Virginia Senator James Webb: Washington's Most Unlikely Revolutionary

When he ran for public office, Webb didn't campaign on his military record, he simply offered himself as a fighter. In Fields of Fire, Webb's first novel and one of the best depictions of combat in Vietnam, the protagonist, Lt. Robert E. Lee Hodges, sums up his approach to confrontation: "I fight," the character declares, "because we have always fought. It doesn't matter who." In Vietnam, Webb became the most highly decorated Marine from his Naval Academy class: two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, the Silver Star and the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor. He's enamored of what he calls the "warrior aristocracy" tradition of the Scots-Irish, and he made captain at age twenty-three, though he thinks of himself as an enlisted man -- one soldier among many.

Webb loves war. He's been studying military history as long as he can read. He loves war so much he can't stand to see one bungled as badly as Bush has the one in Iraq. In place of a plan, Bush offers a posture; where there should have been a strategy, there was only ideology. That's what makes Webb so angry about Iraq. It's not a fight, it's a cause, either a wonk's dream or an oilman's conspiracy, depending on how worked up Webb is when you ask him. There's only the cause driving this stupidity into the sand, not the needs of a nation. It's the work of the elites Webb has always hated. "America's top tier . . . are literally living in a different country," Webb charges. "Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to war."

Just a few years ago, Webb described America's elites in terms that might be familiar to the fans of Fox News. Liberals were "cultural Marxists," and "the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood" were a fifth column waging war on American traditions. But Iraq has refocused his views. Now when he speaks of the elites he more often means "the military-industrial complex," and "the Cheney factor," the corporate chieftains he describes as the new robber barons. The war and the crimes of class -- sending Americans to Iraq and their jobs to China -- are becoming interwoven in his mind. Iraq has aligned his angers.

For years Webb worked for Republicans, a career that culminated in a stint as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. But when his old nemesis Oliver North, a Naval Academy classmate whom he has despised for decades, ran for Senate in 1994, Webb campaigned for Democrat Chuck Robb just to stop him, and he started identifying himself as an independent. For his own campaign in 2006, he billed himself as a Reagan Democrat. Barely a year later, he's a "Jacksonian Democrat," after Andrew Jackson -- another man of war who went to Washington at the head of a populist crusade. His authorial "James" shortened now to a folksy "Jim," Captain Webb is marching leftward, and he's taking many of his old views with him: his dedication to military power, the chip he carries on his shoulder on behalf of the Southern white man he believes is the "whipping boy" for American racism, and most of all, the populism that hates both the Democratic and Republican upper classes.