The Jumble of Contradictions That Make Up Jim Webb’s Core Philosophy

Below is an excerpt from a remarkably insightful article that castigates the liberal media and Democrat politicians for undermining the heroic and noble efforts of American troops fighting an evil and implacable enemy. The article points out that the troops consistently and decisively defeated the enemy on the field of battle, but for craven political purposes, were defeated at home by the feckless and treasonous Democrat Party and it’s lapdog media allies. The article, written over 20 years after the end of the Vietnam War, reveals an author who is still enraged at the Democrat appeasers, whose utter fecklessness lead to a genocide in Southeast Asia in the immediate wake of the American retreat. The article states in relevant part:

“Media depictions of the fighting typically showed tired and frustrated American and South Vietnamese soldiers, while often using stock propaganda footage of communist troops marching cheerfully down the Ho Chi Mihn Trail. The elders who made their names in younger days on such allegations as U.S. troops lying about their ‘body counts’ gave almost no mention of the horrendous communist military casualties, despite the most newsworthy item of those few weeks: the Hanoi government officially admitting it lost 1.1 million soldiers dead and another 300,000 still missing from the fighting, compared to American losses of 58,000 and South Vietnamese of 254,000. And few discussions recalled the Hanoi pledge in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that Vietnam would be reunited only by peaceful means, with guarantees of individual freedoms in the South, as well as internationally supervised free elections.

To the contrary, on the heels of Mr. McNamara’s comments regarding the ‘unwinnable’ strategy he concocted and failed to adjust during the first four years of the war, media air waves were filled with a litany of speeches proclaiming “vindication” by those who otherwise might have been forced to answer hard questions regarding their conduct and beliefs during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For some, such conduct was betrayal. For others, it was stupifying naivete. But for most, there has been a persistent conspiracy of silence that has lasted for decades, accompanied of late by an attempt to leap over the carcasses and devestation that followed the communist takeover, to simply pretend it did not happen.

When forced to comment, those who opposed our attempt to assist the building of democracy in the South picked up the debate in its present makeup, pointing to the Hanoi government’s efforts in the past years to liberalize the economy and reach out to the Americans in the wake of the collapse of their Soviet ally and the continuing menacing growth of the Chinese.

As a consequence, the best opportunity of a lifetime was lost for the many who still wish to put a generation’s most bitterly divisive period into proper perspective.”

 So who was the author of this piece which rips into the John Kerrys, Ted Kennedys and Defeatocrats of the 1970s? None other than Jim Webb.

Webb’s article, written in 1995 and appearing in Strategic Review makes several compelling points. However, it also begs several questions that Webb has never answered. These are:

1. Let’s assume for a moment that Webb is correct that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war and Americans are stuck in the middle of it (most military leaders on the ground in Iraq disagree with this ignorant assessment, but let’s grant Webb this for the sake of argument). With that said, it cannot be contested that during the Vietnam War, Americans found themselves fighting in the middle of a civil war between various factions–the North Vietnamese communists (NVA), the South Vietnamese pro-western authoritarians (the ARVN), and the South Vietnamese communists (the VC, who were largely purged by the North Vietnamese after South Vietnam’s collapse). Nor can it be denied that America’s ARVN allies were very often unreliable and badly infiltrated by VC cadres.  This begs the question, if, in Senator Webb’s view it was not a disaster for Americans to fight in the midst of the Vietnamese civil war, where the fighting was much more intense and American casualties were exponentially higher than they are in Iraq, why is it a disaster for Americans to fight in the midst of a civil war in Iraq, when no one will deny that at the very least it serves the American national interest at least as much as the war in Southeast Asia?

2. If, in Senator Webb’s view, the subsequent communist genocides perpetrated in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, were compelling reasons why the United States should never have surrendered against the NVA and VC, why is it okay for the United States to retreat from Iraq when every serious observer on both the left and the right admits that such a retreat will lead to bloodshed that will make the events in Southeast Asia look like a Sunday church picnic and will quite possibly lead to a nuclear conflagration that will embroil the entire Middle Eastern regions and threaten the very existence of close allies like Israel?

3. Why would the United States have been correct to continue fighting to ensure that the protocols of the Paris Peace Accord were followed–when the Vietnamese posed zero threat to the United States, had no ambitions outside of Indochina and were located in an area of the world that really served very little strategic interest–and why is the United States now wrong to continue fighting in Iraq when no one disputes the fact that our surrender will embolden Al Qaeda and Iran to attack us around the world, including within the territorial boundaries of the United States, and that these enemies have expressly stated that they will not be satisfied by any outcome short of the complete and total anihilation of the United States and the murder or forced conversion of all of her citizens.

Of course, Webb cannot answer these questions. The fact is, he lacks the intellectual honesty and mental capacity to offer coherent answers. Sadly, as someone who has tracked Webb’s career very closely, it is clear that part of this has been caused by a serious and degenerating mental breakdown which has now reached a Smedley Butleresque (look him up)  level of duplicity, hypocrisy and idiocy–but that is another article for another time (but very soon). In the meantime, let’s all sit back and reflect on the jumble of contradictions that is Jim Webb (D-WaPo).