Jim Webb Has Lost His Way

It is the only conclusion I can come too after reading his own words concerning Vietnam written in 1995. His essay The Triumph of Intellectual Dishonesty is reposted courtesy of the folks at FrontPage Magazine:

In the first fifteen years or so following Saigon's fall, there was nothing but bad news to report from Vietnam, and those who had made their political and journalistic careers on the wrongfulness of the war bear a culpability for persistently failing to report it. Similarly, during the twentieth anniversary observances these icons and their intellectual progeny persisted in focusing almost solely on the conduct of the war during Mr. McNamara's tenure as Secretary of Defense, which ended in disgrace in late 1967. It was as if the political, military and even moral issues had been decided in favor of the communists by that point, and the ensuing eight years of fighting and twenty years of suffering were merely an afterthought.

The end result was a startling disservice to a full understanding of the war. 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 Minh 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.

Senator Webb is committing the same crime today in regards to Iraq that he accused the media and the Intellectual Left of committing against Vietnam. If Senator Webb can not be trusted to remember his personal history how can we trust him with the future of this country? If he can honestly reflect that the Anti-War left didn't care if the policies would or would not work, but only that the Communists won, how can we trust that those same people who are leading the current the Anti-War movement, want anything other than the US to lose again?

Senator Webb should re-read his own words and find the truth in them, for the lessons he learned in and about Vietnam are being forgotten now all in the name of a vote, he is the true Manchurian Candidate. One doubts whether Mr. Webb, who understands only popular opinon, or the antiwar leaders, who find solace and even hope in the preaching of Islam's hard-line leaders, will ever understand the true character of Iraq - or for that matter the nobility of the Americans who attempted to save it.