PROGRAMMING ALERT: Watch an “America’s Election HQ – How We Fight” special anchored By Bret Baier. “How We Fight” premieres October 29 at 8PM ET and airs again at 11PM ET and Sunday 3AM – 5AM and 3PM ET.
The next commander-in-chief will lead a military bruised by years of war overseas, while undergoing profound cultural transformation at home. The military itself admits it has “grave concerns” over its readiness to face the dizzying array of threats that have emerged over the past eight years. What must the next president do?
Find out in our exclusive interviews with Defense Secretary Ash Carter, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, leader of the Iraq surge General David Petraeus, retired Army readiness General Carter Ham, legendary Marine General John Kelly, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, and Ambassador Dennis Ross – Senior Middle East Advisor to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama. In another Fox News exclusive, former Green Beret Matt Golsteyn speaks for the first time about his ordeal of going from war hero, to accused war criminal.
Over the past 8 years our nation has been without leadership.
Due to the absence of that leadership my peers and I have watched as Iraq–whose security was paid for with the blood of our friends and peers—has effectively disintegrated.
President Obama’s statement in 2011 that America was “… leaving behind and Iraq that is stable and self-reliant” was, quite simply, a joke.
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If he had been close to correct, then we wouldn’t have over 5,000 plus “boots on the ground” today, fighting to re-take Mosul.
My father gave me my first lesson in leadership at a very young age when he told me, “Don’t lie and always know your people.” In my beloved Marines—which I joined in 2005–that lesson translates to “accountability” and “integrity.”
You may know my father, Jim Webb. He was a Democratic Senator from Virginia. Before that he was Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan and, before that, an Infantry Marine in Vietnam.
My father gave me my first lesson in leadership at a very young age when he told me, “Don’t lie and always know your people.”
In my beloved Marines—which I joined in 2005–that lesson translates to “accountability” and “integrity.”
Accountability speaks directly to the welfare of the people in your charge. Then there’s integrity.
Integrity encompasses many things. One is to simply tell the truth. There are many examples of how both Hillary Clinton and the current administration lack the basic ability to tell the truth–whether it’s Hillary Clinton’s emails, her actions in Libya, the administration’s misleading unemployment figures, or the president’s pledge that they’ll be “No boots on the ground” in Iraq, plainly, the willingness—even the ability of both of these leaders–to tell the truth is absent.
For example, telling the American people the truth would require that the President and his former Secretary of State admit that Iraq is falling apart, admit they made bad decisions, and then ask the nation’s citizens for forgiveness and then permission to re-engage to rectify those mistakes.
That would have been the mark of leaders who value integrity and accountability, that would have been the mark of leaders who respect the men and women who have, once again, been sent overseas and are currently at risk. Instead, the president and his former secretary do all they can to avoid acknowledging these men and women have been deployed to Iraq, at all.
America sorely needs a departure from the failed policies of the past decade, but more importantly it needs a strong leader who will not only be accountable to the people whom he represents, but has the integrity to identify and confront the issues that plague this country.
I see these qualities in Donald Trump and that is why I support him for the presidency.
Jim Webb served as an enlisted Infantry Marine from 2005-2010 and is the son of former Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Jim Webb. He currently lives in Baltimore, Md.
