Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [118]
But forgive me, I digress.... Bin Laden attacks us, so we attack Iraq. In my speeches over the past few years, I liked to bring up the Martha Stewart case as an analogy. What did Martha actually get put in prison for? It wasn’t insider trading—that charge was thrown out. She went to jail for lying to the government. Okay, if we lie to the government, we go to jail. But what happens when the government lies to us? I pause and then say, “Oh, that’s right, we go to war.” And I make the point that I’m not talking only about the current war, but about how the Vietnam War escalated after Lyndon Johnson’s administration concocted the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
I’m also very angry at the Democrats, who were cowards from the beginning of the Iraq ordeal. They seemed so frightened of their political standing, or of what Karl Rove and the Bush machine had created, they wouldn’t just stand up and say no. Even now that the Democrats control Congress again, they will only go so far. They want a timetable for withdrawing our troops, but they don’t seem ready to hold Bush’s feet to the fire to get it. I, at least, give the Republicans credit for having courage, misguided though it may be. I don’t think anyone who voted for this war deserves to be president, Democrat or Republican.
What frustrates and angers me more than anything is this: It’s my generation. We’ve been led down the primrose path once already, with Vietnam. Shouldn’t we, of all people, know about being deceived? How dumb can we be? Now we’ve gone and done the very thing we protested so vehemently against in our youth. We’ve become what we feared.
Maybe it’s time we recalled the words of Robert F. Kennedy, when he was running for president in 1968: “I am concerned—as I believe most Americans are concerned—that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned—as I believe most Americans are concerned—that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned—as I believe most Americans are concerned—that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians] slaughtered; so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: ‘They made a desert, and called it peace.’”
At the end of the Vietnam War, I was actively involved in the Stop-the-Draft movement. I’ve done a full 180-degree turn today. My change of heart started when I ran into Bill Walton at a Timberwolves game, around the time the Iraq War was getting underway. I’ve known Bill since the late 1970s, before his Portland Trail Blazers won the NBA title, because we used to train together at LaPrinzi’s Gym when I lived in Portland during my wrestling years. Suddenly Bill Walton—the ultra-hippie, ultra-anti-war guy—looked at me and said: “We’ve got to get the draft back.” I was floored. “Bill, you’re advocating reinstating the draft?!” I said.
“That will stop the war,” he said. It hadn’t dawned on me until then. As long as we have a professional military, it’s not going to touch that many Americans whose attitude is, “Well,