Leadership Quote by William Odom

The line lands like a cold briefing note that accidentally tells the truth: American power can be steered by other peoples interests, sometimes by our enemies, and sometimes by our own appetite for simple moral narratives. William Odom, a career soldier with an intelligence sensibility, isn’t moralizing about Saddam Hussein so much as auditing incentives. He frames the 2003 push to topple a "secular Arab leader" as a strategic gift to two actors the U.S. publicly defined as threats: bin Laden’s jihadist movement and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The intent is corrective and prosecutorial. Odom is trying to puncture the post-9/11 logic that fused Saddam to terrorism, and to show how that fusion ignored basic geopolitics. If you remove a secular dictator who suppresses Islamist militants, you widen the space for them. If you shatter Iraq’s regime, you eliminate Iran’s primary regional counterweight and hand Tehran a long-sought revenge for the 1980 invasion. The subtext is sharper: the war didn’t just have "unintended consequences"; it aligned with adversaries’ core goals in ways that were predictable before the first shot.

Context matters. Odom was a senior military figure who watched Washington convert trauma into strategy, then strategy into ideology. His language is deliberately transactional - "in the interest of" - because he’s arguing against the comforting idea that outcomes can be managed by intention alone. The rhetorical power here is the inversion: the U.S. imagined itself acting against terror and Iran, yet Odom suggests it functioned, in effect, as their force multiplier.