Sunday, October 15, 2006

The War Crime In Jim Webb's Past

I admit to instinctively reacting negatively to Virginia Senate candidate Jim Webb for some reason, much the way I reacted to the personae of Bill Clinton when he arrived on the national political scene. According to polls, Webb and Allen are neck and neck.

In looking for an answer to my intuitive response, I was surprised when I Googled An Hoa Basin in 1969 while researching a war crime to which Webb is prominently linked and instead found myself reading blurbs from Webb's book - Fields of Fire.

I'm not accusing Webb of involvement with a war crime, his role in the affair is widely known - his post trial defense of Samuel Greene. But his judgment in that and on a related matter leaves me with a very troubling feeling about the man.

Webb touts his early military experience in his campaign, aside from writing fiction, it's the only consistent experience he has. Some insiders of the Reagan administration suggest he left

In his third year of law school, Mr. Webb polished his arguments in a lawsuit filed in federal court, saying, among other things, that the makeup of the court should have included an infantryman with combat experience.

The lawsuit failed, but the judge wrote a letter to Navy Secretary J. William Middendorf recommending Mr. Green be granted clemency.
Mr. Middendorf responded with a form letter. A month later, Mr. Green killed himself.

In 1978, Mr. Webb went to the Board of Correction of Naval Records in a last-ditch effort to upgrade Mr. Green's dishonorable discharge to a general discharge.
"Eight years after the shootings and three years after Green's suicide, Mr. Webb wrote to Mrs. Green: 'At last Sam's name is cleared. This is a small solace, I know. ... I only regret we were unable to do more for him sooner,'" Mr. Timberg wrote.
Mrs. Green responded with a Christmas card: "My son Samuel Jr. is happy in heaven and grave about this."

Today, Mr. Webb says the principles of leadership, justice and social fairness outweighed the negative perceptions that might be drawn from the case. "I basically said, 'I'm not saying this guy is an angel. I'm saying he is not a murderer. In my view, there's just too many inconsistencies in here.'"
"What had happened was horrible, but who would be able to judge it in the eyes of someone who had 11 days in Vietnam and was getting an order?" Mr. Webb told The Washington Times.

I simply don't get a sense of someone reaching for any objective standard of justice given the two extreme positions. It's almost as if Webb sees the entire world as Me and them. Follow orders as I did and if you kill innocents, that's okay. But walk away from that possibility in protest and you absolutely need to be held to account.

It doesn't add up for me. It appears to be driven more by ego and too much from personal experience than any objective sense of justice. And it's that Me versus them approach I sense in his demagogy - from invoking the the chicken-hawk slur, to offending women and allegedly maligning Blacks.

In the final analysis, Webb strikes me as precisely the kind of intelligent but very small minded man capable of such things. You're either with Jim Webb, or one of Jim Webb's kind, or you're not. And if you're not, you're automatically wrong.