Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [114]
So she stays. I know her, and I know what interests her. And I know that you’ll be able to go by yourself up an arroyo with a dog, and just explore. That’s what the mystique of the Baja is about, the desert and the sea.
TERRY: The thing that is amazing about Jesse Ventura, if you’re with him on a day-to-day basis, is that he loves to watch sports and he talks a lot and it’s always about politics. But when you see the way his mind works and his strong convictions of right or wrong—just the way he looks at life—he is unbelievable. What I get out of him is always different, every time I turn around. It’s not always great, but it’s always different.
“Terry, you’ve got to read a chapter in this book, it’s amazing.” The book is Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles Through Baja California, the Other Mexico, by C. M. Mayo. We picked it up in Todos Santos. It had a chapter on the U.S.-Mexican War of the late 1840s, Polk versus Santa Anna. The latter having been “President of Mexico on eleven different occasions, first liberal, then conservative, always mercurial, always ruthless.”
I can’t help chuckling as I tell Terry, “When a French cannonball blew his leg away at the knee, he’d actually had a state funeral for it! Had his leg carried by twelve hundred members of the presidential guard, ‘in solemn procession through the streets to a specially built shrine. The ceremony was attended by Congress, the diplomatic corps, and the entire cabinet.’”
“That’s disgusting!” Terry exclaims. We are sitting on the porch of our new hacienda, each with our books and otherwise looking placidly out to sea.
“They called Santa Anna caudillo, the strongman. Sounds kinda like he was an early version of Saddam Hussein. What I didn’t realize is that American troops once had control of La Paz, Todos Santos, even Cabo San Lucas! Along with most of mainland Mexico, too.”
“Really,” Terry says.
“Yeah, except get this part. ‘The war was unpopular and expensive, and Polk was eager to conclude a treaty.’ So, he ended up having a set of secret instructions sent to Santa Anna, saying that U.S. forces would withdraw from all the territory we had taken inside Mexico, including the Baja. In exchange, Santa Anna confirmed our title to Texas and also signed away territories that are now California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and parts of Arizona and New Mexico. Not a bad deal for the Americans.”
I pause a minute to reflect, then add: “I guess we’ve got a long history of invading sovereign nations in unpopular and expensive wars.”
I was a few months out of office when the invasion of Iraq took place in March 2003. Had I still been governor, I might have been the only one who opposed it. It had to do with the fact that we were lining up our military against that country as an aggressor and an occupier. Vietnam, as dirty as that was, was still a French colony when they asked us to support them logistically. Of course, it accelerated far beyond that in the end, with the French leaving us holding the bag and our being more than willing to do so.
But, thinking back to the months prior to the Iraq War, nobody in the national news media was questioning the policy. Here we were going it alone, or with the “coalition of the willing.” Actually, except for the British, most of the “willing” didn’t even have armies!
New documents that came out in April 2007 prove that a unit inside the Pentagon—Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans—intentionally cooked up the “intel” claiming there was a direct tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to gather support for a preemptive strike. It’s long since been established that the other big rationale for our invading, Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, was utterly bogus. I don’t think the CIA is as inept as we were led to believe during the run-up to the war, but was used very much as a scapegoat. I’ve had that verified through some channels of mine; that there are people