some military wingnut. He 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.

In Odom’s pessimistic assessment, “there never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq.” He thinks this is because of two main “truths” (I quote at length so we can see the extent of Odom’s negative thought-energies):

“First, 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.

“Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense…. Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis' rising animosity toward the United States. Even supporters of an American military presence say that it is acceptable temporarily and only to prevent either of the warring sides in Iraq from winning.”

In contrast to Odom’s negative thinking, Vice-President Cheney has been consistently upbeat. Cheney knows that the reason we’re not winning the war in Iraq is not because of anything that’s happening over there, but because of defeatism here at home. Cheney, Bush, and the rest of the stalwart optimists who continue to support this war know that there is a plan, there has always been a plan, for turning Iraq into a stable, pro-Western democracy. Critics who demand the details of this plan are misguided, and are in fact the primary problem. The plan exists; it’s just a Secret.