The Hon. Jim Webb on Afghanistan

I would be remiss not to draw your attention to this piece by my own favored 2016 Presidential candidate (and former Senator during my years in Virginia), author, scholar, diplomat, former Secretary of the Navy, and decorated Marine Jim Webb.

Webb's military and diplomatic service were both especially centered on Vietnam, so in the course of his description of the events he notes something probably many people missed.

In a remarkable display of tone-deaf diplomatic naiveté, the Vice President was pictured sitting in front of a sculpture of Ho Chi Minh during a meeting with Vietnam’s President Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the very moment the rest of the world was comparing America’s humiliating and incompetent dilemma in Kabul with the 1975 fall of Saigon. 

The rest of the initial description is well known to all, and even the administration's defenders would be hard pressed if they tried to deny that it was a "disgusting nightmare of incompetence that can only be rectified by holding those responsible accountable." They're doing their best to try to avoid holding those responsible accountable, or even identifying them, but they're aware enough of the danger of engaging the argument that the President and the Secretary of State are not taking questions. 

Likewise his list of military truisms, as he calls them, are very similar to the discussions we have had here. These are clear and obvious principles, at least they were clear and obvious to military officers at one time. His third section, a contrast with the much-less-calamitous Vietnam retrograde, likewise is a more detailed version of what was said here. 

His concluding remarks are where the focus should be. 

In a perverse way, perhaps we should look at the calamitous blunderings in Afghanistan as an opportunity to demand a true turning point.  Americans know that a great deal of our governmental process is now either institutionally corrupt or calcified.  They want change, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, no matter his empty credentials in government.  Lacking clearly expressed options, most don’t really know how to articulate the specifics of what that change might encompass.  It’s kind of like the statement of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart many years ago that he couldn’t define pornography for you, but he knew it when he saw it.  In this case, most Americans can clearly agree that what they have been seeing time and again, domestically and overseas, is not good government, despite honorable intentions among many dedicated people. 

Even the very best among those who come forward to serve often find that the good they came to do is stultified by distracting debates over the very premise of why the American system of government was created and whether the icons of our past were truly motivated by the words incorporated in our most revered documents.  The military itself is increasingly being used by leftist activists as a social laboratory to advance extreme political agendas.  Congressional oversight leans heavily toward social issues, with too many members struggling without success to focus on accountability at the very top when, for instance, good people at the bottom have to implement poorly conceived plans that might kill them. 

This is not an exaggeration, and it is not just what has been happening at the Kabul airport and elsewhere in Afghanistan.  Those situations merely provide us a microcosm, a symbolic moment in time, that allows us to see the implications of confused or distracted leadership, military and civilian alike, motivated by political machinations.  In the American political system, we have the capacity to demand that this inequity change.  What we need is the will to do it.

Webb and I see things in some ways very similarly; instead of 'calcified' I generally say 'ossified,' but the ossification analogy likewise depends on calcium. I have been examining underlying principles since last year precisely because I think we need a new beginning and -- as Webb says -- we need to be able to say what exactly it is we think the change should be. I wish he had been clearer about what he thinks the change should be, because I do not know from these brief remarks exactly what he thinks would do. 

I know what I think, now: I think the governments of the United States and the several states should be dissolved. Some urban regions may wish to establish socialist governments on European models, but most of America by land mass should pursue new foundations laid along lines of volunteer government in which a central principle is that no one may make money through their efforts in government. This will both remove the corrupting effect of making your living from governing others or regulating others, and force the volunteer government to take on much less because you only have time for governing when you aren't making the living you still have to make through some service to others in the private market. Likewise I think we should restore the idea that the sole purpose of this volunteer government is to defend the natural rights of the people, exactly as the Founders held. Nothing else is the proper duty of government, and anything else is at best a distraction. 

My guess is that Webb has both a longer and a less-thoroughgoing list of reforms. Perhaps it would thereby be more palatable to the many, and even (or especially) to the powerful. It is time to begin laying out these thoughts plainly. We must be able to say what exactly we want to accomplish in this moment of demanding what he calls a "true turning point."