Jim Webb Goes AWOL from the GOP

Mackubin Thomas Owens:

My friend Jim Webb announced last week that he will seek the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate from Virginia. If he wins the Democratic primary, he will challenge the incumbent, Republican George Allen.

Republicans should worry. Webb is an impressive man. He is a 1968 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. As a Marine officer in Vietnam, he led an infantry platoon and company, was wounded twice, and was awarded the Navy Cross (second only to the Medal of Honor as a recognition of valor) and the Silver Star. After he was medically retired from the Marine Corps, he attended Georgetown Law School and later served as counsel to the House Veterans Committee. He is the author of six novels, including Fields of Fire, the best novel there is about Vietnam. During the Reagan administration, he served as an assistant secretary of Defense and secretary of the Navy. Combine his virtues with the fact that Virginia is one of the few states where a conservative Democrat might win, and, if Webb prevails in the Democratic primary, Senator Allen is likely to be in for the fight of his life.

What most endeared Webb to me and many others who served in Vietnam was his unflinching defense of Vietnam veterans against the slanderous charges that have been leveled against them: dopehead, baby-killer, war criminal...you remember. Webb is the man who time and again stood on the front lines of the culture war that still rages between those who served during the Vietnam era and those who didn't, a culture war that played a major role in the recent election. He could always be counted on to stand up to the elites who peddled falsehoods about Vietnam veterans. Ironically, these slanders were most at home in the Democratic party, whose nomination Jim now seeks.

What happened? Why does a man who served in the Reagan administration now embrace the very party that, since Vietnam, has denigrated the martial virtues he epitomizes? Part of it is his opposition to the war in Iraq. Webb is no knee-jerk Bush hater, and his opposition to the Iraq war is based on strategic considerations — he is concerned that by committing such a large force there for an extended period of time we have weakened ourselves in the long run against a rising China.

More to the point, though, is his growing anger at the Bush administration for what he sees as a McNamara-like disregard for military advice, and even worse, a tendency on the part of too many Republicans and conservatives who did not serve in the military to attack the service of veterans like Jack Murtha who oppose the war. Webb's New York Times op-ed of January 18, "Purple Heartbreakers," was a clear harbinger of his break with the Republican party. There he wrote:

[I]n recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha.
The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who have thus far decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.

Oh, spare me.

I've read "Fields of Fire", and it was absolutely marvelous.

But Webb left the Republican reservation a long time ago, and the notion that he did so because of the GOP fighting back against the scurrilous lies of Kerry and Murtha is simply ridiculous.

Webb knows full well that the modern Democrat Party has done nothing but undermine the American fighting man, and certainly knows better than most how Kerry in particular betrayed his comrades during Vietnam. If Webb cared about honor and integrity as much as he talked about it, I doubt he'd rush to the embrace of such dirtbags as make up his new party.

Webb's nose is bent out of joint because he has no juice within the GOP today---nobody listens to him. And, unlike his classmate Ollie North, he simply can't get over it.

Before we go indicting the Republican leadership over their supposed insensitivity to the military, maybe we'd better look at the voting record of servicemen and women and ask why on Earth they're pulling the lever all the time for these alleged country clubbers so indifferent to their plight.

Webb and his coterie of ill-informed fellow-travellers might be better off talking to the rank-and-file than to the Clinton-holdover generals pissed to have to leave the Washington cocktail scene for the desert where the real war's being fought.

BTW, last I saw, McNamara was a Democrat far more hawkish than Webb's new party buddies ever will be.