Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast. Today is Friday, March 16th. I'm Anastasia Yuglova. Retired

Lieutenant General William Odom, currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former

director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988

spoke at a Cato Institute conference Wednesday, arguing for immediate pullout of troops from Iraq.

His argument, in essence, is that victory is not an option.

I'll just let General Odom speak for himself.

General, would you say that the troop surge is a failure to admit failure?

The troop surge has no prospects of success because it deals with tactical issues not the strategic

problem, and our judgments about the effectiveness of the surge are going to be

misunderstood or going to be distorted, misleading when they look good and when they look bad. So looking at this thing as either a

success or not a success kind of misses the more critical point which we need to be

focused on. Can this cause a strategic change? And it clearly cannot.

Did we make tactical errors in the execution of this war that essentially cost us the victory?

That's one of the great myths that should be put away. There was no

correct way or effective way to fight this war. The war was not in our

interest. It was the interest of Iran and Al-Qaeda. How can you win a war that's

accomplishing the goals of your enemies? That's the paradox of the whole war.

And once you get that into your head and realize the inexorable nature of that,

you begin to understand why a lot of arguments are staying there.

Just don't hold water.

You've said that you find comparisons to Vietnam instructive.

How so?

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